First Look: AT&T Samsung Infuse 4G display is big and brilliant

The Samsung Infuse 4G--available from AT&T on May 15 for $200 after rebates with a two-year contract--has one of the best displays I've ever seen on a smart phone. Its 480x800 Super AMOLED Plus display is also the largest, measuring a whopping 4.5 inches (the Motorola Atrix, also from AT&T, also has a 4.5-inch screen) . Despite its IMAX-like display, the phone measures in at a pocket-friendly 8.9mm (9.24mm at the bottom) and weighs a feather-light 4.8 ounces.

This Android 2.2 phone runs on AT&T's 4G network, which in our informal tests appears to be a tad slower that the 4G networks of other carriers. Other features of the Infuse include an 8-megapixel camera with 720p video recording and HDMI playback.

I've had the chance to play with a press sample of the Inspire. Here are my impressions:

It's brilliant. Videos and Web pages on the Infuse's display looked astonishing. Colors popped, and videos appeared smooth and sharp; this was true of the prerecorded movie trailers loaded on the press sample as well as the videos I took with the phone (see one embedded below). The still camera functioned equally well and came with a variety of options for sharing content on social networks, as well as nearby PCs and HDTVs (wirelessly and via its micro USB/HDMI jack).

It's responsive. There's been a lot of hoopla regarding the speed of phones with dual-core processors, but the Infuse's 1.2-GHz processor seemed more than adequate for helping the phone zip through most chores, including the speech-to-text feature. The phone transcribed my words as quickly as I could say them, with impressive accuracy. And jumping from one app to another was practically instantaneous

It's fast. Using the FCC speed test from Ookla, I was able to measure download speeds averaging between 2.5 and 3 megabits per second (mbps). That's not bad, but it isn't as fast as the whopping 8- and 9-mbps speeds I've experienced with the newest 4G phones from T-Mobile, such as the G2X 4G. Upload speeds ranged from a respectable 1 to 2 mbps.

Inputs. Besides speech-to-text, the phone comes with three keyboard options: Swype, Android, and Samsung. As with other phones that have it, the virtual Swype keyboard, which lets you type without lifting a finger and has a very intuitive predictive-text feature, was the easiest and fastest method for composing simple text messages. But I tended to switch to Android keyboard, which has an excellent predictive-text feature, for more elaborate communiqués.

Bottom line: The Samsung Infuse has accomplished an impossible task: Squeezing one of the largest and perhaps best displays in telecom land into an incredibly slim, pocket-friendly package—seemingly without making any compromises regarding performance. Of course, the final word regarding performance will soon come from Consumer Reports engineers, who are currently putting the retail model through its paces.

—Mike Gikas