Samsung Pixon (M8800)

Features

As an imaging phone, the Pixon has a lot to offer. Besides an 8-megapixel autofocus camera, it comes with a suite of other imaging features commonly found in dedicated point-and-shoot cameras. These include a dual-power LED flash, shake reduction, wide dynamic range capability, face detection, smile shot mode, geotagging and an auto panorama setting.

There's also Face Link which lets you tag faces in a picture and hotlink them to an entry in the phonebook. Once tagged, you can make calls or send text messages to the person directly from the photo.

Aside from the standard crop, transform, level and effects options, there are two additional image-editing functions on the Pixon. The first is Live Pix, a scrapbook tool that lets you doodle on images and playback the actions as a Flash file. The limitation is that you'll have to crop the photo to the size of the screen (240 x 400), instead of using the entire image as your canvas. The second function turns your photo into a Polaroid with a strip of white space below for memos.

The onboard accelerometer lets you scroll photos in the media browser simply by tilting the phone. Pictures are sorted by file names, folders, dominant color in the snaps, time and face tags. It's a pity the sensitivity of the motion sensor cannot be configured, a tiny point that would have made us like this feature even more. Alternatively, you can also browse pictures by "flicking" your finger across the screen.

Besides browsing pictures, the built-in motion sensor also switches the screen between portrait and landscape modes. When you do that, the onscreen alphanumeric keypad morphes into a full QWERTY keyboard for text input. There's also haptic feedback which vibrates when you punch the keys.

As for videos, the Pixon records motion images with a maximum resolution of 720 x 480 pixels at 30fps. If you lower the resolution to QVGA, you can shoot at a faster frame rate of 120fps, typically used for slow-motion effects. File formats that are supported include MPEG-4, WMV, DivX and XviD.

On the user interface, the Pixon is based on TouchWiz which was first seen on the F480 and subsequently as a skin on the Windows Mobile-based Omnia. Widgets are docked onto a column on the left and can be dragged and dropped onto the screen. Previously, the numbers and types of widgets were predetermined and that limited the usefulness of the software. Things have improved greatly since the F480 days. The Pixon now has 21 widgets out-of-the-box, including weather apps, calendar, photo browser, music player and basic PIM functions.

The only limitation with this interface is the size of the screen. Each widget takes up quite a bit of space and don't fit together like a jigsaw, so you'd run out of screen estate very fast if you have more than a couple of apps on the display. Samsung has already addressed this issue with an upgraded TouchWiz that enables scrolling on the Home screen on the Ultra Touch model that it recently announced at the Mobile World Congress. LG, too, has enabled that on its Renoir. But, unfortunately, Samsung currently doesn't have any plans to have a software upgrade for the Pixon to enable this feature.

Samsung has also managed to integrate the scrolling in the entire software, including the menu lists, Web browser, contacts and photo browser. Like the Renoir, scrolling on the Pixon felt a little finicky and less polished than the iPhone, but it was definitely usable.

The Pixon is a quad-band GSM handset with Bluetooth, GPS with A-GPS and TV-out connectivity. It has 200MB of onboard memory and is bundled with an 8GB microSD card slot for added capacity. However, it lacks a built-in 3.5mm audio jack for third-party headsets and Wi-Fi connectivity, which for some people could be deal-breakers. Samsung's answers to these shortcomings are a standard headset fitted with a 3.5mm port extension and HSDPA.

We would also have rooted for a multitasking manager on the Pixon so that we could switch between apps more easily. Besides the usual fare of applications like Web browser, FM radio, video editor, voice recorder, the Pixon is preinstalled with Google Search, Mail and Maps.

Tags: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Camera Phone, Imaging, Camera, touch screen

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