At A Glance:

In the box
- Samsung Jet S800
- 3.5mm headphones
- Charger

The Samsung Jet is apparently pretty smart, and fast too. It is armed with an 800 MHz CPU and is touted with extensive multimedia capabilities. No prizes if one was to figure out which phone it is aiming for with the one touch functionality.

Let’s take a look at Samsung’s latest.

Design
The Jet sports a slim, sleek design, with a large resistive AMOLED 3.1 inch screen which spouts a vibrant 16M colours. The Jet is covered with light plastics, and the back is covered with transparent red plastic. The Jet’s dimensions stand at 108 x 53 x 11 mm and the weight comes in at around 110g. It has a nice grip to it and the phone isn’t too wide for our hands to hit the buttons on the sides. And did we mention the phone looks great?

The phone is minimalist, with a diamond shaped home button. The button also brings up the task manager. On either side of the phone is the call button and end /power button. On the left of the phone is the volume rocker and on the left and the top right hand corner is the unlock button. On the lower right is a button which activates the Media gate 3D cube which points to six media features: the photo album, the music player, the video player, the FM radio, the games and applications menu, and the Web browser. There is also a trigger button which activates the camera.

The 5.0 megapixel camera is located on the top right hand side of the phone, while the vanity camera is located in the front. Open up the back and you’ll see microSD slot and the SIM slot, the battery secures the SIM into place. The top of the phone has the microUSB/charger port and the 3.5 jack catering to audiophiles.

Features
The TouchWiz 2.0 is featured here, Samsung’s proprietary system isn’t too different then from the original TouchWiz, and the home screen has a widget bar that allows pull out widgets onto three home screens. There are four tabs on the bottom of the screen, which allows the keypad, phonebook, messages and the menu.

From the widget bar, there are built in apps from Facebook, Youtube, and CNNMobile.com with options to download more. Email wise, there’s support for syncing with the Microsoft exchange server, in addition to Google Mail. The Jet has onboard A-GPS with support from Google Maps, additional features like traffic status of the area and getting directions from Google servers.

For an added sense of security, user can activate the ‘Smart Unlock’ where you can assign an alphabet which you can write onto the locked homescreen to unlock the phone. It’s pretty intuitive, and was better than holding the touchscreen lock button.

The Jet has a built in accelerometer, which works well and is quite accurate about the placement of the phone. We’ve experience no sudden jumps from vertical to horizontal screen. There is also additional motion functions- shaking, double tap and snap gestures. Shaking the phone turns off applications, double tap activate or pauses apps and snapping switches tracks in the music player.

Looking at the menu will display 3x5 grids and three pages worth of icons, much like Google Android devices. There is a myriad of functionality here, from the music player, file explorer, music player and a FM radio. The PIM functions were also sprawled throughout the screens. The phone has 2GB internal memory and the microSD card slot will support up to 16GB.

This brings us to the music player. It is easy to summon up songs and create playlists. The player allows track filtering by author, album and genre. Automatic playlists from recently added, mostly played, etc. are also there. And the player can be minimised into a widget. The video player is decent, the quality isn’t top notch, but it allows DviX and Xvid support.

The virtual keyboard kicks in automatically when the phone is tilted horizontally, but it’s not a QWERTY keyboard. For example, the Y on the keyboard does not follow the standard layout, instead it is shuffled to the bottom. It took away the intuition from typing on a PC’s keyboard, and will take a little getting use to. However, the keyboard tactile sensitivity is there and there weren’t any overly frustrating moments with it.

A new addition is the Samsung Dolphin web browser which allows 5 web pages for surfing, and supports the heavily touted One Touch Zoom- the feature claims to make things easier for users. Hold the screen and you’ll bring out the zoom functionality, scroll upward or downward and you can zoom in and out of webpages. The Zoom also works in the Photo Browser and file viewer to see TXT, PDF and PPT files. While it works well for zooming and in, the Zoom doesn’t truly replace the multitouch of the iPhone. This is due to the extensive functionality of the multitouch as opposed to the single use of the One Touch Zoom.

Another qualm is the lack of office software, which puts a dent on the smartphone claims of the Jet. The TouchWiz 2.0 UI still feels a little wonky, and the accuracy at times is rather frustrating. We would like to point out that the TouchWiz is precise enough that the lack of a stylus doesn’t make us feel too out of place.

Camera
There is a 5.0 megapixel camera onboard with autofocus and LED flash. The quick camera button located in the right spine of the phone activates the camera. Macro shots are clear but when taking a wider angle, items appear a little blurry. The dual LED flash is decent, thought it does tend to saturate an area with lights. As per usual, there are plenty of other added functionalities to tweak white balance, flash, ISO, etc. The Jet captures video too.

Connectivity
There is just about every connectivity option available in the Jet, from quad-band GSM connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0, and Wi-Fi. Data connectivity wise there is GRPS, EDGE and HSDPA 3.2 Mbps.

Games
There are a good amount of games here but most of them are trial versions. The one that did come with the phone is Tumbling Dice and RollerCoaster 3D. RollerCoaster 3D uses the accelerometer to guide a roller coaster around increasingly steep slopes without crashing the carts into pieces. Tumbling dice is useful if you have a pre-existing game which requires dice.

Verdict
The Jet is an affordable device compared to its closest rivals, and it is a multimedia phone with a chock full of features. However, the TouchWiz feels like it needs a little tweak before Samsung gets it right. At RM 1,888 we recommend the phone to heavy multimedia users. But serious users who need work applications might face problems, due to lack of an app store to tweak the TouchWiz.

• Tags : Samsung Jet S8000