July 29th 2009 04:07 pm
Samsung Jet S8000 smarter than a smartphone review
Samsung Jet
There is a new Jet in town. Featuring a high power Jet engine @ processor at 800MHz, this Jet is a new touchscreen phone from Samsung. It was claimed to be smarter than a smartphone. While I do agree that it was smarter than LG Arena. But smarter than a smartphone? Well, lets take a ride on this Jet.
On the first look, this phone features a 800×480 resolution at 3.1 inch AMOLED touchscreen. It is an improvement over some other phones which still uses the old TFT LCD technology. AMOLED’s advantage over TFT is its colour reproduction where it can produce sharper and more vivid colours. However, under direct sun light, I could barely read the menu from the screen. This is a common problem which existed over a vast range of other touchscreen phones.
Samsung Jet with new Touchwiz 2.0
The phone features a resistive type touchscreen technology. It’s not as responsive as a capacitive ones like the iPhone and LG Arena. But Samsung did much to the touchscreen sensitivity and I found it to be on par with iPhone’s capacitive touchscreen.
Upon booting up the Samsung Jet, you’ll be greeted with Touchwiz 2.0. A new version of Samsung’s touch interface. The left side of the screen features a widget bar, which reminds me of Windows Vista. YouTube, weather forecast, shortcut to Google, music player, are just some of the available widgets there. Scrolling down the bar will reveal more of the widgets.
Tapping on the menu icon on the lower right brings up the, erm… menu of course. It consists of three pages. Flipping to the next page is as easy as sliding the screen to the left or right. Much like a design copied over iPhone’s one.
Typing a text on a touchscreen phone is a serious concern for me as there were no tactile feedback using the virtual keys. Samsung Jet offers multitap input, handwriting recognition and QWERTY virtual keyboard in landscape mode. I’ll rule out the handwriting recognition as it couldn’t effectively recognize my handwriting accurately. The multitap was functional but slow. It will never matched with a true multitap keys. It was slow but it get the job done in the end. My favourite is the QWERTY virtual keyboard. With a smaller screen as compared to iPhone, the keys were smaller. I would have thought that mispressing keys is as prone as LG Arena QWERTY keyboard, but I was wrong. I find the accuracy of pressing the desired key is near to 99%. But in the end, using a QWERTY keyboard covered more than half of the screen, typing a long SMS or email wont be such a good experience as you only get viewable lines of less than 5.
Holding the cube button on the lower middle brings out the task manager. It lists out the opened applications and you can switch between applications from this menu. The design of this cube button is misleading as I initially thought that it brings out the cube shortcut interface.
The cube interface which is called Media Gate 3D user interface, is reminiscent “” buy online of the S class UI from LG Arena. Instead of offering 4 sides only, Samsung Jet’s cube interface can be accessed through all 6 sides of the cube. The 6 sides of the cube offer shortcut to multimedia prowess of Samsung Jet. Such as the movie player, music player and the Dolphin web browser. To access the Media Gate interface, you’ll need to press the little button on the side situated just on top of the camera button. A little bit odd design as both the Media Gate button and the camera button look more like a volume controller.
The back of Samsung Jet
As far as multimedia capability is concern, Samsung Jet is no slouch. It features 5MP camera which is the standard for mid-high end phones. The 800MHz makes it fast and responsive when navigating over menus and widgets. However, Media Gate 3D cube is not as responsive which is a letdown considering when this phone is powered by a 800MHz processor. Capturing video can be done at a maximum resolution of 720×480 at 30FPS in MP4 format. >> next page
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13 Comments »
Easy to use cellphone on 30 Jul 2009 at 10:55 am #
It looks pretty cool and I like the efficient use of space with menus on the side and bottom. I must say this looks like a pretty good iphone competitor.
Halim on 09 Aug 2009 at 12:24 am #
“Capturing video can be done at a maximum resolution of 720×480 at 30FPS in MP4 format.It’s decent enough as this is the 720p HD format.”
720×480 is not 720p HD it’s 480p.
admin on 11 Aug 2009 at 5:36 am #
Thanks for noting me my mistake there.
Biz on 03 Oct 2009 at 6:49 am #
This phone looks great. I plan to take it, but my concern is divx codec. Does it support all divx files? I had bad experience with divx codecs on previous phones, since I had to convert files.
ingenius on 04 Oct 2009 at 11:14 pm #
I heard that this phone would not ‘hang’. then it is the best compared the others.
Anyone could verify ..?
Jas on 12 Oct 2009 at 1:48 am #
Hi there.(:
I heard that Jet doesn’t have instant messaging, what does it really mean? :O
& is the battery life weak ? How long will it last on normal usage.. ? Like,how long will one bar last? (There are 5 bars right?)
Ohyea, can we add more widgets to the widget bar ?
Sorry to bother.
Much thanks if you’d answer my questions.
admin on 07 Dec 2009 at 1:09 am #
sry for this late reply. Ya, Jet doesn’t have build in instant messaging application. Which kinda disappointed since many phones have it since few years back, reminds me of my sony ericsson w550i
.
as for battery life. from my opinion, is better than average. i get mine to last for 3.5days with sms(10-15sms per day), not more than 15mins call per day, updating weather forecast through wifi, emails and some mp3.
widget yes, u can add more, but keep in mind there is a limit of the allocated memory for that, which is also the memory for installed games and downloads(internet). kinda letdown actually as this memory space is not configurable and it’s kinda small.
admin on 07 Dec 2009 at 1:19 am #
#Biz
ya this phone support divx, but keep in mind of the resolution, it cant play video with higher than 720×480 res.
#ingenius
.
well, this is quite true. i never encountered ur so called “hang”. but i did encountered reboot like few times in a month. but it was ok for me since the boot up is fast compared to other phones out there
Android OS on your Samsung Jet | TechMostW@nted on 01 May 2010 at 2:19 am #
[...] additional applications is only limited to Java mobile platform. But on the other, it was still a great phone and best bang for buck if you’re not a techno geek and you basically looking for great [...]
Cheap Budget phones with wireless(wifi) capability | TechMostW@nted on 05 May 2010 at 4:41 am #
[...] cafes) to enjoy better reception. What I did usually was to stand outside of the premise using my Samsung Jet to Google some information or just to chat with my buddies via MSN/Yahoo. While it does look [...]
Samsung Wave S8500 review, do you really need Samsung Wave? | TechMostW@nted on 16 Jul 2010 at 10:34 am #
[...] there was a Jet, it was speeding too fast and gone out of control and plunges to the sea. It creates Waves strong [...]
gotitleaveit on 21 Jan 2011 at 1:51 pm #
I bought this phone, it is poor! If you put in a word that isn’t in the dictionary (which is a common word) it becomes the first word. The touch screen is absolute rubbish and decides to stop working if you over work it. My one throws tantrums if its cold outside or too hot. The only good thing about it is the wi-fi, oh and the music song finder. Save your money and buy something better!!
admin on 23 Jan 2011 at 10:36 am #
Well, thats why u see http://www.techmostwanted.com/phones/android-os-on-your-samsung-jet/ is badly needed by Jet users
I agree with your comments, the OS is total crap but it comes with above average hardware specs and thats why again, u need android to full utilize the hardware capabilities.