At first glance, the Samsung Transform on ($150 after new two-year contract from Sprint) looks like the Samsung Epic 4G's younger brother (also on Sprint). Both phones sport a slide-out keyboard and a front-facing camera. But once you actually hold and use the phone, you'll immediately notice the differences in specs, performance and design.
Slider Design
Despite the similar design to Epic 4G, the Transform's build quality is clunky and feels plasticky. The sliding mechanism however, is solid and the QWERTY keyboard was easy to pop out and use.
The keyboard's keys felt cheap and flat and trying to drum out longer text messages grew increasingly annoying with every typo. I often found myself just using the virtual keyboard in landscape mode rather than the hardware keyboard.
The Samsung Transform sports a 3.5-inch 320-by-480-pixel capacitive LCD screen, and at times, it looked a bit dim and blurry. On a sunny day, I could barely see the screen outdoors, even after messing with several brightness settings. The glare from the sunlight made it hard to see what I was doing on the device. Under the screen you find four soft keys (Menu, Home, Back, and Search), and at the top of the device find a standard 3.5-mm audio jack and a micro USB port behind a sliding door. On the left spine of the phone is a volume rocker and on the right you have the power button, a dedicated voice command key, and a camera button. There is a microSD card slot, but like many other Android phones you have to remove the back covering to get to it.
Performance and Software
Being a lower-end Android phone, the Samsung Transform is powered by an 800 MHz processor with 201MB of onboard memory. The capacitive touchscreen had problems registering my input at times. The biggest tweak is the inclusion of Sprint ID. When you first set up the device, you are prompted to download a Sprint ID pack containing several applications such as Sprint TV, Telenav GPS Navigator, and NASCAR Sprint Cup. At the time I lacked network coverage and couldn't continue with the rest of the setup. A minor quirk, but this is something to be aware of should you try to setup the phone in an area with poor reception. After initial setup, you are free to browse through several different Sprint IDs. Each ID contains several apps, wallpapers, and ringtones that follow the theme of the ID and you can switch your ID at anytime.
Battery life was surprisingly good. After a full day of taking pictures, watching YouTube videos, making calls, and downloading apps, I still had around 60% battery life left. I was able to go almost 2 days before the battery ran out. However, as with most smartphones you will most likely want to charge the phone every night.
Multimedia
The phone sports a 3.2-megapixel camera with a flash as well as a front-facing 0.3-megapixel VGA camera. The rear camera took some reasonably decent shots when the area was well lit. In lower light settings the flash tended to blow out the image, causing a hazy distortion.
Videos shot with the camcorder was decent as well. The playback was a little choppy but not so bad as to being unbearable and audio picked up nicely as well. Strangely enough you are not
given the option to record video using the front facing camera. Although the phone uses the stock Android media player, sound quality was good enough that you could use the phone as an MP3 player.
Bottom Line
The Samsung Transform is a good entry level phone for new Android users who aren't ready to give up physical buttons just yet. If you're looking for something more powerful, however, you'll want to skip the Transform and move on to the HTC EVO 4G or the Epic 4G. The sluggish download speeds and small internal memory will annoy heavy app users to no end. The phone is scheduled to receive 2.2 update (Froyo) later this year which will hopefully solve its storage issue and make the phone faster overall.
