Review: Samsung Jet S8000
Samsung's latest flagship handset, the Samsung Jet S8000, was released to massive fanfare around the world, and the General Manager for the UK said that he thought it was better than the Apple iPhone 3GS - but can a non-smartphone really compete?
The Samsung Jet S8000 is billed as 'Smarter than Smartphone', a direct comment on the fact that while it uses Samsung's proprietary feature-phone UI, the TouchWiz 2.0 OS, it still packs some mean hardware under the hood.
And we're not just being complimentary of the specs by saying that, we're talking an industry-leading 800MHz processor powering the performance from a dinky frame (108.9 x 53.5 x 11.9mm) on a 3.1-inch AMOLED screen.
While it's hard to see where this might rival the iPhone in the mobile phone market, bar having a touchscreen, it's certainly cheaper than most of its smartphone rivals, with users getting a free phone and paying less on their contract and up to £150 less to pick up the handset SIM free.
The first thing that hits you when you pick up the Samsung Jet S8000 is just how small it is. While the dimensions will give you an idea just how dinky it is, it's very hard to describe just how diminutive this feels in the hand.
This is a double-edged sword for the phone: on the one hand, the Samsung Jet S8000 fits very well in the pocket and is a real pleasure to carry around compared to some of the other chunka-phones on offer.
However, on the other hand, the plastic chassis and the 110g weight count against it, as it feels a little lightweight and, dare we say it, cheap in the hand. We like the shiny red prismatic effect on the back of the phone though, and the AMOLED screen just screams colour no matter what you're displaying on the screen, but there's something about the build quality that doesn't shout 'we've spent £5 million on a global marketing campaign for this handset'.
We're not saying the plastic-feel of the Samsung Jet S8000is a bad thing, as it's certainly very pocket friendly which is obviously very important for a number of people these days. It's just that a little bit of brushed aluminium or stronger materials would have probably added to the overall appeal and feel of the phone.
That said, the phone is well designed and all the buttons are within easy reach thanks to the smaller proportions. We're utterly delighted to see another 3.5mm headphone jack stuck on the top, and Samsung has managed to do this without adding a huge amount of depth to the device. However, when using headphones plugged into the Jet S8000 it's very difficult to use the full QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode and watching video is a little tricky too, as the jack is a little too far to the left in our opinion.
Actually, this is something Samsung does very well (packaging things all together in a compact handset) and makes us wonder why a company like HTC keeps maintaining it can't do a headphone socket and a flash.
But we think you'll find that with the Jet S8000 Samsung has managed to do all the above AND improve the camera to a dual flash version... this shows there's room for improvement, HTC (although well done for putting a 3.5mm jack on the Hero).
USB CHARGER: The Samsung Jet S8000 uses a standard mini USB charger
The Jet S8000 is one of the first Samsung phones to make use of the Cubic-style menu interaction (more on that later) and in honour of this, it has placed a 3D-cube style button on the front which carries the same sort of functionality as the menu button on S60 devices.
It's a little large and garish for our tastes, but at least it brings some unique style to the front of the phone and, let's be honest, this is a phone Samsung hopes people will pick up for the way it looks, as much as the hardware. The likes of 2GB of internal storage and 30fps VGA video camera will act like gadget sirens (the ones from Greek mythology, not on top of police cars).
It's an interesting idea to place the button that calls up the spinning cube next to the camera button, but one that works surprisingly well, with very little confusion as we might have predicted before trying it.
It's got a slightly similar footprint to the Palm Pre in being deceptively small, which means it fit snugly in the hand rather than dominating it in the style of the iPhone 3GS, although it would have been nice to feel a little more weight or strength in the chassis.
As mentioned above, the Samsung Jet S8000 uses an updated version of the TouchWiz 2.0 as well as adding in the new 3D cube system of selecting applications. We've seen a very similar thing from the likes of LG in the Arena, Viewty Smart GC900 and Crystal GD900 with the S-Class spinning cube and customisable home screens, and we weren't impressed by it then.
Samsung's reason for including its proprietary TouchWiz interface is apparently due to trying to keep costs down and make it affordable for consumers in these credit-crunched times. It's a strange strategy, as it makes it hard to work out where the company is trying to position the phone; at least with the likes of the Samsung Tocco Ultra Edition the style and form was top priority, which will appeal to a lot of people.
We were really looking forward to using a phone that has a less power-hungry interface coupled with an industry leading processor, and we were both impressed and disappointed in equal measure.
The great thing about Samsung is that it really listens to criticism and acts swiftly on it. There has been some ire at the low response of past touchscreens - the Jet S8000 allows much more accurate swiping when rolling up and down menus, for instance.
But there's still some way to go before this is perfected, and Samsung is still stuck in Division 2 when it comes to the touchscreen game, battling the likes of Korean rival LG and Nokia, while Apple, Palm and HTC are all giddily laughing in the top flight.
For instance, when you receive a text message or missed call on the home screen, it's nigh on impossible to press the 'view' button without missing a couple of times. Similarly, when trying to scroll through names in the contacts menu, even though Samsung has provided a handle to drag through the different letters, we couldn't accurately hold this even after extended use, and was a real irritation.
