The 5megapixel race has now got more players. Previously only Nokia and LG were main contenders, but now with Sony and Samsung both releasing K850i and G800 respectively there is even more intense competition. While the Sony Ericsson K850i is marketed as a camera phone, the G800 is called a digital camera which also has a call facility.

The first thing which will catch your attention about the phone is that it is very sleek and comes in very nice packaging. The entire metallic Samsung trademark is very pleasing to the hands. The phone is quite heavy. It has only 55MB of memory and yet weighs as much as 135grams without any external memory.

The key feature of the phone is its 5megapixel camera which sits at the rear of the phone behind the manually opened lens. This protects the camera as well as the Xenon flash. The highest resolution offered by the camera is 2560?1920 pixels. The camera also features red eye reduction. The flash is better than Nokia’s standard Led flashes, but falls short of the quality of the Xenon flash on the Sony Ericsson K850i.

The interface is the standard Samsung interface. The camera interface is one of the dullest with almost no tool tip help support to assist with the camera functions. Another big lagging feature is that in burst mode it takes only 3 shorts which are in VGA resolution and not in 5megapixel resolution, which is a big let down as almost all the phones are allowing burst shots in full resolution.

Now let’s examine the other features in this phone. The G800 is equipped with a media player which can play mp3, aac, aac+ and wma tracks. A very innovative thing about it is that it shows currently played tracks on the standby screen and allows you to control it via navi-keys.

However regarding quality, the phone leaves a lot to be desired. There is a built in Stereo FM and document viewer which allows you to read word, excel, PDF and PowerPoint presentations on the phone. The phone also has a TV-out for viewing the pictures as slides on your TV too. The standby time is expected to be around 2 days with a moderate amount of photography.

Further to the short video demo that I uploaded yesterday, here is the point by point analysis of the phone. I hope you enjoy it. 

Phone Hardware

1. Samsung has clearly taken the pole position in the phone-camera category. In a short span of months, Samsung has pushed out her second 8 megapixals (MP) camera – Samsung M8800 PIXON after i8510 INNOV8. Clearly, no other phones except LG perhaps can come close to Samsung in this area. PIXON is the slimmest phone with a 8 megapixals resolution, a record previously held by LG RENOIR KC910 (a successor to LG KC990 VIEWTY). 

2. PIXON is a 3.2 inch touchscreen phone but it’s not the first touchscreen phone launched by Samsung. However unlike OMNIA, M8800 PIXON is not a windows mobile phone. It is also not using Symbian OS which is the OS for INNOV8. Instead, it uses Samsung’s proprietary TouchWiz interface (I’ll touch more about the phone OS and applications in the later section)

3. Let’s talk about the camera feature first since this is the key USP for PIXON. The new PIXON is equipped with the core functions that you will find on any Samsung’s low end point and shoot range camera. PIXON’s camera features include auto-focus, 16x digital zoom (which, to me, is pretty useless if you want a high quality shoot. Optical zoom will be much more important), fast-shutter and face detection. And of course, being a phone, it provides the geo-tagging function and easy uploading via the mobile internet. 

4. It’s natural that that we compare PIXON to LG RENOIR since both have 8MP camera. While I have not tested LG RENOIR, I learnt from third party sources that RENOIR uses Schneider-Kreuznach lens and Xenon flash. PIXON on the other hand uses plastic lens and dual LED flash. In addition, RENOIR has active autofocus whereas PIXON uses passive autofocus. But the report also commented that camera speed-wise, PIXON has an edge over RENOIR and PIXON has a more friendly user-interface. (http://technorati.com/posts/OpbBYGK7SrgKE3pAz_SSxWJrJcNHyvOX4y9G993i3j0%3D). 

5. Putting aside the camera feature, I tend to compare this to Nokia XpressMusic 5800 as well. Both are very lightweight (PIXON 121g and Nokia 109g). Both have long battery life with Nokia winning by a slight margin (Samsung has talktime of upto 3 hours and 40 minutes and standby of 290 hours; Nokia has talktime of up to 4 hours and standby of upto 300hours). However, unlike Nokia, Samsung has only 256k colors. Nokia 5800 by contrast, supports 16m colors. 

6. Some other similar features are the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and full virtual Qwerty keyboard and built-in GPS. PIXON uses Google Maps whereas Nokia has its own Nokia MAPS (which requires a subscription). However, Google maps is free and to me Google maps serves my purpose as I don’t need a turn by turn voice navigation.

