Foreword, accessories

Our regular readers probably know that we had two Samsung prototype handsets for long-term testing recently, so that that You can see, through us, how does the final stage of a phone’s evolution looks like. The second member of this duo is the subject of our current review, the smartphone called i8510, or Innov8 as known to many. We hope that this article is an explanation for why didn’t we post new parts to our blog series – we’ve been just waiting for the handset with software that “can be tested”. This has finally arrived, even though there has been some wait. Many have asked why we needed to switch phones, and I’d like to explain it: Samsung has made some small hardware changes that cannot even be seen by users. I have personally liked the switch, independently of this, as this time I have received a black one, so you can see pictures of this one in this review. I think this is called a good switch.

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He was the protoype..

There are many mysteries related to the Innov8-saga, for example the launch date (at least in our country) and its price. We had infos about both of these previously, the launch has been postponed and the price increased unfortunately. There has been a kind of mass hysteria when the phone appeared in a webshop at the price of €675 EUR. As we’re just at the introduction I would not like to tell everything in advance, but just to calm all of you down I’d like to say that it will be cheaper.

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..and he was the tested one

I would also like to attract attention to the fact that the phone I have is still not the final version, at least a software update is expected, but according to Samsung the device in a state when it can be reviewed. Unfortunately the box, due to the non-final stage, is not as it will be in stores, it’s just a simple white cardboard with the handset inside, along with a charger, a data cable, a stereo headset and a photo tripod/tweezers combo – It’s still not clear to me how this works.

Exterior, materials used

So, Innov8 is a top model, it practically has all the available technologies. The great competitor is evidently Nokia N96, so I will keep comparing these two throughout the review – I would like to apologize to all readers who consider some other phone as the base for comparison.

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Innov8 is large. Okay, it’s not too large, but the thing is that so many features need space, so this is the reason for the 106.5 x 53.9 x 17.2 mm size. The 140 grams weight on the other hands is due to the fact that Samsung used high-quality materials when manufacturing the phone. The back is made of metal, the keypad is made of metal and the other parts are of high-quality plastics, there are a lot of surfaces with lacquer finish. Assembly quality is also good, the slider has a minimal amount of play, no matter closed or open, but the whole thing is still massive, there are no cracks or pops or gaps at joints. The phone speaker is on top of the front cover with the video call camera and the light sensor being right near it. The QVGA display with a diagonal of 2.8” is underneath them and we can’t say anything bad about its quality as it’s great from all points of view, it can be clearly read in sunlight too. It’s of course a TFT panel that is covered with a shiny layer: this won’t disturb us during use and it looks good in my opinion. Under this part we can see the manufacturer’s logo and below we can see the main controls: six buttons and the five-way d-pad which is also an optical touch-mouse. This function comes in handy when browsing of course, as we can control the mouse cursor with it, but we can also use it for getting around in the menu, its vertical and horizontal sensibility can both be set. It would be hard to tell of the part surrounding the front if its metal or plastic with lacquer, but the point is that it provides a feel of quality.

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The back reminds me of Samsung digital cameras, which is no wonder as Innov8 has an 8 megapixel image sensor, which is a big deal to tell the truth. In the top part we can find the flash, the lens and the stereo speakers, accompanied by tons of labels and logos. The middle part (that can be taken off) is made of metal, we have to push the plastic part below it downwards – practical.

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There is nothing on top, in the top left corner we can find the hook for fastening the wristband. Below it the volume control keys are placed, along with the 3.5 mm jack output and the microUSB connector that is protected by a cover. These parts are made of the shiny plastic that doesn’t collect fingerprints that much.

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The bottom part is also empty, on the right there is the camera’s exposure key, the microSD slot and the slider that helps us quickly switch between picture taking/camera/playback modes.

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The sliding mechanism is great, to tell the truth we can expect this from the manufacturer if they have launched so many sliders in the past years. The numeric keypad is on the bottom – this looks just like the one on U900, but it’s of course physically larger. It’s really easy to use and elegant, I have only been annoyed a bit by the multimedia hotkeys M1 and M2 (I never use these), as I have accidentally pressed them sometimes when writing an SMS and then I had to exit the music player/RealPlayer.

These buttons can be configured, just like the two black ones on the front – the difference is that the multimedia keys can launch the programs assigned to them anytime, while the softkeys on the front work as hotkeys only in standby mode. The function of the silver keys on the front cannot be changed; the left one takes us to the menu, the other to the gallery – no matter where we currently are.

Hardware, speed

Innov8 has Symbian Series 90 9.3 running on it, and it of course has Feature Pack 2. This is the same thing from N96 and the two handsets have been launched at the almost same time and this created a quite interesting situation. The Finnish competitor has a 264 MHz ARM9 CPU – the exact type is unknown. The core in Innov8 is clocked at somewhat above 300 MHz and it has hardware 3D acceleration, so theoretically it should be much faster than the competitor. It is sure that there were no problems with it during everyday use, it was fast, without slowdowns experienced at the beta software, and it’s also a fact that due to the complexity of Symbian 9.3 it’s a bit slower than its predecessors. I have tried to benchmark speed with the JBenchmark trio. This is not supported by the handset, according to Samsung, but I’ve thought that it will be a good comparison with N96. Unfortunately the third part didn’t run, so here are the results from the first two:

You can see that Innov8 really strikes at N96, even if not at every test, but it’s generally much faster, it’s almost as fast as N95, which is the fastest smartphone ever, at least in benchmarks.

