Introduction, accessories
We could have got used to it that there is some similarity between manufacturers’ handsets from the same price range. Usually the users feel only the positive effects of this, as leaders of the race are taking over great ideas from each other and are trying to offer more services at a lower price than the otherwise good rival handsets. It still has been really strange for me to have practically the same handset in my hands twice in a short period. Here’s the Samsung edition of LG Renoir – or vice versa, it doesn’t really matter.
M8800 Pixon is based on the very same concept as LG’s photo device we’ve been testing recently. Of course it would be an exaggeration to say that the lucky star (LG - Lucky Goldstar) set the Thames on fire, but it’s a fact that Prada, offering the base for Renoir’s menu system, has been launched much earlier than Samsung’s first phone to use the TouchWiz sytem, F480. But the point is that both manufacturers are developing and patching up their own system and now the first touchscreen 8 megapixel phones of both Korean manufacturers have arrived to us at nearly the same time.
The phone has again been provided by XXL GSM, much thanks. The handset is rather small, compared to the phone’s price and features, it is possible that phone manufacturers are starting to realize that transporting air between two continents is not such a great business, the best example for this being Nokia, having a bit megalomaniac boxes, with their 5800. So the package is small, it’s not very elegant, but not undemanding either; besides the handset there is an in-ear headset made of two parts, a 1 GB microSD card and its adapter, a charger, a data cable and the stylus that’s familiar from Omnia – the one that looks like a mascara.
Exterior
As for the physical parameters, the largest difference between Renoir and Samsung is the materials used: while the first one uses medium-quality, shiny plastic, Pixon has a metal back and keypad, and high-quality plastic parts. According to this it weighs 7 grams more, while its size is about the same (121 grams, 107.9 x 54.6 x 13.8 mm). Assembly quality is great, the handset won’t crack at all and there are no joint problems either.
On top of the front there is the speaker, the light sensor and the camera used for video calls, below these we can see the high-quality touchscreen that is easy to read in sunlight as well and has a diagonal of 3.2”, and a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels. On the bottom there is the company logo and below that there are the call handling keys and the back key.
The back – as I have already mentioned it – is made almost completely of metal, its most precious decoration is the autofocus camera with its 8 megapixel image sensor, the lens being a bit of a lump on the otherwise plane surface. Still, Pixon lays flat on the desk, as the hard plastic part on the bottom is at the same level as the lens. The LED flash and the handsfree speaker have a huge Samsung 8.0 label near them.
The sides are made of ribbed plastic, and it doesn’t only look good, but also provide a firm grip for the new top phone of Samsung. On top there is the button used for taking off the back – one should have some really tough nails to use this –, near this we can see the charger/headset connector, while on the bottom there is only the microphone and the wristband’s hook. The volume control keys are on the right, right below them there is a multimedia key and the camera’s shoot button, while on the left there is the microSD slot, a hotkey and the button used for (un)locking the screen.
Widgets, menu system, speed
Pixon of course supports the nowadays very popular widgets – I really cannot understand this popularity –, which can be placed on the standby screen. The offer is huge, but since this screen cannot be scrolled, we shouldn’t use more than five-sic of these, as although we can put more there, they will surely overlap each other. The default set includes the following: analog clock, world clock, date display, network name, music player, image browser, calendar, birthday display, profile chooser, games quicklaunch, help, speed dialer with images, missed calls display, mirror, radio, Google, AccuWeather weather forecast, Bluetooth and calculator quicklaunch, notes and two links regarding messages, the first takes us to the message composer, the other to the inbox. I think it’s not worth discussing these in detail, as their functions are quite self-explanatory, I might mention that the missed calls display is completely automatic, so if we miss a call it pops up immediately. The mirror is a funny thing; it just launches the frontal camera, so we can keep looking at ourselves all day long.
