Introduction
Following our photoshoot teaser with the M8910 Pixon12 yesterday we are ready to invite you on a second date with this promising cameraphone. This time we hope to show its other side - the one that doesn't necessarily revolve around the camera functionality.
You've all seen that while the gap between cameraphones and the dedicated digicams seemed huge a couple of years ago, it's already closing in fast. The Samsung M8910 Pixon12 certainly isn't a full-time replacement for a camera enthusiast as it lacks the optical zoom and some customization options but it might just do a pretty good on quite a lot of occasions. And the best camera is the one that you always have on you.
We are sure the both flashes will be temptation for many of you especially when the xenon-featured phones were almost forgotten in the last year. The huge count of megapixels plus the wide-angle lens and tons of camera features are something camera geeks can't and won't miss just like that.
Samsung M8910 Pixon12 lifestyle photos
But we've already showed you how it compares photography-wise to some quite unusual peers. This time around we are all set to showing you there's more to it than just a sharpshooter. Let's see go through the Pixon12 basic specs one more time:
Samsung M8910 Pixon12 at a glance:
- General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100 MHz, HSDPA 7.2Mbps, HSUPA
- Form factor: Touchscreen bar
- Dimensions: 108 x 53 x 13.8 mm, 120g
- Display: 3.1 inch 16M color WVGA AMOLED resistive touchscreen
- Platform: Latest TouchWiz 2.0 UI with Smart unlock
- Memory: 150MB integrated memory, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
- Camera: 12 megapixel auto focus camera with Power LED flash and xenon flash, wide-angle 28mm lens, object tracking auto focus, automatic lens cover, geo-tagging, image stabilization, Smart Auto mode, face detection, Beauty Shot, Smile Shot and D1 video recording at 30 fps with auto focus and face detection
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, TV out
- Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate and turn-to-mute, FM radio with RDS, DivX/XviD video support
- Battery: 1000mAh Li-Ion battery
We only received the Samsung M8910 Pixon12 yesterday but this is our second cover story on it. We're actually working on a full review but that's probably going to be ready no earlier than next week, so in the mean time we though we'd give you some good reading beside all those camera samples yesterday.
Samsung M8910 Pixon12 in our office
A high-end mobile phone is not about one thing only. A high-end device like the Pixon12 should keep you connected (online, texting, talking), it must be easy and fun to use, it should also help you organize your personal life and appointments, and finally, it should be there for you when you want to share your life's most striking moments to friends and family - and be ready to capture them as well.
So this is what an all-in-one mobile is about and we really hope the Pixon12 delivers on as many of those as possible. The notion of the ultimate device is hardly viable anymore as innovation and new features are always around the corner, but if the Pixon12 does deliver on most of those things without huge compromises, then it would be a fine product by our books.
So follow us on the next page for quick tour of the Samsung Pixon12 design and ergonomics.
The Samsung M8910 Pixon12 is yet another touchscreen device and its design is hardly revolutionary - you know, a big screen on the front and a few buttons below. This form factor doesn't really lend itself to much variation anyway. Still, we like the Pixon12 design quite more than the one of the original Pixon. The Samsung M8910 Pixon12 front is quite sleek with black glass framing the display, while the surface around the buttons is made of a matte material that helps keep fingerprints away. The Pixon12 3.1-inch display is a bit bigger than the LG Arena screen, same as the S8000 Jet and a bit smaller than the original Pixon and the Apple iPhone 3GS. With a WVGA resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, the M8910 Pixon12 is quite as well on the forefront of the current mobile phone resolution. The resistive screen of the Samsung Pixon12 is sensitive enough. It reacts to even the slightest touch just as a capacitive screen does, with the added bonus that you can use anything you want to interact with it - stylus, pencil, nails, gloves, etc. There are three hardware buttons below the display - Call and End keys obviously and the center button. Now, the center button does not launch some 3D cube or something, it just opens or closes the main menu. Pressing it a bit longer starts the new task manager introduced with TouchWiz 2.0. On the left side of the phone you get the microSD slot and the hardware Lock (or Hold) key. On the right side are the volume rocker (used for zoom in camera mode), the new small button for switching on or off the camera and the shutter key. All controls are easy to operate in both single and two-handed use scenarios. The top houses the standard microUSB port with a protective cover. The phone charges off the microUSB port - just like most of its recent siblings - and is quite useful as you can leave the charger at home when traveling if you have a computer with you. Even more than that, the lack of 3.5mm audio jack means the microUSB slot is used for the headphones. Luckily the supplied headset is in two pieces and there is a 3.5mm jack on the handsfree part so you can use your own headset. Since this is a brief preview only, we'll present our audio quality findings next week when the full-featured review will be ready. As usual, the 12 megapixel wide camera lens is on the back of the device along with the xenon and Power LED