Samsung S8300 UltraTouch
Maxabout Review
Samsung's Answer To HTC
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
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Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH
The S8300 happens to be the world's first AMOLED touch screen phone featuring an 8-megapixel camera. First seen just before the Mobile World Congress 2009 back in February, this phone features a large 7.2 cm, scratch resistant, AMOLED display and is just 12.7mm thin.
Samsung has long been regarded as the most stylish mobile phone manufacturer. As the newest flagship edition to the Ultra range, UltraTOUCH is a truly beautiful full-touch mobile, boasting revolutionary touch screen technology, sophisticated design and packed with multimedia features.
Sliding the phone open reveals the keypad. It is quite spacious with large enough keys for comfortable typing. Some additional bordering wouldn't have hurt the typing capabilities of the device but it is good enough as it stands now. The Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH keypad has a nice, even backlighting which, combined with the great display, make for amazing looks in the dark. The only noteworthy element on the left side of Samsung S8300 is the volume rocker. It's large and has nice tactile feedback, making it quite comfortable to use.
The Samsung S8300 right side hosts the camera key, the display lock key and the microUSB slot. The latter is hidden under a small plastic lid to prevent dirt accumulating. The top is completely plain and so is the bottom, save for the microphone pinhole. The back of the S8300 UltraTOUCH hosts the 8 megapixel camera and its loyal companions - the LED flash and the self-portrait mirror. Those are of course only visible when the slider is open, which gives them some serious protection from scratches.
According to Samsung India, the Samsung S8300 UltraTouch comes equipped with their Touch Wiz interface with support for Mobile widgets. The widgets can be pulled from the menu bar and positioned anywhere on the screen. After that you can one-click access all the applications like Music Player, FM, Games, Calendar, etc. A nice improvement is that the S8300 now has three different homescreens, which you can alternate by simply pressing the numeric icons at the top right corner. This is quite convenient as it allows you to fit many more widgets on your desktop and it still doesn't make too much of a mess.
Leaving the homescreen aside and the new menu icons graphics, the rest of the interface hasn't been greatly modified. Much like the Samsung Pixon you have a tab at the bottom of the display which holds four keys with varying functionality according to the currently selected menu. There are also some nice animations and transition effects throughout the menu. The main menu displays as a 4 x 3 grid of icons, while sub-menus appear as lists. You can use the keys on the keypad for selecting them.The Samsung S8300 also supports multitasking, which means that Java applications can be minimized to remain running in the background.
The ultra-slim 12.7mm body of UltraTOUCH unites perfect form and function with full-touch screen and additional 3x4 keypad slider. The subtle arcs and slender contoured silhouette in the design ensure a timeless beauty and the polished ‘silky back’ design means that the phone looks fantastic from every angle. With a brushed metal frame for durability and an anti-scratch, anti-smudge screen, users can keep their phone in great condition. The Samsung S8300 makes use of the same camera module as the Samsung M8800 Pixon. However the engineers promise even further improvements in picture quality by enhancing the image-processing algorithm.
The handset is capable of taking photos with a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels. The videos recorded by the S8300 can go up to VGA resolution at 30 fps, which still qualifies as pretty good even though the rumored Samsung i8910 should be able to record 720p HD video. The camera also has a number of nice built-in features including the Samsung proprietary wide dynamic range option, the anti-shake digital image stabilization, geotagging, face detection, smile shot as well as viewfinder gridlines. The camera interface is nicely touch-optimized and is certainly one of the most comfortable camera interfaces on a touchscreen device so far. The Samsung S8300 UltraTouch comes with 80 MB of in-built memory, but it offers support for Micro SD cards up to 16GB.
Main Features Of Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH:
- 2.8 inch anti-scratch AMOLED toushcreen display
- GSM/EDGE/HSDPA connectivity
- A-GPS
- 8 MP autofocus camera with dual power LED flash and geotagging
- VGA video recording at 30fps
- Media player
- Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP
- FM Radio with RDS
- 80MB of internal memory
- MicroSDHC card support, up to 16GB