We have seen the menu system in a couple of handsets, so I won’t go into many details. It’s Samsung TouchWiz, it works well, it’s easy to use, it’s well though-out, and it’s a bit slow, compared to an iPhone. The main menu has 12 icons, in the submenus we usually have a list view. The whole thing is easy to control with fingers, as we can access the submenus/options through large virtual buttons, not mentioning that we have scrolling as well. The size of the internal memory is 180 MB, 21 MB of this being used by default, so besides the 1 GB memory card we have nearly 160 MB to store data. We should also mention that using an appropriate cable we can display Pixon’s picture on a TV as well.
Text entry is rather comfortable. The default method is the virtual keyboard, which has two types: if we keep the phone vertically we can see a numeric keypad, and if we rotate it 90 degrees we get to see the QWERTY keyboard you can see below. Although the Samsung guys didn’t use too much design, the keyboard is easy to use, and the vibrating feedback after each keypress also helps. Handwriting recognition has been another positive aspect, as nowadays I have only seen such a thing on Windows Mobile – since there’s no PalmOS – and Pixon is much better than WM. We can write on the display and on the blocks you can see on the picture, recognition is not 100% effective, but it can be used – not mentioning that it recognizes even accented letters.
Software
Let’s see the software set. The Google icon on the main menu to the software giant’s apps list, where we can use web search, we can access mail and Google Maps - this can be launched from games as well, I don’t know if this is intentional or just a bug. The Organizer includes the calendar, notepad, the task list, the world clock and the unit- and currency converter. There is not much to say about these, the calendar is easy to use, but it can store only 300 entries. We can save 100 tasks and notes.
The list of applications is not very long, but we can practically find anything we would need: a nice web browser, an FM radio, a basic image editor, called strangely live pictures, a video editor, Bluetooth, syncing, a stopwatch, a timer, an RSS reader and the sound recorder, which can still record only up to 60 minutes.
Unfortunately I had no time playing the games, so I’ll just only put here a list of them: dice, Brain Challenge, Diamond Twister, Pyramidbloxx, Millionare 3. This last one of course makes use of our knowledge of English and brain cells, while the first one uses the handset’s gyroscope.
Phone calls, data transfer
I had a couple of problems related to phone calls, all of them are due to software bugs. Sending my own number (which I still cannot remember, though I had it for years) is turned off by default on my SIM card, so after a handset arrives the first man I call always knows that I have a new phone, as he cannot see my number. Well, using Pixon everyone had this great feeling, as no matter I have turned on sending my caller ID, it didn’t work. A similar, and similarly serious, bug is that names in the contact list are always displayed in the first name, last name format, although the opposite can be set in the menu – it just won’t work.
By the way, the contact list can store 2000 contacts, there are quite a lot of extra fields. The call log can have a unified view, and we can take a look at dialed/incoming/missed calls separately too. There are no problems with messaging, besides text messages Pixon also supports MMS and email messages as well. We can store 500 SMS messages, while only the internal memory limits multimedia messages and emails – so we can have a lot of them. Voice quality is great, those who I’ve been talking to have even praised the quality of the phone, which is nowadays – unfortunately – a bonus.
The data transfer repertoire is not bad, but there is a four-letter feature missing, that has been present on Renoir: WiFi. The GSM module is quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), for data transfer we can use GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and up to 7.2 Mbps HSDPA. There is of course Blueooth support at version 2.0 and stereo sound transfer (A2DP) is supported as well. There is a built-in GPS receiver, and since there’s no navigation software we can use this in two places: for finding out our position on Google Maps, or for geo-tagging photos.
Multimedia
So the camera’s resolution is 8 megapixels, there is a weak LED to help it work in poor lighting conditions. There are lots of settings and preset modes, we can take image sequences, panorama pictures, mosaic images, we can flash on smile, there is face recognition focus and even “blinking recognition”. There are quite a lot of preset modes (portrait, landscape, night mode, sport, party/indoors, beach/snow, sunset, dawn, autumn colors, fireworks, text, candle light, counterlight (in this case the flash activates in spite of the good lighting conditions, this is what we call fill-in light)), but of course this is not the end of settings. Besides white balance we can set sensitivity (between ISO 100 and ISO 1600), light metering (average, center-weighted, spot), there is a software image stabilizer, increased dynamics range, we can set JPEG compression and contrast, color saturation and sharpness. The highest resolution for images is 3264 x 2448 pixels, while we can record videos at 720 x 480 pixels or 640 x 480 pixels.