7. Samsung PIXON also uses a resistive screen and as mentioned in my earlier post on Nokia XpressMusic 5800, I am not very used to the “touch” on resistive screen. It requires you to exert pressure on the screen to scroll down. It requires more deliberate efforts to scroll than the multi-touch capacitive screen on iPhone. 

8. PIXON uses proprietary headset jack. But all is not lost. You are able to connect a 3.5mm normal earphone to the connector provided by Samsung. The only thing is you can’t afford to lose this connector. In addition, the phone also has the ability to do TV out. You have to purchase the accessories separately. 

9. PIXON has an internal storage of 200M (much larger than Nokia 5800’s) and similar to most phones today it has an expandable memory slot using microSD card.  

10. In terms of its speakers’ quality, Samsung included its own SRS (surround sound system). By comparison, I feel that Nokia 5800 is a cut above Samsung when I play the same song using the speakers. The music player also boosts some presets (in total 8 of them). However, unlike Nokia’s XpressMusic, you can’t change the presets to customise your own. (More about this in the later section)

11. While PIXON has a 3.2 inch screen, its browser is not friendly. You can’t open several tabs at one go. And because it has resistive screen, it is not using to navigate with fingers as you need to press against the screen as you move around on a web page. But what I like about the phone is that you can zoom in and out by using the volume up/down button or to use the virtual buttons on the screen. Both are easy to control. I don’t’ encourage you to buy the phone if you intend to browse a lot. Besides the less-friendly browser and browsing capability, PIXON does NOT support WiFi. WiFi is important for me because I tend to put my phone on WiFi when I’m at home or in the office so that I don’t have to pay for cellular data charges. PIXON is not the right phone for web-browsing. iPhone or G1 are clearly far better choices. 

12. Last but not least, PIXON has several physical buttons to provide one-click access. It has 3 buttons at the bottom of the screen. The left and right buttons are self-explanatory (making and ending calls / power switch). The middle button is NOT a home or menu button. Rather it is a “Back” button. I had thought it would be easier to have a Menu button but Samsung has designed the Menu button as a virtual button (read on to find out). On one side of the phones are the camera button and the volume buttons (which can act as zoom in/out and and scroll up /down depending on the application that you are running). On the other side of the phone are the hold button and a menu button that provides a virtual menu for quick access to “call”, “music player”, “messages”, “browser”, “main menu” and back. 

Phone OS and Applications

1. As mentioned earlier, the phone uses TouchWiz OS. It has several widgets on the home screen that you can pull out from the side of the screen to the main screen. Some neat widgets include Google Search, Weather Channel, Favourite Contacts, Photo Album, Music Player and others that are already pre-installed on the phone and many more that can be downloaded from Samsung FunClub website. 

2. Pixon’s organizer application comes with some handy tools such as Calendar, Memo, Task, World Clock, Calculator and Converter. 

3. For the music player, the interface is very friendly and easy to use. You can set any piece as voice or video call ringtone or caller ringtone. You have the option to decide whether to allow background music playing. It has an additional feature similar to the Shazam. PIXON has this application called the “Music Recognition”. It will try to identify the song that you are playing. I have not tried out too many songs (in fact, only a few), hence it’s not fair for me to comment on the accuracy. So far it recognizes most of the songs I bought from iTunes. Between the two phones, I’ll recommend Nokia XpressMusic 5800 over Samsung PIXON for music not just because Nokia 5800 has better music player features and speakers but also because Nokia is targeting squarely at the iTunes market with the music store via its Come with Music service.

4. Nowadays most phones have both music and video players. Given the 3.2 inch screen size, it’s comfortable to play a video or movie on it. What’s neat about the video player is that you can choose to upload to web or to send via email/MMS or Bluetooth (same for music) and even add tags to it (only for videos). You can view the video in either portrait or landscape mode. 

5. In addition, PIXON has this Video Editor application that allows you to insert one video track and two audio tracks. You can choose 176×144 or 320×240 for the resolution settings. You can choose from 5 different effects (Emboss, Black&White, Sepia, Solarise, Sharpen) to apply on the video. Interesting tool for you to make your own little impromptu video.   

6. Just to also mention that the phone has a voice recorder application but it can only record up to a maximum of 60 minutes. I thought if Samsung really wanted this to be a “fun phone” for photo-taking and video editing, it should perhaps include some effects to make some tweaks to the voice. What you can do for video editing is only to trim the length.