Samsung was one of the pioneers of the widget-filled homescreen, and clearly has no intention of giving up on the idea with the new TouchWiz interface. The new home-screen system allows you to have three separate home screens, with each bringing new wallpaper and a full set of widgets to choose from when customising. The latter is especially important, for if you want a screen for work and one for the weekend, then you may want to have the music player on both, but in previous iterations this wasn't possible.
However, it's easy to get a bit bored with most of the icons on the menu, as many of them don't lead to any good widgets, rather just links to mobile websites. Considering this idea is meant to be an alternative to 'proper' apps, it feels a little cheap.
Some of them are simply too big as well; we wanted a single home page that gave us instant access to Profile settings so we could whack the phone on silent in a heartbeat, but as the widget is so massive there's very little screen left to actually swipe on, meaning you end up throwing the widget all over the screen.
The menu system has been massively overhauled, with the Symbian style menu icons leading to another menu, leading to another menu and so on, all gone in favour of an iPhone-style layout.
In fact, it's just a little bit too iPhone-y, as we can't think of another reason why Samsung would take the 'Tools' group and explode them all over the menu - there's just no reason to see the Stopwatch, Timer, Converter and World Clock on there.
Swiping through the menu was also a little difficult one-handed, and as the screen is so busy you would sometimes find yourself wondering if you've actually switched displays, though the little orange indicator bar at the top was a little bit of help.
The cube, accessed by pressing the dedicated button next to the camera, is a nice touch, and shows off the processing power of the Samsung Jet S8000 nicely. Spinning the cube is a lot of fun, but ultimately a bit cumbersome when you're trying to get to the internet browser, and after pressing the button you have to wait around a second for the separate interface to load up - slick it is not.
There are buttons at the bottom that take you straight there, but it feels a bit deflating when you access the cube menu just to press a hot key. While we like the fact there's an innovative approach to accessing multimedia, it could have been better executed.
And there are other points where the processor seems to have up and left, leaving its wheezing understudy from an old Samsung D600 to take over. When scrolling through the photo list and browsing music by album cover (*cough*Coverflow*cough) the whole thing judders along badly. What is weird is that on other phones using the same(ish) UI, such as the Samsung i8910HD, which has less processing power, they manage the same tasks with much better speed.
You can hold down the 3D cube key and enter MotionGate, which basically lets you select a pre-defined application by flicking the phone left and right. We would imaging the technology community will unite in declaring this a gimmick, something that looks and sounds cool, but then actually is an anti-climax once you get to it.
Similarly, unlocking the phone by drawing an icon (more on that later) is fun, but once entered the screen takes a second to unlock.
For a phone that's supposed to be so slick it can rival the speed of a superfast aeroplane (or a Jet, in case you didn't get the name) these things stick out like a sore thumb. A phone that doesn't have a super heavy interface and packs a whizz-bang processor should be infallible when it comes to speed of movement.
The Jet S8000 certainly has style and the interface in the AMOLED screen is bright and vibrant, but to position a phone as 'Smarter than Smartphone' and then to use the underpowered TouchWiz interface seems a little odd.
Calling on the Samsung Jet S8000 was a pretty decent experience, with call coverage better than average in most cases. The pleasing thing was this was mostly 3.5G HSDPA coverage too, meaning that where we could chat, we could also surf should we be so inclined.
Something Samsung phones do very well is give the full range of calling and contact options directly from menus. For instance, should you want to send a buddy a text message, but haven't got a recent message to reply to, then you can just head into the contact list and there's a messaging icon to press ready and waiting.
Similarly, pressing the Call button from the home screen will bring up not only a list of all calls made or received, but also text messages too, so if you have more often contacted friends, then there's an option to communicate with them easily.
The contacts book, as discussed earlier, looks nice thanks to the colourful screen and high contrast ratios, with icons to call and message clearly standing out.
However, the problem comes when trying to scroll through them, as unless you want to manually roll through around 200 names or so (10 friends and 190 cousins... Auntie Radar was 'into' the '60s) you've got to try and grab the little scroll handle, which as we said before, is harder than trying to fight a legion of rabid rabbits for the world's last carrot.
Perhaps that's over-exaggerating it a little bit, but needing two or three goes to hit it and a lot of concentration doesn't scream user friendliness to us. You could always use the up and down arrows to achieve the same thing, and given the system that's probably your best bet.
Each contact screen is also well laid out with the option to call (both voice and video) as well as message within easy reach, and the now-standard contact photo should you forget what your Mum looks like or something.
After the improvements TouchWiz picked up when used as a skin on the Samsung i8910HD, we were looking forward to the actual TouchWiz UI getting the same advances after the terrible fusion of keyboard and touchscreen in the Samsung Tocco Ultra Edition, where Samsung wanted to re-invent the wheel.
It's good and bad news on the Samsung Jet S8000, with the good news coming out on top. Messaging is much more intuitive than before, with a greater degree of accuracy and a nice set of options for your letter-taps to your mates.