flash. is the camera has an automatic lens cover but there's a protective glass on top of it instead behind it as it was on the Samsung INNOV8. The glass of course is vulnerable to scratches and finger smudges. The back of the Samsung Pixon12 hosts an incredibly handy grip, which makes the phone perfectly stable in the hand while taking images,but add some bulk along the way - much like as with the original Pixon. The lack of stereo speakers on the Pixon12 is a shame as otherwise the device is a very capable portable media player. So besides its size and look the Pixon12 is a pretty handy cameraphone and sits in the hand almost perfectly. And also thanks to the convinient grip, it's great for doubling as a digicam ready for a lot of shooting. Samsung M8910 Pixon12 comes with the latest and coolest implementation of the company proprietary TouchWiz user interface. Supported by a great performance and excellently responsive screen, the UI is probably the highest we have seen a Samsung feature phone go. As has become customary for Samsung recently, the Pixon12 comes with a rearranged homescreen. This time around you get three different screens that you can alternate by swiping your finger to the sides. The currently selected one is indicated by the three thin lines at the top. You can fill up each of those homescreens with as many widgets as you like but unlike the final version of Samsung S8000 Jet, which we also have handy, you get one and the same wallpaper for all screens. Now remember those cool transition effects we shot on video in the Samsung S8000 Jet preview? Well a good portion of the styles available on the pre-release Jet back then are now available to the Pixon12 as well. The ones that lack, have not made it to the production Jet either, so the Pixon12 has all bases covered. Still, whatever has been left of them, they are still more than welcome as they give new life to the user interface, without lagging at all, which is a really nice achievement. It's once again obvious that the Samsung Pixon12 is using hardware, which is at least as powerful as the one on the Samsung Jet. With the Pixon12 the Photo contacts application is no longer accessed directly from the homescreen but we hardly consider this a major loss. The bunch of photos that you can add and latter use as references to your phonebook looks trendy and cool, but its practicality is arguable. Samsung M8910 Pixon12 also comes complete with the Smart unlock feature, previously known as Gesture lock. First featured on Samsung S5600 and Samsung S5230, Smart unlock allows users to simultaneously unlock the phone and open a menu item or an application, or even dial a contact, just by drawing an alphabet letter on the unlock screen. Each alphabet letters from A to Z can be set as a gesture by the user to perform the various actions in question. For instance, you can use it to start apps like the music player, messaging menu, the web browser, Java apps or the dialing keypad. Unfortunately, there's no sign of the 3D cube that Jet has - we believe it was called something along the lines of… 3D Media gate. Well, we actually know it's named that way for sure as we went and checked it specifically, but still we wanted to make a point of that it's a name that hardly sticks to a cube. 3D Media... Cube, we guess, would have made a much better title. But we digress. The Samsung M8910 Pixon12 has all text input methods duly covered with three different options. The first one is the traditional thing - typing on a customary (albeit virtual) 3x4 alphanumeric keypad. Tilting the phone on its side automatically converts that keypad to a full-fledged on-screen QWERTY keyboard. The 3.1" display provides enough space for this layout, especially given that the number keys and symbols are in a separate screen that toggles on and off upon a tap. Typing is really comfortable by touchscreen standards, once again the very sensitive display counting big time. The final option is to rely on handwriting recognition. While very intuitive and precise on most cases, the lack of embedded stylus is almost taking it out as an option. If you like to have your stylus dangling on the side of the phone, it's a whole different story. The music player usually found on Samsung devices has received a slight face-lift before being implemented on the M8910 Pixon12. It sports slightly different icons when browsing your tracks and a new way of displaying the album art in the Now Playing mode. The music player allows filtering tracks by author, album, and genre. Automatic playlists (recently added, most played etc.) are also generated and can subsequently be used as filters. If that doesn't seem enough, you can create your own custom playlists. The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background. The equalizer offers the standard presets like pop, jazz, classic, etc. but it also has some more special options - WOW HD, music clarity and externalization. There is also a virtual 5.1 Dolby enhancement which can only be applied when headphones are plugged in. Continuing our trip down the road, the three different visualizations are a nice touch to the music player and the album browser (quite like the one on Omnia HD) takes after Apple's Cover Flow, something we quite appreciate. In unison with the other recent Samsung handsets, the M8910 Pixon12 has two different picture galleries. They are both optimized for touch operation and are very user-friendly and this time each sports a cool new view mode. The first is an inherent part of the file manager and accessing it is as simple as opening any folder that contains images. It allows sorting your images by date, type, name, and size. The gallery offers grid, list and a nicely looking zig-zag view layouts. The last one