Sprint has announced that it will offer Samsung’s first Android-powered phone. The smartphone will include built-in Google services including Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube. Subscribers will be able to add additional applications to the Samsung Moment through an online app store called the Android Market.

The Samsung Moment features a 3.2 in AMOLED touch screen which offers crisper colors and wider viewing angles than many other mobile phone screens. Other features include a 3.2-megapixel camera and camcorder with flash and auto-focus, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, Stereo Bluetooth 2.0 support, expandable memory up to 32GB, and the ability to access personal and corporate email through Active Sync. The brains behind the Samsung Moment is a 800 MHZ processor making it one of the fastest smartphones on the market.

The Samsung Moment will retail for US$179.99 after $50 instant savings and a $100 mail-in rebate with a two-year service agreement. The smartphone is available November 1st, but interested customers can pre-register for the smartphone early at the Sprint website.

Read more at the Sprint press release

Brian’s Opinion

It’s nice to see Samsung jumping on the Android bandwagon. I’m a big fan of the touch screen and slide-out QWERTY keyboard combination as it gives the best of both worlds to smartphone users. As more Android smartphones are adopted by wireless carriers I think we will begin to see Android take up a larger amount of market share compared to other legacy mobile operating systems.

If the Samsung Moment is well received you can bet we’ll see additional Android-powered models from Samsung. I think Samsung was in a “wait and see” mode before they put the resources into providing an Android phone. That probably made good business sense and the Samsung Moment is a product of that patience.

I believe 2010 may be the year we see a huge breakout of Android phones supported by Google. You can expect Google to put some serious marketing into Android to make that happen. When Google does that there is no doubt that mobile phone manufacturers will follow suit with more Android models.