7. Don’t bang on this phone too much for games. PIXON has some pre-installed games (mostly for trial only). It doesn’t have the depth and breadth of an iPhone appstore.   

9. The phone can be used easily for mass storage. It has a Documents Viewer application that allows you to open Microsoft Office (only 2003 and not 2007) documents. This is a pleasant surprise to me. I have tested it out on a few powerpoint files (since I tend to deal a lot with powerpoint files). You can view in portrait or landscape mode. And more surprisingly it has a Search Function. This means I can go to certain particular slide easily if I can remember the keywords in that slide. The viewer has a zoom function too.  

10. Okay, I just want to say that this phone is not cut out to support heavy duty email. Of course, PIXON is never provided for that. It can support POP3 or IMAP. I have tried setting up using IMAP. I realised that it seems slow in processing my emails. There is also a limit on the size of the file that you can download. Only up to 5Mb. Most powerpoint file that I receive tends to be bigger than 5Mb. So this is practically of no use to me. If you just want simple text reading, this phone serves the purpose. If you read my earlier post on Nokia 5800, I mentioned that Nokia 5800 supports Mail For Exchange which allows synchronisation of Inbox, Calendar and Tasks. For PIXON, only basic email function is supported. 

11. What I find strange is that Samsung includes ShoZu for MobileBlog (which also allows you to upload your photo to ShoZu). I thought it would be more useful to include a Flickr or Facebook application since this is primary a camera phone. But then again, Samsung may want to encourage people to do micro-blogging and hence ShoZu application will fit the bill. 

12. PIXON has a Photo Album application that uses its built-in accelerometer sensor. Not only does it auto-rotate the screen when you change the orientation of the phone, it also allows you to advance back and forth easily by tilting the phone. Cool way to view hundreds of photos quickly. 

13. There is another neat thing I like about this phone. At times, we may send a sms to the wrong party. This phone has this “precautionary” feature built in by requiring you to click the “Done” virtual button so that you can preview your entire message again before sending out. In addition, when you type your message, the textbox is enlarged so that you can view your draft message easily. You can choose to use the normal phone keypad or handwritten (using the stylus) mode or the virtual Qwerty keyboard.  However, I somehow feel that it is a little slower than most phones in sending out the messages. Not sure if it’s because it has the dialog box that shows “Sending” and hence the perception that it’s taking a bit longer. 

14. Lastly, I just want to say that this phone supports RSS. This means you can import your favourite feeds into the phone easily. That’s something I must have for all phones. Feeds are my daily needs. 

So in summary, I would say that if you are looking for a phone that can double up as a proper camera and have decent music and video players. This is the phone to go for. It has long battery life. This is important for taking photos and playing videos. Plus with the light weight, I really won’t mind carrying one more gadget with me.  

The Samsung i8510 is a dual slider that was pretty much designed to resemble the Nokia N95. Although it is slightly heavier than the Nokia N95 it is a few millimetres thinner as well. With its touch sensitive navigation, the Samsung i8510 has a ton of features such as, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi, 8GB of built-in flash memory, FM radio a typical music player, plus a very nice 8mp camera. In terms of specification, you will not get better than this.

This Samsung i8510 has a wide 2.8 inch screen that shows all of what you want to see. It is a dual slider and that means that the keypad is underneath the initial top of the phone, alongside the music control keys that slide out of the opposite side. Although this phone is a bit heavy for some users, others will love its durability. You can hold plenty of video and even up to 2,000 songs and even more if you compress them. You can even ad a 16GB memory card that boosts your internal memory up to 24 GB which is more than enough to store tons of full length movies and even somewhere around 6,000 songs.

This phone is also well known now as being Europe’s first 8 megapixel camera phone and it uses Symbian technology to run everything. The camera has plenty of advanced settings and modes such as blink detection, zoom in up to 9x and a dual powered LED flash. There is a dedicated button that activates the camera, opens the shutter, and toggles between video, pictures, and your phones video/picture gallery. It can take very good video footage and you have the option to record with up to 120 frames per second.

