Firstly, before I even bought the phone I was dubious of my new Android being a Samsung manufactured model, generally not a mobile I would ordinarily go for preferring a HTC a Sony Ericsson handset if available.  That aside, I was buying it for the OS and on those terms first imprressions of Android is impressive.  It is highly expandable with a good choice in the Market with a lot of free apps, which compensate for some of the limitations of the phone’s natively installed applications.

The phone system settings are a bit all over the place with some illogical menu choices to get to what you want, could be laid out better and more obvious.  Saying that setup with a Google Account is stragiht forward, and it accepts Google Apps account with no hassle by simply entering full email of Apps domain as Google Account username.  For me this is a big thumbs up.  The Gmail client and Google Talk offer push notifications on email and IM’s while the apps are running, calendar events are also synced to phone quite conveniently, a usable task list/mobile calendar with the familair Google usability offered by Android under the hood.  I notice that several apps make use of Gears, I had an inclination Gears would run on Android, makes sense to have offline capabilities, particularly on a mobile device. The basic support for Google Docs is somewhat dissappointing but I’m sure this will improve with time.

Of course, with Android, its all about the apps.  But decent hardware is needed to back it all up, with HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS connectivity and also 3.2 MP camera with video.  The device is powered by a Qualcomm 6246 800 MHz CPU with 256Mb RAM, when you think about it makes it about as powerful as a PC of the late 90’s. Sound quality for music is only so-so, one thing that could be improved on, but voice is crystal. The software stack and Android itself appear to based on a linux kernel gathering from a debug app I installed. Good choice.

The native support for DivX is most welcome, simply a matter of copying a movie direct to phone’s SD card.  It is worth reducing resolution of video to 320 x 240 to save space on the memory card, many free apps can do this, I use mencoder myself.

Getting to the Apps, essentials to get immediately on this device are jkAppSwitch, as the phone lacks a basic task manager, and also the Astro file manager is definite must.  The usual crop of apps one would expect are available and for the most part implemented quite well.  Facebook, Twitter, WordPress are all very well supported and really do make Android a killer social networking platform when coupled with Google notifications.

The first app I looked for after sorting out the basics was an SSH client, connectBot works quite nicely for this.  This was the most impressive feature for me as it is so useful to have.  I had yet to come across a phone that would read a QR code successfully with built-in camera, including the iPhone, an was mighty impressed when the Barcode Scanner app picked it up straight away and decoded it- these are appearing everywhere now more and more.  I think this was mostly to do with the camera, which has a very intelligent auto-focus and image stabilizer, probably the best I’ve seen on a phone.

Of course with live mail, twitter, facebook, gtalk, etc all running one gets inundated with information overflow so I suggest just running the apps you need updates from at any given time, and watch out for data charges if operating on phone network and not a wifi zone.

There are the usual batch of cool-for-the-sake of cool apps, GPS tracking, send a file with gesture movement, disco lights and all sorts of other weird, wonderful and wacky apps.

It looks like an Android 2.0 firmware update will be available soon, which is nice to know, 1.5 (Cupcake) is on the model I purchased.  In the end I have gotten past the fact it is a Samsung and Android can fill any gaps missing natively on the phone until something better comes along on O2.  Battery life is an issue however, but time will tell this more as I have being using it a lot since I got it.