By Damian Koh
16/10/2008
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephones/0,39051199,43821131p,00.htm

The Innov8 marks the culmination of what Samsung wanted to achieve with the Symbian S60 platform, once the turf and playground of Finland-based Nokia. Even though the Innov8 isn't the first S60 handset from the Korean phone-maker (there were a few others just before it), in terms of product positioning, we feel this is the one that's headed in the right direction and which could give Nokia's Nseries some serious competition.

Design

Like most recent Samsung handsets, the Innov8 has a very solid feel to it, thanks to a right mix of plastic and metal (Duralumin) for the chassis. In the hand, the phone delivers a robust experience compared to the 8GB Nokia N95. There's one little nitpick. Although the choice of black adds a classy feel to the handset, its glossy front tends to pick up fingerprints easily.

Moving down from the 2.8-inch QVGA display, a cluster of buttons controls most of the phone's functions. When you slide it open, there's a second pair of shortcut buttons above the standard numeric keypad. The upside to this 3-by-5 layout is that it addresses one of the biggest problems of slider handsets where users' thumbs tend to hit the lower edge of the top slab.

The numerous shortcut keys and onscreen Active Standby bar (access to six shortcuts) also reduce the need to dive into most of the phone's menus after the initial setup, which will eventually work in the users' favor once they remember where each shortcut brings them. Although the D-pad and silver keys on the navigation cluster are not backlit, they are large enough such that it didn't affect the use of the phone even in pitch-black surroundings.

Like the Omnia, the Innov8 has an optical joystick. This can be turned off in the settings. However, instead of a mouse pointer, it replaces pressing a directional button on a regular D-pad with a swiping motion. The joystick turns into a mouse pointer in the Web browser and that's where it truly shines. Otherwise, the conventional method of clicking on the D-pad is probably still the best way to scroll the menus. Elsewhere on the sides of the phone, there's a three-stop switch for toggling between various shooting modes, camera shutter, microSD expansion card slot (supports up to 16GB microSDHC media), volume rocker, a 3.5mm audio jack, and micro-USB port for connection both to the PC and charger.

In line with the NV-series of digital cameras, the Innov8 has a blue ring on the circumference of its camera module. On the same side of the phone are the stereo speakers and LED flash. The only oddball when using the camera is the position of the volume rocker which doubles as a zoom lever. At its current position, which is on the opposite side of the shutter, we found it a little awkward to reach.

Features

The Symbian S60 platform has been Nokia's playground for some time now, but Samsung is stepping up to the game with recent S60 devices like the G810 and the Innov8. In a nutshell, it's still the core S60 architecture we are looking at, although Samsung did throw in cosmetic changes to the software skin and added minor enhancements to the user interface.

The highlight of the Innov8 is obviously its 8-megapixel camera. Typical of an imaging-centric phone these days, there is a barrage of settings available to the user. These include an auto panoramic shooting mode, smile shot option, face and blink detection and geo-tagging capabilities. VGA video capture is at 30 frames per second and there's also a slow-motion QVGA recording mode at 120fps. The camera is accompanied by a built-in LED flash. Unlike Sony Ericsson's implementation for its Cyber-shots where sliding open the lens cover automatically activates the camera, you'll have to unlock the Innov8 and hold down the shutter to jumpstart the shooter. Don't get us wrong, there's nothing wrong with this, but Sony Ericsson's approach is by far more intuitive.

Given that it's one of Samsung's flagship products, and will probably stay so for the rest of the year, the Innov8 comes with a full suite of connectivity features. Besides a side-mounted 3.5mm audio jack, it also has dual-band HSDPA and quad-band GSM cellular radios, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP, DLNA streaming and integrated GPS with support for Assisted-GPS. The NAVFone navigation program is loaded onto the bundled 1GB microSD card and you'll need to manually install the app on the handset. On the other hand, Nokia preinstalls its Maps software for most of its recent handsets. The software license provided is for life and includes turn-by-turn navigation.

The Innov8 comes in 8GB and 16GB flavors, but according to Samsung, it hasn't started selling the higher-capacity model, yet. The onboard memory capacity is indicated above the phone's display, on the left. Our review unit was the 16GB version.

