AT&T has finally met its match…in itself! With the new Samsung Captivate planning to captivate smartphone users this summer, AT&T has come out with the Google phone finally able to compete with its long-standing flagship champ the Apple iPhone. Or have they? What with the iPhone 4 around the corner, it’s anybody’s game.

The first AT&T smartphones to run on the Google Android operating system, Android 2.1 to be precise, are coming soon–one of which is the Samsung Captivate (the other of which is the HTC Aria and a story for another day).

The Samsung Captivate has a captivating 4″ WVGA Super AMOLED touch screen. The iPhone 4 has a 3.5″ multi-touch display. Though for screen size, Samsung wins the prize, which type of touch screen interactivity is preferable is purely up to the user, with advantages and disadvantages to both.

The display on the Samsung entry has 800 x 480 resolution, which has a leg up on older iPhones, but one of the flagship features of the iPhone 4 is its 960 x 640 HD display. Point goes to Apple.

The Captivate boasts an accelerometer, a 6-axis sensor, and a gyroscope. The iPhone 4 also boasts an accelerometer as well as a proximity sensor, a 3-axis gyroscope, and an ambient light sensor.

The Captivate will come with 16 GB of internal storage while the iPhone 4 will come in a 16 GB and 32 GB variety. But the Captivate has a microSD card for expandable storage and the iPhone 4 does not.

The iPhone 4 has an assisted GPS and a digital compass, and comes with built in Apple email, iTunes, Safari web browser, stocks, weather, maps, notes, YouTube, photos, calendar, and memos. The Samsung Captivate also has a GPS as well as an AT&T Address Book, AT&T Navigate and Samsung’s Social Hub, and comes with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Talk, and YouTube.

Both devices have a 5.0 megapixel digital camera with 720p video capture. Both devices have 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, but the iPhone 4 has Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR wireless technology while the Captivate has Bluetooth 3 connectivity.