Cool Phones for the Masses

All sorts of cool smartphones running Android are being produced lately.  The HTC Evo 4G, Motorola Droid X, Samsung Galaxy S (a.k.a. Captivate for AT&T or Vibrant for T-Mobile), just to name a few.  Here's my humble yet entire adequate thoughts on the phones.

HTC Evo 4G
I wrote something about it a while back.  Look there.  It's good for you.

Motorola Droid X
Much the same as the Evo 4G.  It's a little bit taller and actually has buttons--not the capacitive things the Evo has.  Unfortunately, no stand, but it does have an external button for the camera, like a shutter release. Where the Evo has an ARM-based processor, the Droid X has an OMAP chip from TI clocked to 1GHz.

Samsung Galaxy S (Captivate/Vibrant)
Now for my personal favorite, the Galaxy S line.  For one reason or another, Samsung decided to run the same phone innards with slightly different shells and sell them to different carriers.  I recently went to the AT&T kiosk in the mall and played with the Captivate (the flavor AT&T gets).  It's a nice thin (0.39") phone, but it feels a bit laggy when I use the menus and such.  Perhaps if you dumb down the ultra-smooth interface, it would speed up.

As I understand it, it has a "6-axis accelerometer."  Yes, there are only 3 dimensions in space.  So, I suppose there are two accelerometers.  Pretty cool, eh?  Also, it comes with a 16GB microSD card.  So, it doubles as a music/video/picture/whatever-else player.

And the second coolest part in the Galaxy S line is its 1GHz Hummingbird processor.  It boasts 3x the processing power of the Snapdragon processor.  Pretty sweet.

And the very coolest part: the AMOLED screen.  As far as I can tell, this is the only phone with this spiffy screen.  It's very thin, and the touchscreen is built right into the display, not overlaid.  THAT is why this Samsung takes the cake.

All that isn't without it's drawback.  Yeah, only one.  By default, the GPS has issues, and you'd need a geek to fix it, although there are step-by-step instructions online.

As a final note, any one of these phones can and will blow the iPhone 4 away.  But those loyal Apple users will need something more before they switch.

P.S.: The iPhone 4 has an antenna problem where if you hold it just right, you loose signal.  I'd recommend you not buy the first version.  In fact, I recommend you not buy any version.