is definitely the most fun to use of the three but it is also certainly the least functional as you need to do quite a lot of scrolling in some folders. Going through 12 megapixel images is quite fast with the Pixon12, we're just amazed how quickly it's ticking. We've hardly seen a Samsung handset listing so numerous thumbnails in a folder so fast. Once you open an individual image, you can sweep you fingers across the screen to see the next images without having to return to the image list. Alternating portrait and landscape modes is automatic thanks to the built-in accelerometer. Samsung have also implemented the so-called one-finger zooming, which recently was revisited in the Samsung press materials. It's marketed as a new feature, but it's been around for quite some time already on the original Samsung i900 Omnia. This however is the first time we see it implemented on a feature phone. Zooming is extra simple and takes only a single move of your thumb - you just need to hold it on the screen for a second and then drag up or down for zooming in or out. This method works in both galleries (and the web browser) and at first glance it even seems more convenient than the pinching gesture on the iPhone. The alternative to the picture gallery is the Media browser (as opposed to the Photo browser found in the previous Samsung handsets). It has its dedicated icon in the main menu and is the quickest way of accessing you images. Beside the regular grid view, the Media browser adds another cool view mode which is pretty convenient for flipping tons of images with your finger, while getting a tiny preview of each one of them at the same time. As usual the two galleries also have another Samsung proprietary accelerometer-based feature. It lets you browse pictures in fullscreen landscape mode by simply tilting your phone to its sides. The sensitivity of the tilt scrolling has been improved to a point that it is acceptable and normally usable. It is a great improvement over the rather annoying implementation in previous handsets that we have tested. But still, that feature is among the less practical and most meaningless things we've seen in image gallery ever since it was first introduced on the original Pixon. Samsung M8910 Pixon12 and the Samsung S8000 Jet are the two pioneers of the new WebKit-based Dolfin web browser, which is an in-house developed application. With full Flash support and the new one-finger zooming algorithm it is one of the finest web browsers we have seen so far (especially on a feature phone). The new web browser supports allows up to 5 pages to be open at the same time. Multiple downloads in the background are also supported and there is also a built-in AdBlocker. The one-finger zooming works like a charm too. Of course you can also rely on double tapping a block of text or an image and the handset will automatically zoom in to it. Another double tap and you are back to the previous zoom level. In addition to the Flash and Java support, the new web browser also offers kinetic scrolling and fullscreen view mode. In all fairness we have to admit that the kinetic scrolling is somewhat bumpy and not as smooth as on the iPhone but it still does the job. The world's first commercially available 12 megapixel GSM handset, Samsung M8910 Pixon12, sports a maximum image resolution of 4000 x 3000 pixels. It's an autofocus unit, of course, and there is both xenon and LED flash unit on board. Those give the Pixon12 both the extra light output in extreme darkness and the video light functionality that's otherwise impossible with the xenon flash. You asked and we delivered - we've prepared a quick flash comparison between the Samsung Pixon12 and the Sony Ericsson C905. The photo is taken at a 2-meter distance. Samsung M8910 Pixon12 is the second handset to sport 28mm (in 35mm terms) wide-angle lens after the Nokia N86 8MP. Again, for those of you unfamiliar with the material we will explain that the 28mm lens gives you roughly 20 percent larger angle of view when looking through the viewfinder. Due to the multiple requests, we will do quick comparison between the two cameraphones in the full review that's due next week despite the fact that we don't consider the N86 8MP fit enough for a heads-to-heads. The Pixon12 is pretty well geared when it comes to software features too. The anti-shake digital image stabilization, geotagging and viewfinder gridlines are all here and so are face detection, smile shot and blink detection. The ISO sensitivity can go as high as 1600 but you will hardly end up with any usable photos at that setting. The Pixon12 sports a Smart auto mode, which picks the best scene preset according to the shooting conditions and the subject much like the LG GC900 Viewty Smart (it was called Intelligent shot by LG). Compared to the regular auto mode the Smart auto gives the phone control over many more of the phone settings such as contrast, color balance, saturation, etc. thus tweaking the output (probably favorably) to a far greater extent. Finally, the Samsung M8910 Pixon12 is the first handset to feature tracking touch focus. All you need to do is hold your finger over the subject you want to focus on and watch as the crosshairs follows it on the viewfinder. Once you press the shutter key, it will focus on it and proceed to capture the actual shot. The user interface is about camera interface is just about the same as on the original Samsung Pixon. Nicely touch optimized and surely one of the most comfortable camera interfaces on a touchscreen device so far, it also excels in terms of speed. Furthermore the image saving process is also very quick as a 12MP photo only takes slightly more than a second to be recorded. With the automatic preview turned off, this could lead to some