Samsung i8510 innov8

...phone on the move! How Samsung could have messed this up with the Tocco or the Omnia is beyond me, but those phones have problems that I have reflected upon in reviews I have previously written, so let’s stick with what makes this phone so bad ass.

The phone feels metallic and sturdy in the hand, as well as feeling slightly weighty, making this a phone which I like very much. I dislike phones that feel like they were molded out of ...
...PC. If you have the Samsung PC Studio installed, you can select that option on the phone to synchronise it to the program on the PC, and have it automatically transfer over any updates made using PC Studio. There are the Image and Media Transfer modes where the phone quickly shows all pictures and videos taken with the phone in Windows Explorer, allowing for you to quickly copy over to your computer. Finally there is the Mass Storage mode, which ... more

This phone is awesome. There you go, this review should only be those four words and that’s it. I thoroughly enjoy using this phone because it has been a symbol of reliability for me, providing me with swift access through the phone’s menu and crisp audio clarity through the earpiece. Now, this is what I am talking about. A mobile phone that works how a mobile phone should do, being reliable and functional like a home phone on the move! How Samsung could have messed this up with the Tocco or the Omnia is beyond me, but those phones have problems that I have reflected upon in reviews I have previously written, so let’s stick with what makes this phone so bad ass.

The phone feels metallic and sturdy in the hand, as well as feeling slightly weighty, making this a phone which I like very much. I dislike phones that feel like they were molded out of plastic used to make carrier bags and then shaped together into objects that feel as if they would implode with even the slightest clinch of a hand. My version of the phone is the 8GB variety that gives me 8GB of memory to play with without the need to insert a memory card. There was a 16GB version, but that was more expensive and I could always expand this phone with a memory card if I needed to. The battery cover is a metal plate which also serves as the antenna when it is pressed up against a conductive metal prong inside the phone. That alone was one of the major selling points for me, a metal plate that serves more than 1 function on this phone. Add to that the fact that it increases the likelihood of it being bulletproof also increased my desire for this phone. I know it makes little sense, but most guys I know enjoy practical all-in-one things, be they discreet or obvious. Imagine this: you could have a car, OR, you could have a car with SatNav onboard for a little bit extra. Most would go for the SatNav, obviously. A great thing about using the entire metal back plate as an antenna is that the signal strength is very good, it can maintain an average signal strength when other phones just limp away and flop underneath this phone’s antenna range, cowering from how brilliantly it has outperformed them.

This is a slide phone so it doesn’t have any of the touch screen nonsense that most new phones love to advertise about, and it supports up to 16GB SDHC memory in a single card via the convenient microSD slot to the right side of the phone under a dust flap. The keypad is flat so those with long fingernails who love keypads with large bumps in them will not like using this phone, but I find it easy to use, and texting and dialling with it a cinch. This phone uses the Symbian S60 operating system, which is same as the one being used for the Nokia N series of phones. That is a smart choice because it is a fast, reliable operating system that has many features for it. What features you ask? How about support for Zip files, Office document compatibility, easy access to WiFi and therefore internet? Good stuff.

The feel of the interface is simple yet stylish in a modernist type of way. It is a theme that can be changed, but I prefer to keep this theme as it is the main one and is my favourite of the lot, with its blacks and cool cyan blues encompassing the screen and embracing our visual perceptors as they bound about the screen, looking at the semiotic white icons of the main menu. The front screen has a convenient widget repository on the left hand side, which grants quick access to various popular phone options such as the FM Radio, Bluetooth and WiFi. It’s different from the widget system used for the Tocco or the Omnia, but very effective since it is there and accessed with the directional keys with ease.

Plugging this phone into your computer via USB is a hassle free experience that just makes transfer of data extremely easy. The speed of the transfer is very fast over USB 2, and the phone actually charges when it is plugged into the USB port. When it is plugged in, it gives you a few options to connect the phone to the PC. If you have the Samsung PC Studio installed, you can select that option on the phone to synchronise it to the program on the PC, and have it automatically transfer over any updates made using PC Studio. There are the Image and Media Transfer modes where the phone quickly shows all pictures and videos taken with the phone in Windows Explorer, allowing for you to quickly copy over to your computer. Finally there is the Mass Storage mode, which gives access to the phone’s massive internal memory as well as the microSD card inserted into the phone as if they were plugged in via a memory card reader. This is my favourite mode since I can access all the vast amounts of storage space and transfer stuff off and onto them.

