In my book:
Triumph=High priced, fast, though gas-guzzling (bad battery life) 8-cylinder muscle car with an internal steering system (GPS) that seriously needs a fix. If you install the right ROM and other software to fix a few bugs as well as the GPS, it's really not a half bad phone at all. The flashed ROM may actually improve battery life too.
Optimus V=Corolla. It's affordable, but more importantly, it's reliable. It won't win too many drag races or benchmark pissing contests. But it gets you from A to B with less battery power consumed. Chicks won't dig you as much for driving this car, but that's not a good reason to buy it anyway.
The Optimus V is the safer choice IMO. But the Triumph, if tuned and fixed, can be a pretty formidable phone. I'm on a budget, so I'm planning to hold off on upgrading until at least summer.
Oh, and I'm on the Intercept. The Optimus V beats it handily in every field except for the fact that the intercept has a dedicated qwerty keyboard. Think of the Intercept as a 1998 Hyundai Elantra (remember when Hyundai used to make bargain basement pieces of junk and call them cars?). My family actually had one. We kept having to take it back to the mechanic because of a specific part that was defective. Everything else about the car was fine. But that individual part would've costed too much money and time to replace. Dad insisted the first few times that the mechanic just use a temporary fix for it. After the car got into a huge accident, he sold it to a junk yard, only to later learn that one of the employees of that service station we visited had picked it up for cheap, spent decent $$$ to replace that part. Last I heard he'd been driving it around for several years. It's probably on its last legs if it hasn't already been junked completely.
That's pretty much the Samsung Intercept for ya. Out of the box, it has too many problems. Crappy battery life and super duper lag. But if you flash it using Stockom on Crack and install Juice Defender, it's actually surprisingly reliable! I DO get rare instances of Google Service or whatever that background software's called crashing on me. But it's once in a blue moon. I text and do e-mails at the library when I don't have my notebook with me. It's been with me many places so far.