Samsung Impression

[ Music ] >> Kent German: Hi. I'm Kent German, Senior Editor at CNET.com. I'm here at CTIA 2009 in Las Vegas. I want to show you the Samsung Impression. This is a new phone for AT&T. It was announced a couple of days before the show began, but this is my first chance to see it. So, this is a, a messaging phone. It's not a smartphone so it doesn't have Windows Mobile or a third-party operating system, but Samsung introduced a lot of messaging phones here, and what we mean by that is a phone that has a QWERTY keyboard or for a full-alphabetic keyboard that's really designed for messaging, e-mail, and just tapping out those messages faster. So, it has a slighter design. I'll show you the slider in a second, but it does have a big touch screen that's pretty expansive. It's very bright. It's colorful. It's nice. The thing about touch screens is you really don't want them any smaller than three inches. It just makes things a little too cramped for getting around there. So, this isn't the case, which is nice. It does have Samsung Touch Wiz interface, and so what that is it has a moveable bar on the side. You can go in and you can add widgets, and widgets are shortcuts that'll take you direct to applications. You can add them. You can remove them. The only bad thing is that Samsung gives you a set amount so you have to choose from that, but you can customize within that set amount. We'll tip the phone on its side, and we'll slide it right up. It has a nice slider mechanism. Doesn't feel too stiff. Doesn't feel too loose. Nice keyboard down here. Pretty spacious, which is, which I liked. It does have the number keys do double as some of the letter keys. We have seen phones where there's dedicated number keys, which I kind of like a little better, but this is fine. I felt it was pretty spacious. I can get in there and type pretty quickly. Had a bunch of shortcut controls as well. So very well designed in that sense. This will help you tap out those e-mails quick without doing a predictive text. Phone is chock full of multi-media options. It has a three megapixel camera. It does have Bluetooth, AT&T Navigator. It does have a media player as well. So, mid-range multi-media features, but really this phone is about that messaging. It is the highest-end messaging phone that Samsung introduced here. It'll introduce a few more as well. The physical controls down here are talk end buttons and a clear button. Have a speaker on the back. One on the camera lens, and then on top there is a proprietary headset jack. Don't really like that. Really prefer to have a 3.5 millimeter headset jack. Overall, though, pretty nice phone. Very, very eye-catching. Got a pretty good feature set as well. I'm Kent German, and this is the Samsung Impression. [ Music ]