Samsung Jet S8000 smartphone review
The launch of the new Samsung Jet S8000 saw the phone paraded as ‘Smarter than Smartphone’, laying the gauntlet down to all the high-falutin’ handsets on the market at the moment.
With an 800MHz processor, it’s certainly fast, but will the extra grunt under the hood actually translate to a decent experience on the phone?
- Watch our video of the Samsung Jet
- Peruse our hands-on gallery with the Jet
The first thing to note about the Samsung Jet is the fact it’s a fairly dinky model, with dimensions of just 108.9 x 53.5 x 11.9 mm, and a 3.1-inch AMOLED screen. This basically means that not only do you get jaw-dropping visuals on a the phone, it fits snugly in the hand, and the prismic red and black plastic cover might feel a little bit cheap but looks top dollar.
The Jet packs a decent interface too, with a new 3D spinning cube to play with, similarly to the LG Arena giving you access to all manner of multimedia applications such as games, video, music and internet (plus it’s loads of fun to while away the time spinning the cube).
The cube is accessed by pressing a dedicated button on the side of the device, which can also be held down for a couple of seconds to open ‘Motion gate’. This function allows you to pre-define a couple of applications that can be opened simply by flicking the wrist left and right, although this seems like more of a gimmick as it takes time to both register the movement and open up the Motion Gate itself.
The home screen features three customisable displays, where you can drop widgets from the side bar to give a personal experience and let you have different options for different lifestyles, with each homes screen accessed simply by swiping left and right.
Samsung has made quite the show of the new and upgraded internet browser on the phone, building on the effort that comes bundled with its proprietary TouchWiz OS. Some nice touches, such as being able to search Google via the address bar and open up multiple web pages in the same browser, add a level of power to the internet experience that wouldn’t be possible without the improved processor.
But the small 3.1-inch screen, while adequate for a great many sites, isn’t good for full HTML, and sadly doesn’t include the smart fit technology the iPhone 3GS or HTC’s range gives us for easier reading of text.
As you can imagine, the media offerings on the phone are pretty darn good on the WVGA display, meaning that video looks sublime, also thanks to OLED technology.
We also adored the fact that the phone comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack built in, meaning we could watch and listen to all manner of music and film without having to fumble around with an adaptor each time. However, the screen size is a little small for watching full length videos, although packing a few music vids on the built-in 2GB memory is a great way to enjoy all the fruits of YouTube.
Music is also well-catered for on the Jet, as you can not only play tunes with album art on the fairly basic music player, but also use the Find Music function to record sections of a track and query the database to find out what it is. We found this function worked best on the FM radio, as you could find out which track was playing when the DJ decided not to tell you. There’s even a link to the Samsung shop to let you download the tunes yourself, although the price is a hefty £3 per track.
The camera on the Jet is top drawer as well, with the 5MP effort flanked by a dual flash LED. What this means is while colours don’t look any more vibrant (the method of producing white LEDs means they are very poor at reproducing a full colour gamut compared to the likes of Xenon) the lighting isn’t so harsh, and the shadows are reduced somewhat, which is a good thing obviously.
Video recording is better than that on the iPhone 3GS in our opinion, which is impressive given that both boast 30fps VGA recording, so it’s certainly good enough for filming your mate eating a Frisbee or something else humourous you want to post to the web.
Links: Samsung Mobile
Full published article at: http://www.t3.com/reviews/phones/smartphones/samsung-jet-s8000-smartphone-review?cid=OTC-RSS&attr=T3-Reviews-RSS