The Samsung i8510 has a great web interface and it also has the ability to download with speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps, which is nothing short of amazing. Surfing the net was what this phone was made for. It has an HTML browser that allows you to switch between portrait and landscape modes in order to make your web page display as well as possible. The feature of touch-sensitive scrolling makes surfing the Internet just great. Of course this phone comes with Bluetooth technology and Wi-Fi compatibility. It also has this great feature of being about to use the TV-out connection to view photos and videos right on your very own TV. You can even stream content via a wireless connection to a PC or even a laptop by using the Wi-Fi compatibility feature.

You can do just about anything with this phone from downloading music to downloading iPhone applications and running them perfectly. You can listen to streaming music, watch streaming videos, and even upload your photos and videos to any website that you want. It has 3d surround sound with DNSe 2.0 technology that will allow for some great sound quality but if you choose you can plug in your headphones in the 3.5mm headphone jack. The Samsung i8510 is a unbelievably great phone that will essentially make you spend less time using your computer, as well as your DVD and mp3 players.

The Samsung D840 is the slimmest slider, even slimmer than the flagship Samsung D900. Its thickness of 11.5 mm surpasses the tall claims of other slim phones. The phone comes in a smart steel casing and available in two colour solution – silver and black. With its ever growing popularity, other colour variants are expected too.

Functionally too, the Virgin Mobile Phone Samsung D840 surpasses the flagship D900 and many other slim phones in its price bracket. This triband supporting handset works in more than 100 major countries across the globe with exceptional network reception. The device is powered with multi slot GPRS and Class 10 EDGE capable of achieving data speed of up to 236.8 kbps to give you fastest mobile Internet speed except 3G. A WAP 2.0/xHTML browser for quick navigation through the Internet, an email client to manage your professional and personal emails, a document viewer that is compatible with popular MS Office and PDF files – the Samsung D840 is all you’ll need to connect to the world.

The integrated camera module of the Samsung D840 is 2.0 megapixel. The T-Mobile mobile phone use their LCD display as a viewfinder when on camera mode. The camera is capable of shooting great pictures irrespective of the ‘photographer’s skills. The integrated LED flash and digital zoom comes in very handy in dark and gloomy conditions. Shoot videos in high resolution and accurate colours to share it with anyone you want.

The Samsung D840 is also an accomplished music player and plays numerous file formats with great clarity. The phone houses a healthy 80 Mb internal memory to carry any multimedia files. Watch videos on the Samsung D840’s screen in 262k rich colours or watch them on your TV with its TV output. There always some more than you can imagine possible with the Samsung D840.

The Samsung E900 resembles a ‘Super group’ of music scene. Just like a super group which is consists of individual musicians who are already famous in their respective fields, the Samsung E900 too includes all the best features from its previous successful models like D500, D600 and D800. The Samsung E900 drew a lot of comparison with LG K800 which was released about a month prior to it. Though design wise, the LG chocolate is more interesting, the Samsung E900 packs more features and support memory cards.

The touch sensitive keypad remains largely hidden till the slider is opened. 262144 colour deliverable TFT screen produces images with amazing clarity and remains easily readable even in bright sunlight. The Samsung E900 is widely rumored to be codenamed ‘Ghost’ because of the reflection it produces on its glossy surface.

The Samsung E900 includes Voice Clarity Feature – that automatically adjusts volume according to background noise. Pixel Viewer is another useful feature to view document in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and HTML formats. If you find the handset’s display small for large files, you can watch them on a larger screen like your TV.

The camera module of the O2 Samsung E900 is based on CMOS technology, 2.0 mega-pixel and backed by digital zoom and integrated LED flash. The result is bright and high resolution pictures in all light conditions. Video recording in CIF format is enabled. With TV Output, you can enjoy the special moments you captured with all at once.

This tri-band phone has more options to keep you connected other than GSM mobile connectivity across five continents. High speed EDGE/GPRS powered Internet connectivity is supported by WAP 2.0/xHTML browser and an email client that supports POP3, SMTP and IMAP4 protocols. Download all you want to the Samsung E900’s generous 80Mb memory pool which can be expanded further through memory card.

The Samsung D840 is the slimmest slider, even slimmer than the flagship Samsung D900. Its thickness of 11.5 mm surpasses the tall claims of other slim phones. The phone comes in a smart steel casing and available in two colour solution – silver and black.

Functionally too, the Samsung D840 surpasses the flagship D900 and many other slim phones in its price bracket. This triband supporting handset works in more than 100 major countries across the globe with exceptional network reception. The device is powered with multi slot GPRS and Class 10 EDGE capable of achieving data speed of up to 236.8 kbps to give you fastest mobile Internet speed except 3G. A WAP 2.0/xHTML browser for quick navigation through the Internet, an email client to manage your professional and personal emails, a document viewer that is compatible with popular MS Office and PDF files – the Samsung D840 is all you’ll need to connect to the world.