remarkable shot to shot time. We are pretty impressed with the Samsung M8910 Pixon12 image quality. We even had the nerve to make an impromptu shootout between it and the good old Canon 350D DSLR camera. The point-and-shoot A610 was also thrown in the party. You can check it out over here in our yesterday's article. Having spent an extra day with the Pixon12 now, we are able to put it against some more proper competition. Of course a more proper shootout is still planned for our upcoming review but those comparisons should be enough to give you a first impression. Ours seems positive with no major defects visible anywhere (except perhaps the unusually increased noise in the darker parts of the sky) and the well balanced output. Compared to its S8300 UltraTOUCH and i8510 INNOV8 siblings it does look like a winner. And here go some more Pixon12 camera photos for you to enjoy. We also took a couple of shots to test Samsung Pixon12's camera low light performance. Seems pretty good for a cameraphone, right? The video recording of the Samsung M8910 Pixon12 failed to impress us as much as its still image quality. It manages D1 videos at 30 fps but the quality isn't anywhere near the best Samsung have pulled off recently. And we aren't even talking the HD-capable Samsung Omnia HD here. The Samsung Pixon12 isn't even close to the S8300 UltraTOUCH, which is admittedly one of the best in the D1 category. We can pretty much say the VGA@30fps video by Nokia N86 8MP is also better than the Pixon12 results. Now don't get us wrong here - it's not that bad with the videos turning out usable on most occasions, it's just that we were in for a "wow" rather than an "oh" effect. The colors are washed out, and the resolved resolution can hardly be called high (and you can tell the video bitrate is almost 4x lower than the one of S8300 videos). We guess the still camera raised the bar too much for us. Here is a sample video taken with the Samsung M8910 Pixon12 camera so you can see for yourselves whether you like it or not. Samsung are clearly on the hunt for the top all-in-one mobile and the Pixon12 seems a nice step forward. And when you consider it should hit the European market this very month, we can understand the users excitement and the pressure is all on us and our fellow tech journalists to make it clear what the Pixon12 is worth. The steep price (rumored at 639 euro in Spain) puts the Pixon12 in a quite unfavorable position of either ruling all current high-end handsets (Samsung's own inclusive) or fade into oblivion as a mere proof of concept than anything else. The Samsung Pixon12 is not a smartphone such as the Sony Ericsson Satio or even the Omnia HD. Instead it runs the all new TouchWiz 2.0 interface. More beautiful and user-friendly than ever before, the new user interface is pitched by Samsung as "smarter than a smartphone". And they might have a point there - much like the Samsung S8000 Jet, there's some serious hardware in there and the whole device is as fast as you may want. There's full featured multi-tasking as well, along with a GPS navigation software and the spanking new WebKit-based web browser developed by Samsung themselves. We gotta admit, camera or not, the Pixon12 packs quite a punch, but if you are really into expanding your handset capabilities with third-party applications, a non-smartphone won't do it. For everything else, the Samsung Pixon12 and its TouchWiz UI 2.0 is pretty much enough by our books. Now we know we may have stepped over the line here and produced a rather elated preview (much like the one yesterday), but that's partly due to the fact that we really excited by the Pixon12 (something quite rare for a bunch of tech editors that have mobile phones for breakfast and lunch), and also because we tend to leave our nit-picking goggles behind when we're working on such preview articles (those do come up when we do our reviews).Samsung M8910 Pixon12 360-degree view
Design and construction
Size comparison: LG Arena / iPhone 3GS, LG Viewty Smart, Samsung Pixon12, Samsung Jet, Samsung S5230
The display is great
As big a screen as they could fit, beats the LG Arena's by 0.1"
The buttons on the front are large and easy to hit
The right side hosts the volume rocker, camera and shutter keys
The microUSB slot and the battery cover release key * the bottom side
The 12 megapixel monster in the pleasant company of the two flashes * the camera grip
Samsung M8910 Pixon12 held in handShiny new TouchWiz user interface
The Pixon12 comes with the last version of TouchWiz UI
You can unlock the handset by drawing a preset letter on the screenText input options
An alphanumeric keypad is onboard for the traditionalists
We would however much rather go with the full QWERTY keyboard
Handwriting recognition comes in three different flavorsMusic player is slightly refreshed
There're new icons but hardly many other changes in the music playerGallery has a new face
The first gallery offers a zig zag view mode
Going from portrait to landscape is automatic thanks to the built-in accelerometer
The one-finger zooming is a nice little feature to have onboard
The Pixon12 Media browserWeb browser closes on perfection
The web browser is just great
There's also full Flash support, including Flash video12 megapixel wide-angle camera -getting there now
Samsung M8910 Pixon12 • Sony Ericsson C905
The camera UI
Samsung M8920 Pixon12 • Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH • Samsung i8510 INNOV8
Samsung M8920 Pixon12 • Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH • Samsung i8510 INNOV8
Samsung M8920 Pixon12 • Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH • Samsung i8510 INNOV8
Samsung M8920 Pixon12 camera samples
Pixon12 low-light samplesVideo recording is not spectacular
Final words
