By releasing Samsung M8800 Pixon, the Samsung have continued their fight with other competitors in the category of 8 Mega Pixel Handsets. The Samsung M8800 Pixon is a Touchphone with an 8 Mega Pixel camera and a massive 3.2 inch display screen that runs on the TouchWiz interface. The Pixon, however is a lower range handset compared to its predecessor, INNOV8, but it has better imaging capabilities.
Design
The Samsung M8800 Pixon measures 107.9×54.6×13.8 mm in terms of height, width and thickness. Presently, it is available only in black color. The build quality of the phone is commendable with good quality materials used. However, in the longer run, the materials are a question of durability. It has a 3.2 inch TFT color display screen with QVGA resolution that supports up to 240×400 pixels. The sun legibility and the touch sensitivity of the display screen are quite good.
Below the touch-sensitive display screen, there are three physical buttons visible, namely the Call button, the End button and the round-shaped Back button. At the top of the phone’s face, you will find an Earpiece, a Video call camera and the Ambient light sensor. On the left side of the phone, you will find the shortcut menu key, the Hold key and the slot for MicroSD card. The Hold key can be used for Locking/Unlocking the touchscreen. On the right hand side of the phone, you will find a dedicated button for the camera and gallery and a volume rocker button. At the top of the phone, you will find the micro USB port and a battery release button. All the buttons present on the handset have nice travel and are easy to use.
The rear side of the camera sports an 8 Mega Pixel camera with autofocus and LED flash and a lens cover. You will also find the loudspeaker at the rear side of the phone. The camera lens with a digicam type of finish to it tells the main purpose of the handset. At the bottom of the rear side of the handset there is a piece of rubber which acts as a camera grip.
Interface
The Samsung M8800 Pixon runs on the TouchWiz interface, which you find as a common characteristic in most of the Samsung touchphones. The interface looks colorful, quick, responsive and nicely thumbable. The homescreen is customizable as per the user needs and the widgets present provides improved user-friendliness and a lot wider customization. Some of the widgets present are the calendar, calculator and the world clock. All the widgets are present on a bar on the left side which you can hide or reveal using the small arrow on the upper left corner of the phone.
One feature of the interface that worths a mention is its multitasking capability. The interface allows the java applications to be minimized and run on the background similar to the Sony Ericcson’s non-smartphones. Apart from these, the UI does not allow any customization. However, you can change the font and rearrange the standby screen. The phonebook looks impressive with a capacity to store up to 2000 contacts with room for various fields for each contact. You can store up to 5 numbers, 4 e-mail addresses and a URL for each contact. Contacts can be searched by using first name or last name.
The phone allows three types of inputting modes for texting. One is the standard 12-key keypad and the second one is the QWERTY on-screen keypad and the third one is the handwriting recognition. But, however the messaging looks quite simple and easy with the on-screen QWERTY keyboard. The Web browser that comes with the phone is a good one that loads pages very fast without any noticeable lags.
Camera and Multimedia
The 8 Mega Pixel autofocus Camera with LED flash is capable of taking pictures with a resolution of 3264×2448 pixels. It has some nice and interesting built-in features such as geotagging, wide dynamic range option, viewfinder gridlines and the anti-shake digital image stabilization. The interface of the camera is very impressive with nice touch sensitiveness and good speed. If the automatic preview mode is switched off, the shot to shot time is very less and looks exceptional.
Coming to the image quality, the images produced by the camera have real colors, good contrast levels and saturation. However, the Pixon falls behind other 8 Mega Pixel cameras. The pictures have somewhat low level of detail and medium noise levels.
The video recording capabilities of the phone is excellent and it is one among the first devices to feature WVGA recording at 30 frames per second. The first handset which featured WVGA was far from being impressive. The Pixon also allows slow motion videos to be captured with QVGA resolution at 120 frames per second.
The Pixon features a nice music player that cooperates well with the TouchWiz interface. It has better looks, but the functionality remains the same when compared to other Samsung touchphones. There are a number of sound effects available such as the surround, the dynamic sound and the preset equalizers. The noteworthy feature of the music player is it allows touch-performed forwarding and rewinding. The audio quality of the handset is quite good with distortion levels under balance and good dynamic range and controlled noise levels. The phone also features a FM radio that supports RDS.
The video player is one of the appealing features of the handset. It supports all types of format files including the Divx/Xvid files. The video player has a cool looking interface that plays video files in full screen landscape mode and you can also fast-forward or rewind videos.
Performance
The call quality of the phone is impressive with audible voices heard at both the ends of the line. The loudspeaker also produces good sound and the loudness just hits the right spot. The browser, and the multimedia features work out very well with the phone.
The Samsung rates the 1500 mAh Li-ion battery at 290 hours standby and 3 hours and 8 minutes of talk time. Overall the Pixon’s performance is up to the mark in terms of Multimedia features and calls quality.