I received my beautiful Samsung Epic 4G last night from Amazon.  I was able to pick it up for $199 with no rebates.  I also, with some dealing, had the $36 activation refunded from Amazon.  They ran a promotion from 9/6 – 9/13 but my order was technically 9/2 but I had to wait until 9/13 before it was even shipped, I thought it was only right.  It took 2 e-mails but the second CSR seemed to understand why and also understood the amount of business I do with Amazon (Xbox 360 Elite, Onkyo receiver, Blu-Ray player, Samsung 46″ LCD among other things in the past 6 months).  I’m not going into a review of packaging, features, etc. of the phone since there are plenty of reviews out there.  I simply want to post my experiences with the phone from the beginning.

Anyway, day 1 has gone well with the device.  The display is beautiful, interface and setup was a snap and every bit as easy as an iPhone.  As soon as I logged into Google, it pulled all of my contacts, which wasn’t really a great thing since I also realized what a mess my contacts were, even having cleaned them up last year.  I ended up spending an hour to clean up, merge and do some other work on the Google contacts along with my iPhone contacts and then reset the phone to factory default and started over resulting in a much nicer list and relevant set of contacts.  So I would suggest that if you haven’t taken a look at your Google contacts, you may want to do so before getting a new phone.  I also like how it allowed me to chose who I wanted to pull in from Facebook and how it keeps 3 lists; Google, Facebook and combined showing Facebook info along with my Google contacts.  It seems to me it will make it much easier to untangle things if I were to ditch Facebook at some point.

It’s taken a little getting use to after being on the iPhone for the past 18 months and I’ve found that I do miss the swipe/delete feature that iPhone has on just about any kind of communication and I personally think some of the screen sliding seemed a bit cleaner (not smoother) on the iPhone.  I realize I can hold my finger on any conversation in mail, SMS, etc. and it will give me a menu to delete from, just a bit quicker and cleaner with iOS.  With those few things out of the way, this thing completely kicks the iPhone 3G’s ass on speed.  It honestly felt like the old days of going from one generation of PC to the next.  I click something and it immediately launches, browsing, even on Wi-Fi, is leaps and bounds faster.  I understand that the 3G is now a whopping 2 years old but I’m strictly comparing my upgrade.

I found my frequent applications that I used on the iPhone with the exception of Chase Bank (which I’m surprised they’ve not released an Android app yet).  The quick reference apps like IMDB, Wiki, Shazam, iHeart Radio, Pandora and SnapTell. I’ve also grabbed a few apps like Handcent that allows the bubble conversations in SMS like the iPhone, which I do like.   The first app that I installed was Advanced Task Killer to help manage the overflowing applications that open on the phone.

I’ve tried out all the variations of typing, from the slide-out keyboard to the onscreen options like swype and what is equivalent to the iPhone’s auto-correct.  I’ve kind of settled on the later at the moment since it’s familar while I get use to having a keyboard.  My verdict is still out on the keyboard since I’m not used to it.  Swype is very cool after using it for a while and hardly a novelty as some have called it.

Not much else to say for today, I hope to keep updating as I learn the phone, good and bad as well as any apps that I find useful.