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To say the least, image quality is disappointing. I left the software image stabilizer and dynamics range increaser turned off during taking pictures. I don’t know if this has been a good idea, but it’s sure that most of the images are blurred, besides the center part, don’t have many colors, image noise level is high and the dynamics range is extremely low. The flash is rather weak as well, I might only mention macro mode, as that’s really okay, the shortest range is about 5 cm. I think night mode overexposures the picture (last column, bottom picture), but without it the image will have underexposure (last column, top picture). On the whole I can say that after Innov8, the camera of Pixon has been a great disappointment for me.
Not the same category
The music player is not bad, although it misses some things, for example it has no equalizer and it cannot be controlled too much when it’s in the background, as the default Widget can only stop the tracks, so we can seek only when we bring the player to the foreground. The nowadays popular features (filtering by ID3 tags, album cover display) are of course available, and we cannot say anything negative about the most important feature: sound quality. The default headset and the handsfree speaker are both great, we have an FM radio as well, which works fine.
I should also mention the image viewer, which is the non plus ultra of the gyroscope’s use, or at least it wants to be. The point is that all pictures are displayed one after the other on a horizontal list and we can browse them by tilting the phone. Of course this method is far from being as effective as it should be, not mentioning that when on shaky ground (e.g.: mass transit) it makes image viewing nearly impossible. Now that’s innovation.
Battery, summary
The battery has a capacity of 1000 mAh, and it can be changed. I can say the same thing as for all similar handset: it can keep the handset alive for two days at most (depending on use), but if we use lots of multimedia features we will surely have to charge it daily.
Summary: it’s inevitable to compare Pixon with its great rival, Renoir. Well, the difference between the end user prices of the two handsets is about €60 EUR. From Samsung we get – theoretically – a better design and higher quality materials. It would be no use looking for huge differences between the menu systems, both are sluggish sometimes, but they are basically good, easy to use and user friendly. We shouldn’t forget that Pixon has no WiFi, and Renoir has it, not mentioning that Samsung’s phone, even though it has some serious software lacks, takes some really crappy pictures. In spite of this Pixon is not a bad handset at all: the software bugs will hopefully be patched soon, maybe the camera will improve a bit as well, so it might become better. Still, in its current state it doesn’t deserve the recommended award, so let’s stick to this one:
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| Samsung M8800 Pixon |
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
Samsung M8800 Pixon has been provided by XXL GSM. The handset can be purchased at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.
Specifications
| Samsung M8800 Pixon | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM/UMTS | |
| Size | 107.9 x 54.6 x 13.8 mm | |
| Weight | 121 grams | |
| Colors | Black | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 3.2” | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 400 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 2000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | 500 / 300KB | |
| Internal memory | 180 MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD (SDHC-compatible) | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz HSDPA 2100 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | present / 7.2 Mbps | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / present | |
| GPS receiver | present | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | present | |
| Vibra function | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | present / none | |
| Sound recorder | present (max. 60 minutes) | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | present | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Samsung TouchWiz | |
| WAP / HTML browser | present / present | |
| E-mail client | present | |
| Java | present | |
| Games | 5 | |
| Currency converter | present | |
| Extra software | Image editor, video editor, Google applications | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 8 megapixels, autofókuszos, LED flash | |
| Secondary camera | present | |
| Video recording | max. WVGA / VGA (720 x 480 / 640 x 480 pixels) | |
| Music player | present, can run in background | |
| Equalizer | present, no custom presets | |
| FM radio | present, RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 1000 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 290 hours | |
| Talk time | 3 hours 40 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| Touchscreen display, Widgets, gyroscope | ||