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Here’s a video of the phone in function. This has been recorded of the prototype, but the thing is that the user interface didn’t become much faster in this model either, so the movie below is still up-to-date:

I didn’t mention memory size yet. Thanks to the 128 MB of RAM we won’t have problems with running programs, but we have quite a lot of space for storing data too, one has to be a fanatic to consider this amount as not enough: 8 or 16 GB, depending on the model. The handset can of course work as a USB Mass Storage device, so we can easily copy anything on it. Expandability is available via microSD card, the slot is SDHC-compatible, so we can use a card of up to 8 GB in size; there will be no problems.

Software

I wouldn’t like to talk much about stuff related to the operating system, as our regular readers are probably already bored with this. Those who are not so experienced should start with our Series 60 review and then have a look at the N96 review. After this you will probably not have many questions about this part. Of course I will answer them if you have, for example in the next paragraph.

There are two themes besides the classic one: Elegance Noire, the one you can see on the screenshots, and the one from the previous video, with some more lively colors, more Samsung-like. There is of course active standby, we can put the icon bar to the left or the top. The menu system is absolutely logical, we have the calculator, the alarm clock, the unit- and currency converter, the notepad, the calendar, the name card digitizer, the file manager, ZIP, the QuickOffice family and the PDF-reader under the Office part, while Applications has fring, DLNA, GPS+ enabling faster GPS location, Yahoo! Go, CNN, GyPSii and two games, Asphalt 4 and FIFA 2008. We have a video of these two, and I would like to attract everyone’s attention to my exceptional performance in the football game.

Google has a dedicated menu item in the main menu, just like the minimap-based web browser known from other Symbian smartphones, which we could say is perfect for what it has been designed for. There are a couple of interesting things under Media too; RealPlayer, the music player, the gallery and the radio are of course the basic stuff but we also have a video editor and a digital photo frame, which is practically a fullscreen slideshow app, it can even play music while showing the images. Oh yeah, the sound recorder is over here too, it can record for up to 1 hour.

Part of the stuff related to data transfer is under Connectivity, like USB setup, synchronization and of course the chat client called IM. There are some things under Tools too, including a calendar, remote printing and a speed dialer.

Phone calls, messaging, data transfer

The arsenal of data transfer protocols is full and complete. The handset has a quad-band GSM module (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), we can use GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HSDPA too for data transfer, the latter has a speed of 7.2 Mbps. There is WiFi too (802.11b/g) and of course Bluetooth v 2.0 that supports A2DP. There’s not much to tell about the built-in GPS, but it’s sure that the software connects to the satellites really fast, but as I had no navigation software (there’s none sold with Innov8) I couldn’t use it for much.

Phone calls were okay, neither did I or the other peer had problems with voice quality and thanks to the stereo speakers Innov8 sounds great in handsfree too. The phonebook is the usual, so it can store an unlimited number of entries and there are lots of extra fields, we can create custom ones too, so we could say that the limit is the sky. We can assign images to the contacts, which are displayed as thumbnails in the phonebook and of course at incoming calls too.

Messaging: flawless. SMS, MMS, e-mail client and so on. I don’t know what I could say about it, the electronic mailer supports attachments and authenticated servers too and there are lots of things here, we can set a signature, automatic message downloading, so this part is really good. It’s sad, however that the call log displays missed/received/dialed calls only separately, there is no common list.

Multimedia (camera and music)

8 megapixels. Autofocus. Uncommon. These four words can describe the camera of the phone, but I will still share some details with you. There is no official information about the image sensor, but according to… rumors Innov8 has an image sensor used in compact digital cameras, which is really something for a phone. This can be seen on the quality of the images, as currently this is the handset that takes the best pictures of all phones. Period. And it’s great fun taking pictures with it, but really. There are a dozen of present modes, we can set lots of thing manually. No shutter speed and aperture size of course, but for example we can set sensitivity between ISO 50 and 1600 which is also from the wow category. We can of course tamper with light metering (spot, center-weighted, matrix), exposure correction (+/- 2 EV in 0.5 steps), smile focusing, face recognition, increased dynamics range, so the usual bullshit. The flash is unfortunately not Xenon, just a simple LED, but the better one so it can be used for night portraits. Here are the test photos:

I think I don’t have to say much after looking at the pictures: outstanding edge sharpness, nice colors, high dynamics range, small noise level are the key aspects of the pictures. There is practically no noise filtering, which can be a positive thing, as anyone can play around with it after taking an image. If you’d like to see additional test images, there are some in the blog post about the phone’s camera.

