It's a beast of a phone on paper, with a fast processor and good graphics performance. The screen is also a large AMLED so the colors are bright and vibrant (hence the name). The AMOLED technology also gives you some very deep blacks since the pixels can turn all the way off unlike a traditional LCD screen. The phone also has ample internal storage as well, with 16GB of onboard memory. The phone ships with Android 2.1, but it should be upgraded to 2.2 within the next few months for all the latest features. When Android 3.0 is released, it should have enough horsepower to run it easily, but it will be up to Samsung to release an OS update (if you're impatient, you can always root it and load the OS ROM of your choice from xda developers or other Android homebrew sites).
On the downside, the camera has no flash, so low light pictures won't be great. There's also no forward facing camera, so you won't be able to do any video conferencing (which isn't uncommon, the only phones I know of sold by US carriers that do it are the iPhone 4 via Facetime and Fring, and the Nokia E73 via Fring). All the reviews I have read indicate that the GPS has some serious issues with acquiring a lock, which is a big problem if you plan to use the free Google Navigation (which works great on my Android phone). The digital compass is also supposedly borked, which causes come issues if you are going to use apps like Google Sky Map for stargazing. I've also read that the internal flash memory is a little slow and is formatted with a slow file system, so the phone seems a little laggier than it should be based on the processor speed.
Overall, it is a nice phone with a few rough edges, and a good intro to the Android OS. Be aware that T-Mobile requires you to have a data plan for this phone, which is $30 a month extra on top of your voice plan. Also, T-Mobile does not have 3G is a lot of areas, so your internet speeds may be slow if you aren't in a 3G area (although the phone does support WiFi).
Some good points there though as a Vibrant owner I can add a little. The GPS is a software issue, the phones ship setup for Europe GPS for whatever reason. T-mobile released a note on how to fix this and the fix is on various forums. It requires about 20 seconds of getting into the "power" menu and changing two settings. On my phone this changed the GPS aquisition from ~1 min to around 10 seconds or so with a clear sky, sometimes faster. This beats my "old" Cliq XT but not by much.
Low light pictures with this phone are actually better than most cell phones with the exception of macro or close shots. In those cases even the wimpy LED flashes would help and sadly, macros are about the only time I ever used a cell camera. Either way it's a huge step down from my Motorola ZN5 with it's real xenon flash... oh well. The software included on the vibrant does a great job so I would consider this a neutral point unless macro's or no-light shots are important.
Can't argue with the front facing camera point. I would almost never use it so it's not huge for me but it is a very annoying omission since the international version of the phone has it.
I have not played with the compass but I have used google sky and it seemed to lineup as well as it does on other phones... which is shakey but more or less correct. This may have been an issue that was also fixed by the GPS correction, I don't know.
I have personally not noticed any slow downs with the internal memory, at least not compared to other phones. What I have noticed is that my MP3's will "skip" every once in a while (quick popping noise) when being played from and SD card but not from internal memory. I have no idea why this is the case and I get no music playback issue from pandora so it does seem to be an SD reading issue.
As for processor lag this one I also don't know for sure. There is no doubt that the phone blows away ANY smartphone using anything less than a snapdragon and has the best GPU out. What is less clear is how it compares to other 1ghz phones. I have played with the Cliq xt, droid, and the incredible and only the incredible is in the same league as far as performance, at least to my very unscientific experiments. I would call it a toss up between the two with the incredible feeling slightly smoother during menu and screen transitions and the vibrant launching apps and typing quicker. These results seems odd to me as the hummingbird processor in the vibrant (and all galaxy S phones) shows much higher benchmark scores compared to the snapdragon so it should blow it away.
One other plus that is not mentioned is the battery life. Compared to several friends with the incredible this vibrant just keeps going and going. That is to say I can actually get 2 days of use out of it vs the less than 1 day for the others. Even my Cliq XT gets less up time, though barely, and it's running an older 600+mhz cpu. I can run it out of juice in one day but it requires movie watching, pandora listening, and lots of web surfing (and maybe even some talking since this is a phone, gasp). I've been very pleased with this so far.
Last items... there are some other software goofs with the phone. The signal bar display is flat out wrong and shows too little signal. I can show 0 signal and still get data and phone messages out with no delay. This is a known issue and supposedly will be fixed... yeah right. Also the battery display is incorrect. It will show more battery left than there actually is and does not draw down correctly. This is annoying but I just installed a battery widget that shows the correct % remaining.
That is all... sorry, I ran a bit long. I only wish I could have qualified for a 1 cent deal instead of the $280+ I paid (after tax and before rebate). Yikes...
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