Samsung Impression SGH-A877- black (AT&T)

Pros: its a samsung, great keyboard, awesome display, touchscreen, 3 megapixel camera, good call quality, 3G, UI, microSD slot, good music player, AGPS, looks great, decent web browser

Cons: the top row of keys is a little close to the screen and is a little bit annoying at first, but if even the smallest things bother you, you can still get used to it and ditto to everything Kent German said but the non-rotating wallpaper is no big deal

Summary: Just as a little background as to what I demand from a phone. I owned a first generation Iphone and hated it because it lacked so many basic functions that every phone that costs over $30 has, i.e. no stereo or phone to phone bluetooth, no MMS, no even forwarding messages or deleting just 1 text message, call quality was bad and I couldn't delete just 1 recent call. The list goes on. So eventually I went back to using my old samsung sync even though i text a lot.
So after a lot of research making sure my next phone would have basic functionality, I picked the Impression. And so far I am pretty impressed with it. My biggest complaint after a few hours with it was that when typing the letters on the top row, I noticed that the display kind of got in the way of my finger. You can still properly type with it without a problem, its just one of those annoying things that I will probably get used to. The web browsing, although far from perfect, got the job done and is fairly comfortable.Texting is a joy on this phone despite the above mentioned keyboard "problem". It has predictive text if you want it, but it is not needed on a qwerty keyboard. For a phone it is pretty heavy, but is not uncomfortable to carry around. Compared to other phones, it is a little bit of a pain to remove and put on the back cover. To access the microSD slot, you have to take the cover off but not the battery. (But seriously, how often are you going to be changing the battery/sim/SD?) It comes with a CD with a bunch of links on how to use your phone and a download for a media manager. Unlike the Iphone, you can minimize apps which I'm pretty sure all touch-wiz phones do, also all winMO, blackberry, palm & other smartphones. (This is not a smartphone) Another complaint is that there is no wi-fi, but I came to the conclusion that it is not a big setback. No 3.5mm headphone jack, but I plan to use bluetooth headphones anyways. This is also not a smartphone so you won't be able to get business email on the device. And if you don't have an email from the one of the selected services, like AOL, Yahoo!, etc., but not gmail, then you have to use the browser rather than the special mobile email which is not bad if you save it in your favorites.
If all you want is a good texting phone with a great keyboard that can do just about everything pretty well, then I would suggest this phone for you.
But if you want the great mobile browser that doesn't have flash (hulu, youtube not in that stupid little app) with a million useless free apps right now, then I suggest shopping in the Iphone camp.
p.s. Samsung has released an SDK for developers for all touchwiz phones, which means that 3rd party developers will be able to make apps specifically for the device which us consumers will be able to get our hands on sooner or later. This novelty was made famous by Apple.