Innov8 is not bad at video recording either. The highest available resolution is 640 x 480, which is available at 30 fps, but we can record slow-motion videos at 320 x 240, speed can be 1/4 or 1/8, the speed is theoretically 120 fps. Let’s see three test videos, the first was shot during day, the second is slow-motion, the third is a concert video with very low quality sound.

test video 1 | test video 2 | test video 3

The music player is also great, it can filter tracks by all kinds of ID3 tags (artist/album/genre/composer), it supports playlists, displays album covers, we can seek tracks, it runs in the background, it has a 9-ban equalizer which supports custom presets. The handset sounds great in handsfree, as well as via the headset, but this looks quite lame and it’s rather uncomfortable. Fortunately, thanks to the 3.5 mm jack output, we can use any kind of headset – it’s a pity though that the connector is on the side, I think it would be better of on the top or the bottom. There is a radio, it works perfectly, I can’t say much more about it.

The newcomer has no problems with videos either. It supports DivX movies, which look awesome on the relatively large screen. It can play back files optimized for computer playback too, but there are some lags – this is still “just” a phone. It happened with a couple of older movies that they weren’t displayed correctly, this is probably due to some codec problem.

The gallery doesn’t have such a stylish design than the one in N96, I could say it’s a bit plain. Of course it’s still easy to use, which is mostly due to the fact that it’s very fast – I think the PowerVR 3D accelerator chip has some role over here too. I didn’t mention yet, but the handset has a gyroscope, which will be practically used only here, as the basic screens (SMS, etc.) won’t rotate, but pictures will. Unfortunately sensitivity cannot be set, although it would be good, as I think it’s a bit too sensitive. Unfortunately we can zoom in pictures only through the menu, which is not the fastest and most comfortable method of doing it. The digital photo frame application has the playback mode called Photo River, where images float in on small stripes, but there are very small, so I think this is not he best way to view images. But it’s spectacular and multimedia, let’s be happy.

Battery, summary

The battery under the back has a capacity of 1200 mAh. This is larger than the one on N96, but it looks like the CPU consumes more power in the Samsung, as the uptime of Innov8 is the same as the one of the mentioned Finnish handset: it stays online for two days at most, but one and a half is more precise; of course this is valid only if we don’t use it too much. I made lots of calls during the test period, 2-3 hours per day is the minimum, I have also taken pictures, written messages and played some music, but if I didn’t charge it at night I had to keep looking at the blank screen by 9-10 AM the next day, which is quite uncomfortable.

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Summary: it’s obvious to compare Innov8 with Nokia N96. If we do this we will see it quickly that Samsung’s solution is better, it’s much better. The advantages of the Finnish model are the DVB-H receiver and Nokia Maps 2.0, but the Korean phone has the currently best camera, it has a higher quality case, it’s much-much faster and it’s theoretically cheaper. According to semi-official information its gross price will start at around €575 EUR at us, so it will cost about €40 EUR less than its competitor. This is about the price of the car charger and the navigation software that comes with N96 so I could say that the two handsets have the same price. The difference in speed, the high-quality materials used and the unobjectionable camera I think make the Samsung become the winner. Both handsets know everything, that’s a fact. But Innov8 comes with fewer compromises.

Samsung i8510 Innov8

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

The handset has been provided by the national representative of the manufacturer, thanks!

Specifications

Samsung i8510 Innov8
	General
	Technology	GSM, UMTS, HSDPA
	Size	106.5 x 53.9 x 17.2 mm
	Weight	140 grams
	Available colors	Black, grayish
	Display
	Display diagonal	2.8 inches
	Display resolution	240 x 320 pixels
	Display type	TFT
	Number of colors	16.7 million
	Memory
	Phonebook capacity	dynamic
	SMS memory / max. MMS size	dynamic / 300KB
	Internal memory	16 GB
	Memory expandability	microSD (max. 8GB)
	Data transfer
	Frequency bands	850/900/1800/1900 MHz
	GPRS / EDGE	Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps)
	UMTS / HSDPA	present (384 kbps) / present (7.2 Mbps)
	IrDA / Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	WiFi	802.11b/g
	USB	microUSB 2.0
	Push-to-talk / RSS	present / none
	GPS receiver	present
	Basic functions
	Profiles	present
	Vibra function	present
	Built-in handsfree	present
	Voice dialing / voice commands	present / present
	Sound recorder	present (max. 1 hour)
	Alarm clock	present, also when turned off
	Predictive text entry	T9
	Software
	Platform	Symbian 9.3 Series 60 Feature Pack 2
	WAP / HTML browser	present / present
	E-mail client	present (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated)
	Java	present, MIDP 2.0
	Games	FIFA 2008, Asphalt 4
	Currency converter	present
	Extra software	QuickOffice, Adobe PDF, Zip, GyPSii, ShoZu, DLNA, fring, Yahoo! Go
	Multimedia
	Main camera	8 megapixels, autofocus
	Secondary camera	present
	Video recording	VGA @ 30 fps or QVGA @ 120 fps
	Music player	present, can run in background
	Equalizer	present
	FM radio	present
	Battery
	Main battery	1200 mAh Li-Ion
	Standby time	210 hours
	Talk time	8 and a half hours
	Other
	TV-out, gyroscope, optical touch-mouse, slow-motion video recording