June has brought us an embarrassment of smartphone riches, starting with the jumbo-screened, WiMax-enabled HTC Evo 4G on Sprint, followed by the unveiling of the Samsung Captivate for AT&T, the eye-catching Motorola Droid X for Verizon, and the arrival of a little thing called the iPhone 4. Well, turns out we've got at least one more smartphone superstar ready for its close-up this month: the Samsung Vibrant.
The Vibrant was announced via Twitter by T-Mobile (and spotted by my former colleague Philip Berne at Phone Scoop), but we're still in the dark as far as exact release dates and pricing. We should learn more this coming Tuesday, though, during a Samsung press event in Manhattan.
T-Mobile's been teasing us with an online rebus puzzle about the Vibrant for days now, but the carrier went ahead Thursday and spilled the beans on Twitter.
Among the details revealed in T-Mobile's tweets: a 1GHz Samsung "Hummingbird" processor, a five-megapixel camera, HD video recording, and — perhaps best of all — a four-inch Super AMOLED display, which would put the Vibrant's screen somewhere between the iPhone's 3.5-inch display and the 4.3-inch screens on the Evo 4G and the Droid X.
The news comes on the heels of AT&T's announcement that it'll take on the Samsung Captivate, yet another "Galaxy"-class Android smartphone with ... you guessed it, a four-inch Super AMOLED display, a five-megapixel camera, a 1GHz processor, and HD video recording.
I haven't seen the Captivate or the Vibrant in person yet, but I have been playing around with the original Galaxy S for the past few days, and it's a beaut. The phone's Super AMOLED display (designed to boost touch sensitivity and improve viewability in direct sunlight, which is the Achilles' heel of standard AMOLED screens) is indeed as vibrant and high-contrast as they say, and the 4-inch size of the screen manages to feel jumbo without straying into waffle territory. I was also blown away by how light the 4.1-ounce handset felt — so light, in fact, that at first I thought it was missing its battery.
Hopefully we'll learn more about both the Vibrant and the Captivate — including pricing and release info — at next week's press conference. And who knows, maybe we'll get confirmation of yet another Android superphone: the rumored Galaxy S Pro, a QWERTY slider that's said to be Sprint's next WiMax phone after the Evo 4G.
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