This phone has a beautiful 2.8” colour screen, which takes your photos or any other picture, and renders them with intense clarity. The sharpness of any image is maintained whether the image is zoomed out of or zoomed in, the screen is that good. You do not get the pixellated jagged death image rendering you would get on other phones. The contrast of the colours is exceptional with no colour bleeding, and the videos play on the device without any image distortion. Response time of the screen, as a result, is very fast. It’s not that great for surfing the internet because websites are large and this screen will require scrolling around a bit, but it works if you just want to quickly check something online.

The sound quality is of equal excellence to the screen. The earpiece plays back sound crystal clear and allows you to hear what the person at the other end is warbling about. What improves the sound to even greater depths are the built-in stereo speakers that play audio back at a quality I have never experienced before on any phone, not even a Nokia N96. This is accomplished by the Samsungs DNSe 2.0 dedicated sound chip that makes sounds a little bit better, sort of like a dry cleaner taking audio and washing off all of the crap from it before returning it to you. The sound chip supports Dolby 5.1 Surround sound, so you know this would kick your ass when it is playing at full force. Honestly, do you get those annoying youths on public transport playing back loud music from their pathetic £30 mobile phones because they think they are hardcore? If you are fed up and want to fight back (and preferably, you would have a few dozen mates with you who are hardcore tough nuts), then unleash your favourite prog-rock record from this phone and decimate their limp-wristed decibel trickling phones with your handheld wailing behemoth. That’ll show them! To make this more amazing than it already is, it comes with a standard 3.5mm jack port on the phone for plugging your favourite earphones into. You can also plug the handsfree kit in here as well, so that just begs the question: why do handsfree kits for other phones use proprietary ports? They are just inconvenient and forces us to buy specific accessories to be used with those ports.

This phone is the first in Europe to have an 8 megapixel camera, and the camera with its 8 megapixel powers can capture images at a very high quality indeed. Granted, the flash is LED and is rather underpowered for use in dark lighting, but when in reasonable lighting the camera just captures some of the crispest, most euphoric images outside of a decent standalone digicam. It even has a set of options similar to a standalone digicam, such as multi-shot or sepia mode. The lens is also protected by a mini auto lens cover that protects the lens when the camera is not in use. That is a major improvement on some other camera phones where they have the lens exposed to the world even when not in use. The camcorder mode is capable of capturing 640 x 480 video, which is close to DVD quality, at 30 frames per second. The quality of the video is actually very good, and I was able to test this when it was snowing and I filmed a few seconds of the snow falling from the sky. I did something similar with the Tocco and it was an artefact ridden pile of donkey shit, whereas with this phone you can see the individual snowflakes falling from the sky. The camcorder has a slow motion option where you can slow it down to 1/4 or 1/8 speed, and this has become a function that I have come to enjoy using because it brings out the 6 year old in me. I have always wanted to film things in slow motion, like someone getting slapped or a water balloon getting smashed against someone in slo-mo. Again, the LED light is weak so filming with it at night is not recommended, but that doesn’t stop it being a good short-clip video recorder. The best thing to top all of this off is that there is a switch to the side of the phone that allows you to conveniently switch between modes instantly, so you can have camera mode, camcorder mode, or playback mode at a flick of a switch. That’s bad ass.

The battery life is actually pretty good for this phone. Many have complained about it only lasting a day, but my phone can last a day with the battery at full power still, so my guess is it is a firmware issue. I have used this phone without recharging it for 3 days straight, so my guess is my phone is probably pretty generous to me, or I don’t have many friends calling me out for a drink.

Despite this world of amazingness that is the Samsung i8510, there are some blistering barnacles stuck onto this hull of awesomeness in the form of a mobile phone.

