Samsung Galaxy Attain 4G: Affordable LTE, but bundled with bloatware

PC World - The Samsung Galaxy Attain 4G, which debuted at CES 2012, is a contract-free smartphone that runs on MetroPCS's 4G LTE network. At $250 without a contract (as of January 30, 2012), the Attain is one of the most budget-friendly LTE phones currently available. However, though the phone's low price will certainly attract attention, the overabundance of adware on the phone might drive some shoppers away.

Design

The Attain has a 3.5-in., 320 x 480-pixel QVGA display, a change of pace from most of the 4-in, and larger phones out there. In my tests the screen did a decent job of displaying colors, though some of the app icons and other graphics appeared blurry. Text is readable, but you probably won't want to pore over your Google Books novels on the Attain's diminutive display.

At 4.57 x 2.38 x 0.46 in., the Attain is one of the smaller Android phones available. While it's shorter and narrower than most of Samsung's other Galaxy phones, the Attain is slightly thicker than the Galaxy Nexus (0.37 in.). The Attain's compact size makes it easier to hold, and the phone should fit easily into most people's pockets.

The Attain ships with two cameras: a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera and a 3-megapixel rear camera (more on those later). One interesting note: The Attain is one of the few Android smartphones to have a physical camera button -- something that we normally see only on Windows Phone 7 handsets or camera-centric Android phones such as the T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide.

Speaking of buttons, Samsung has opted to replace the standard soft-touch navigation buttons with physical ones. The buttons are curved, so they're easier to press, but I found them to be a little flimsy. The other buttons on the phone -- the power button, the volume rocker, and the camera button -- all felt sturdier, though the camera button was a bit spongy.

Performance

Running on a 1GHz single-core Samsung Hummingbird processor and 512MB of RAM, the Attain has similar specs to the Samsung Mesmerize on U.S. Cellular and the Vibrant on T-Mobile. Although that isn't necessarily a bad thing, it does make the Attain feel somewhat dated in comparison with all the dual-core phones that are being released these days.

In my hands-on with the phone, I didn't notice much lag when swiping through home pages or jumping around apps. The one time I did notice a performance issue was when I tried opening the popular game Age of Zombies: The app would run, but only after the phone showed a black screen for about 2 minutes. More graphics-intensive games, such as EA's Dead Space, would occasionally stutter and slow down, but were nonetheless playable on the Attain's small screen. The compact display made texting while in portrait mode difficult -- something to keep in mind if you have big fingers and are a heavy texter.