Hands-on review: Samsung Impression (AT&T)

Boasting a bleeding-edge AMOLED display, a slide-out QWERTY keypad, and a 3MP camera, Samsung's new 3G slider sounds great on paper, but the Impression's bulky shell and sky-high price tag are serious turn-offs.

Available now on AT&T for—if you ask me—a too-expensive $199 (with a two-year contract and a mail-in $50 rebate), the Impression makes ... well, a relatively blah first impression, frankly. The 0.61-inch-thick shell doesn't look all that special (especially compared to the likes of new touchscreen handsets like Motorola's gorgeous Evoke), and at 5.3 ounces, the Impression feels heavier than it should.

Get ready for a treat, though, once you switch on the 3.2-inch AMOLED (or "active-matrix" OLED) display. Built to pump up the brightness without draining the battery too quickly, the Impression's eye-popping display packs a punch, although its 240 by 400-pixel resolution is about the same as other recent touchscreen handsets. It's also worth noting that the AMOLED—bright though it is—is still difficult to see in direct sunlight.

Once you get past the vivid display, the Impression is relatively similar to Samsung's other recent touch-enabled handsets. The TouchWiz user interface—which lets you drag and drop widgets from the scrolling left-hand column onto the Home screen, is always nice, although the Impression's resistive-touch display (which detects input when its layers of plastic are pressed together) feels squishy compared to the capacitive displays on the iPhone and T-Mobile G1, which react to the lightest touch. Luckily, you can always tap out messages on the roomy, slide-out QWERTY keypad.

Feature-wise, the 3G- and GPS-enabled Impression comes with a solid set, including Samsung's middle-of-the-road Web browser (fine for mobile-formatted WAP sites, but sluggish on standard HTML Web pages), streaming videos and full-track music downloads (via AT&T's Cellular Video and Music services), plenty of messaging options (e-mail, IM, SMS, and MMS), and GPS navigation. The various menu screens and user interfaces are workable but a bit unpolished.

The on-board three-megapixel camera takes decent-enough snapshots, particularly in sunlit conditions; that said, don't expect high-end features like auto-focus and facial recognition. You can geotag your pictures and store them on a microSD memory card (up to 16GB of storage is supported), although you'll have to remove the Impression's back panel to get to the microSD slot.

Also on board: stereo Bluetooth support and one-way video conferencing via AT&T's Video Share service. Sorry folks: No Wi-Fi.

Call quality on the Impression was good, not great. Calls sounded fine (no echoes or dropouts, at least during my tests) while I was outdoors or near a window; once I moved into the living room of my Brooklyn brownstone, however, calls started to break up. (To be fair, the same thing happens on my iPhone with AT&T.) Samsung promises three hours of talk time on the Impression—again, good, not great.

Overall? While I'm a fan of the Impression's bright AMOLED screen, I felt the handset itself was a bit bulky, heavy, and otherwise unremarkable—hence, my unhappiness with the $199 (with contract) price tag, which seems way high to me.

For comparison's sake, check out the new LG Xenon, another 3G touchscreen slider which—while lacking the Impression's AMOLED and 3MP camera (the Xenon makes do with a 2MP snapper—comes in at just $99 with a two-year contract. That's more like it.