Samsung M8800 Pixon review

The Samsung M8800 Pixon is a camera phone with a difference. It packs in a whopping 8-megapixels, which is pretty damn impressive by anyone's standards – even Apple's.

Granted there is now a few 8-megapixel monsters doing the rounds (the INNOV8, LG Renoir and the Sony Ericsson C905) but it is still quite a big deal all the same. But, more often than not, when there's a camera of this magnitude in a device a lot of the other 'core' functions of the device are neglected.

So, can Samsung do right with the camera and right with the phone? Well, there's only one way to find out – read on for our thoughts on the Samsung M8800 Pixon.

The Pixon's full frontal 3.2 inch touch screen is 240 pixels wide and 400 pixels high and is a dream of clarity and sharpness. It responds really nicely to finger taps and dragging too, which isn’t something we can always say for touchscreens.

You get a funny little extending stylus that attaches to the phone by a lanyard. We never found the need to use it, which is fortunate really, since it looks rather silly dangling off the phone and is better left at home.

This is a well specified mobile. There’s no Wi-Fi which is a notable absence and may irritate some people. But there is HSDPA to 7.2Mbps, GPS, an accelerometer, 200MB of built in memory and a microSD card slot for adding more.

Essentially you can think of the Pixon as an updated and upgraded incarnation of the popular Samsung Tocco. The Pixon uses a very similar interface which we liked then and still like now.

Of particular note in this respect is the use of widgets. These are little applets you can drop onto the main screen. You pull them off a sidebar that pops out when you tap an arrow on the left edge of the screen.

There is a widget you can use to quickly set an alarm, one to access the phone’s FM radio, one for managing music, one that takes you quickly to your favourite contacts and plenty more. Some even go online so there is one that gets a weather forecast, and a Google search bar for example. If you get tired of a widget, you can just drag it back onto the sidebar. Simple, but effective.

This is a nice handset to pocket. It is, in fact, the slimmest of the e-megapixelers though by a hair’s breadth so this is not, in itself, a reason to buy. The build is tidy, and there are just three under screen buttons, Call, End and a little round back button. There is a hold button on the left edge which is imperative for disabling the touch screen. And we like the left side mounted switcher key which brings onto screen a grid of 6 shortcuts to often used applications and the main menu.

So, the camera, then. The lens is on the back of the casing and there is a proper lens cover that comes away from the lens with a satisfying click when you start the camera software running.

Camera features include a dual power LED flash that helps out rather more than usual with indoor low light photographs. Shake reduction, face detection and smile detection help you take photos of happy smiling people without any fuzzing or blurring. You can geotag photos thanks to the GPS too.

And then there is Face Link. This lets you tag people in a photo and then, at a later date, search for them by name. Hmmm. You can also sort photos by the time they were taken and their predominant colour. Not sure what need that last option is meant to cater for, to be honest.

What we do like a lot is the panorama assist mode. Samsung had this in the i8510 and it is great to see it back. Basically you choose panorama mode, then take your first shot and sweep the camera slowly through the arc you want in your panorama. It takes the photos it needs to complete the shot automatically. As long as you hold the camera on a steady horizontal plane, the results are pretty good.

One feature we aren’t too sure about is the ‘tilt and flip’ photo viewer. The accelerometer comes into play here, allowing you to slightly tilt the phone in your hand to move through a slideshow. It works, but we aren’t sure what it actually adds over sweeping images with a finger to run through them.

Notwithstanding the point we made at the outset about image quality of a phone vs a dedicated digital camera, what you get here is quite good. On testing the macro mode proved particularly impressive.

We love the easy user interface of the Pixon, and we quit like the widgets too. Shame about the missing Wi-Fi, though.