The integrated camera module of the Vodafone Samsung D840 is 2.0 megapixel. The phone uses its LCD display as a viewfinder when on camera mode. The camera is capable of shooting great pictures irrespective of the ‘photographer’s skills. The integrated LED flash and digital zoom comes in very handy in dark and gloomy conditions. Shoot videos in high resolution and accurate colours to share it with anyone you want.

The Samsung D840 is also an accomplished music player and plays numerous file formats with great clarity. The phone houses a healthy 80 Mb internal memory to carry any multimedia files. Watch videos on the Samsung D840’s screen in 262k rich colours or watch them on your TV with its TV output. There always some more than you can imagine possible with the Samsung D840.

Want to catch up the latest mobile phone trend? Samsung unleashes the perfect blend of innovative technology and novel design with the fashionable Samsung E900. Spice up your tech-savvy lifestyle with the ultra-cool Samsung E900 Pink.

Slide open the Samsung E900 and capture your special moments with the in-built 2 mega pixel camera with 4x digital zoom and LED flash. Get the full screen display of your photos and MPEG4 videos on the high resolution 262K colours 240 x 320 pixels TFT LCD screen. You can also watch the video clips by connecting your device to any compatible TV via TV-Out or USB cable. Enjoy mobile printing through Bluetooth wireless technology and get brilliant quality photo prints.

Samsung E900 mobile phones accommodates a digital music player capable of playing your favourite tracks in MP3, AAC and WMA formats. Get smash-hit tunes as your MP3 or polyphonic ringing tones. The 80 MB user memory with microSD card slot makes sufficient room for your songs, music videos and photos. So tune in to the music player and make the most of your mobile music experience.

Access high-end multimedia provisions through powerful Tri band technology. With EDGE, GPRS and WAP available in your device, you can share your music, photos and videos online with friends. Get your business done by viewing your business files via Document viewer, and working even offline. The Samsung E900 Pink mobile phones also provides you with other exciting multimedia features like MMS, SMS, email, Java games and more. With the high-speed connectivity, you can enjoy fast downloads of latest games, attractive wallpapers, themes, images, music videos and songs. Get Samsung E900 and you are guaranteed latest mobile technology as well as high fashion inputs. Buy this fashion accessory and get reasons to flaunt your gadget.

mobile phones, Samsung

The Samsung U600 is an attractive slider phone with an impressive large screen of 2.2 inches that displays 262k colour of 240 x 320 pixels. The 3.2 mega pixel camera with auto-focus and flash lets you take crystal clear pictures. Coming to music features, the handset has a built-in digital music player and an FM radio that lets you enjoy high quality music.

Samsung-U600 is a light weight handset that emits 256,000 colours through its TFT display. Weighing only 81 g, this light weight gadget can slip easily in your palm and adds on to your style statement. Technically speaking, Samsung U600 works on Quad-Band GSM network that can be taken to any part of the world and gives an amazing connectivity with its features as GPRS, EDGE and Bluetooth.

One of the most important capabilities of this slider phone is its 3.2 megapixel camera, with 4x digital zoom, flash and autofocus. This will manage to offer captures at a quality above the average. Samsung U600 is a phone meant to be able to handle a large amount of media files at best standards. For this, it also packs Bluetooth and USB connectivity, as well as a TV-Out, to bring videos and images on a large TV set’s screen.

The slider phone is also capable of supporting a large number of media files, such as MP3, WMA and AAC. Moreover, the user will also be able to browse the internet through WAP and download even more media information. The 10 mm thickness and 81 grams in weight of the Samsung U600 phone make this one of the most compact devices to own. Moreover, the smooth, simple design, gives it a certain amount of elegance

The GSM attuned Samsung U600 is fondly referred to as a “Size Zero” phone due to its ultra slim structure. However, there is no end to the immense facilities that the 10.9mm deep gadget offers you. Even with its slider open, it is merely 146 mm in length. The photo unit with facilities such as Digital zoom x4, auto focus, LED flash, single / multi / Mosaic shot, portrait/ landscape view etc is indeed more than what you expect from it. It offers an utmost resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. Please Purchase online http://www.phoneandbeyond.com