Samsung's second handset with an 8 megapixel camera has been announced in London. The phone is the direct competitor of LG KC910 Renoir, but besides its similar pricing there are some differences in features, for example the lack of a GPS receiver and WLAN support. The second largest handset manufacturer in the world doesn't hide the fact that they want to take the first place from Nokia and so they make use of the Finnish manufacturer's slow reactions. Three of the five largest manufacturers, Sony Ericsson, LG and Samsung have their first 8 megapixel phones very close to launch, while Nokia didn't even announce a similar one yet and they are lagging behing in touchscreen devices. The recently announced Samsung M8800 doesn't have an expandable operating system, but, just like Samsung F480, has the company's own widget-based interface, but this time it's more advanced, faster and more customizable. The 3.2" touchscreen still has a resolution of only 240 x 400 pixels where DivX and H.264 videos can be easily displayed fullscreen, thanks to the gravity sensor, by rotating the phone. Text input is much more advanced too, as besides T9, based on standard virtual keys, there is a full QWERTY keyboard and handwriting-recognition too.
Hirdetés
The new model has features like the phonebook for 2000 contacts, memory for 500 SMS messages and the e-mail client that supports mails of up to 5 MB in size and besides filtering mail it can also display HTML messages, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe PDF attachments. There is no reason to complain about music either, as besides the advanced music player there is a stereo RDS FM radio too. The greatest new feature of Samsung M8800 is the Java engine that can run many applications at the same time (previously available only in Sony Ericsson phones) and Google integration which provides full access to Gmail and Google Maps, this latter one using information from base stations in order to locate the handset on the map. The NetFront 3.5 browser, besides intelligently reformatting pages, can run JavaScript and can display preview pictures. The biggest hit is still the 8 megapixel camera that can record 720 x 480 or 640 x 480 pixels large videos at 30 fps or 320 x 240 videos at 120 fps. When taking picture or recording videos geotagging is also done with the help of cell information and such functions are available like ISO 1600 sensitivity, image stabilizer (ASR) or extended (wide) dynamics range (WDR). The first tests, however, are an evident sign of the handset's camera being much behind the performance of INNOV8's that is as good as a compact digital camera. The HSDPA-capable, 107.9 x 54.6 x14.9 mm large Samsung M8800, weighing 110 grams, is expected to become availabel on November 10 at an estimated price of €550 EUR.
Translated by Szaszati