In the centre of the direction keypad is a touch sensitive nub used for touch sensitive things. Now, I don’t like it very much because when you are using the direction keys to browse the menu, you are inevitably going to swipe over the touch sensitive nub causing the menu highlighter to run around the screen like a newly born filly. It will not rest on the spot you were trying to aim it at, and that just gets excruciatingly annoying after a while. It doesn’t help that pushing down on the nub is the ‘OK’ key, so sometimes when you push down to access a menu icon, it moves to the adjacent icon and then activates that instead. You have to learn to keep your thumb really still when you press it. But one redeeming feature of the nub is that in web access mode whether you have connected via WiFi or GPRS/3G/HSPDA, the nub acts like a mouse and moves the mouse cursor around the screen with ease.

Navigating the menus can be disorientating for those not familiar with using this phone or the Symbian OS. This phone has many features as we have already discussed, but as a result Samsung has had to put a lot of these features behind a single icon. The menu has 12 icons for you to select from, and when you go into any one of them, you get like a further 13 icons to scan through before deciding if the function you are looking for is there or not. This becomes really annoying after a while because not all of the things you would be looking for are where you would usually find them as with your previous phones. For example, I want to access my alarm clock, so usually I would go to the phone’s settings to find the alarm and set that, or there would be an alarm option in a shortcut of the menu. But with this phone, I have to go to the ‘Office’ on the menu, and then in there go to the ‘Clock’ option before I can set the alarm. Any newbie will not find that on their first try; I am not a newbie and even I had trouble finding it as well. You will be looking at menus and sub-menus for a while before finding what you were looking for.

Accessing GPS still requires a monthly subscription, and being the tightwad broke person that I am after purchasing this phone, I avoided it completely and wondered to myself why we have to pay a monthly subscription fee for the simple convenience of GPS. If you buy a SatNav for your car, it works without a monthly subscription for the rest of its functioning life, so why does this phone require us to shell out more money for something that is readily available for standalone devices right off the bat? I have no idea, and it just makes me upset when I think about it.

Video playback is very good, but for some reason it does not support a lot of the video formats that the box claims it can support right out of the box, and I have to convert them into a format that the phone can playback. You’ll have to install this program called DivX Mobile Convertor from the in-box CD onto your computer to convert them before you can put any videos onto your phone. The conversion process takes a rather long time, even on a high spec computer like mine, so if you decide to do it, just grab a beer and watch some footie as it churns away. Video playback also saps away a lot of the battery life. Simply watch a 2 hour film, and half of your phone’s battery will vanish like that *clicks fingers*. That’s just really bad.

The music playback, as mentioned already, is of exceptional quality for a mobile phone, but the phone does suffer from single song playback disorder, where it would play the song that you had selected, and after that song is done, stop completely. Even if you play an mp3 in a folder for an entire album, it would stop after playing that song and will not play the rest of the songs in that folder. For it to play songs in any order of any sort, you have to create a playlist with the songs you want to listen to on there, and then use that to access your tunes. They say a man can never have too many lists, but for me playlists are a form of time wasting because you will have to update your playlists when you get bored of the same songs.

Finally, the phone comes with an accelerometer that can detect whether you are holding it in landscape or portrait mode. This is rather played down by this phone and is implemented discreetly since it does not feature heavily in the phone as it does with the Omnia or iPhone. The tilt mechanism doesn’t affecting anything other than images and web browsing in my experience, and it needs the auto-pivot option enabled. What is really weird is that with auto-pivot on, the phone’s battery life only lasts 2 days, while with it off it lasts 3 days before it requires a charge. Even when not in use it drains the battery away, so that is some ill-thought out through add-on that should have had more research time.

Despite the flaws of the phone, I still adore and enjoy it very much because it has served me well for the past few months. I have gotten used to getting around the flaws now and so using it is second nature to me. It is like your best mate really. He has some annoying things about him, but overall he is a top bloke and knows how to cheer you up. I can wax lyrical on and on about how great this phone is, but only when you have it in your hand will you be able to make up your own mind. Would I recommend it? Certainly, but that’s because I love it so much. 

...less