One of the more logical routes Samsung has taken with the Innov8 is its bundle of third-party applications out-of-the-box. The list of programs which came preinstalled on our unit included Fring (for instant message and VoIP), ShoZu (multimedia upload app), Yahoo! Go, GyPSii (location services and social media platform), RoadSync (push email with Microsoft Exchange), video editor, QuickOffice (read-only) and Smart Reader (business card reader). And because the INNOV8 is based on the S60 platform, third-party applications are readily available on the Web.

On the entertainment front, you have an FM radio, the standard S60 music player, Real Player and two full version games--FIFA 08 and Asphalt 4--at your disposal. Games-wise, the full-version approach is a little different from Nokia's demo games on the N-Gage-enabled handsets, though we've seen some of the recent Finnish models bundled with vouchers for users to download the full licensed versions. Most common music formats, including MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, AMR and Real Audio, are supported. The onboard accelerometer, besides automatically rotating the screen when the phone is turned sideways, mutes music playback when you turn the screen facing downward.

If you do a search on the Web, you'd be able to find some rumors about a Widget interface, similar to the ones on the F480 and the Omnia, but without touch capabilities, for the 16GB model. We confirmed this with Samsung and were told that this was never announced or officially released. That's not to say the chaebol won't roll out the feature with a firmware upgrade in the near future.

Performance

One of the things we noticed about the Innov8 was that it felt a little sluggish. There were occasions of slowdowns, especially right after we transferred music and video into the phone's mass memory. The good thing was there wasn't any discernible impact on the performance after we uploaded over 10GB of data into the mass memory. We tested video performance with our DivX video test file and it played back smoothly without any jerkiness or dropped frames.

Occasional sluggish feedback wasn't the only issue. We encountered one too many system hangs and the software didn't feel very stable on our review set, which is not typical for the S60 devices we've tested so far. To be fair, Nokia had the same problems when it first came out with S60 Nseries devices, but it subsequently addressed those issues with firmware upgrades. So we are hoping Samsung will look into this, too. According to the literature, the Innov8 uses a TI OMAP 2430 330MHz processor with 128MB RAM and 256MB ROM.

The battery is rated for 7.5 hours of talktime and slightly over 13 days on standby. Based on our typical usage pattern, the battery managed to see us through two days. Audio quality was good without any muffling and the loudspeaker was audible enough to be heard in an outdoor environment. The onboard ambient light sensor adjusts screen brightness automatically, although this can be switched to a manual setting, too.

One of the biggest questions on everyone's mind is how the Innov8 fares when compared with a dedicated digital camera. Our take? It won't replace a digicam; it's too far from that, either, if image quality was any indication. Our test shots displayed good color reproduction and retained good levels of detail in the shadow areas. The only time it really faltered was under dim lighting conditions, which is pretty much the problem every camera-phone faces. As for the onboard LED flash, we like the resulting natural-looking images as the light wasn't too harsh on our subjects. We will be comparing the Innov8 with the Sony Ericsson C905 Cyber-shot when the latter launches, to give a better perspective of how the 8-megapixel shooters perform side by side.

Sensitivity settings can be manually adjusted from ISO 50 all the way to ISO 1,600 on the INNOV8. The latter turned out to be useless as the colors and image artifacts were all thrown off the chart. Noise levels were acceptable up to ISO 400. Shutter lag measured at 0.2 second, and the camera managed to lock its focus at under 2 seconds in most situations, which is above average for a camera-phone.

Conclusion

There are a lot of things we like about the Innov8 and we think it's probably the Korean chaebol's best attempt so far at the S60 platform. If anything, the Innov8 would be Samsung's best shot at Nokia's S60 pie. That said, we felt that the Innov8 isn't revolutionary enough largely because we have come to accept the kind of feature set it offers as a norm for high-end flagship devices. No doubt, the Innov8 is an important product in Samsung's portfolio, but it is how the company carries on from here, both in terms of hardware and software, that makes it all the more interesting.

The Innov8 retails at S$1,098, which is a little more affordable than the S$1,258 Nokia N96, the Finnish company's latest flagship product.