Given there's only a 3.1-inch screen to play with, the QWERTY keyboard works well. Accuracy is high (although there's no auto correct for the times when you mess up).
And while we're on inaccuracy when using the QWERTY, the placement of the return and delete keys leaves a lot to be desired. It's only after the 60th attempt at trying to delete a letter do you realise that you're mostly hitting the return key, meaning you've just written a message full of lines.
The same can be said for the portrait text input, where Samsung has stayed with its plan to move all the keys around for working with the text. Space is once again in the hash key space, 0 has the job of cycling through your words on the T9 input, and the star key toggles T9 selection.
If you want to add a word into the T9 dictionary, then you'll have to shave your little finger down to a point to access the scroll-down menu of word options on offer at the top of screen. You'll generally have to work through 14 of these before you get the option to 'add word'. Not the most ideal of choices, and it left us switching off T9 or heading for the QWERTY.
Why it couldn't have been the same as all the other phones everyone will have used ever (apart from the pioneering Tocco Ultra Edition, of course), we don't know. However, if Samsung manages to change the way we use text, then fair play.
Of course, there's always handwriting recognition, but you might as well just put the phone on the counter and throw Maltesers at the on-screen keyboard - the accuracy and effort would probably be about the same.
We honestly tried to learn to use this, assuming there must be SOME point given that most touchscreens have it, but in the end we only learned that it's just something that 'can be done'. We nearly got on board with the idea, except when we tried to write the letter U and the phone decided that we REALLY wanted to write V or Y. Every time. Bye, handwriting recognition, we never really knew ya. For a reason.
You can configure webmail to automatically download to the phone as well, although as with the Samsung Tocco Ultra Edition, it's a very tricky process requiring you to check the right boxes for SMTP and POP3 authentication, input the correct port number and generally fail two or three times before you get it right.
Once the messages are downloaded from your account, there's also no way to mark them all as read (which you will have done, as the Jet S8000 just downloads them all as unread) so you have to manually go through all of them to remove the 'new email' icon at the top of the screen.
There's also the option to link in your email via Exchange support on the Jet S8000, but when we opened it up, there were just so many blank fields that needed filling in we nearly wanted to cry.
If you're after Google Mail, use the inbuilt application. If you want it for corporate email, then throw it at your IT guy sobbing 'I don't know how to do this!' before browsing the list of available BlackBerry handsets on offer while you wait for him to come back.
Ah, we were looking forward to this. The internet experience on the Samsung Jet. Overhauled, re-vamped and ready for anything, the launch promised us a new internet experience from Samsung.
And it certainly was an improvement on the Tocco Ultra Edition, with extras like being able to toggle the address bar to not only accept web pages, but also Google search and on-page text search.
Added to that was the ability to have multiple pages open at once, and you can see that Samsung has gone to town on the new web browser.
Except, well, it hasn't really. It's essentially the same web browser as found on the other TouchWiz handsets with a few new party tricks. When browsing, the phone would flip between offering you a mobile version of a page or the full HTML, although much of the problem can be laid at the feet of Google.
For instance, the BBC home page is brilliant when accessed via the mobile portal, and a nightmare to load when not.
When using the in-built Google search bar to search for said site, it takes you straight to the full HTML page, and you have to scroll for the mobile version. However, type it into the address bar and it auto-finds the right version.
Perhaps the fact that this is the only way forward isn't anything to do with the software, more to do with the fact the whole experience is cramped on the 3.1-inch screen. After the beauty of Safari Mobile, or even Opera Mini, the TouchWiz internet browser just feels under powered and too cluttered.
We tried to open up a few sites at once, and it worked, but you're never going to use this in the same way you would on other phones (ie the Android line up or the iPhone 3GS). It simply takes to long to load them in full HTML, and WAP versions of sites are 90 per cent boring.
One nice touch is the 'Hide Ad' function, which masks the advertisements on sites to help speed up the loading process - but this still didn't bring the overall speed of the browser in line with other internet-enabled smartphones.
The final piece of irritation is the lack of smart fit on board, or at least one that we could find to easily toggle on and off. Double tapping does bring things closer, but only after the Samsung Jet S8000 has had a chance to think about what you're after and then zoom in on the page.
Hitting links isn't easy either, with sometimes a double tap and sometimes a single tap needed to register a push, and even then there's a slight delay before the haptics confirm you've hit the right spot. As we mentioned at the start of this section, the new upgrade was a chance to get things right (Samsung's managed it on its Symbian devices, and even its Windows Mobile efforts to a degree) but it hasn't managed that with the Jet.
The camera on the Samsung Jet S8000 is a 5MP effort, but with the added beauty of a dual LED. What this means is while colours don't look any more vibrant (the method of producing white LEDs means they are very poor at reproducing a full colour gamut compared to the likes of Xenon) the lighting isn't so harsh, and the shadows are reduced somewhat, which is a good thing obviously.
The sheer variety of scene modes we've been treated to on previous high-end Samsung models are here once again on the Jet S8000, with the likes of night mode, sports, sunset and dawn all giving you a wide variety of options. Of course there's no digital zoom, but you can always put together some lovely panorama shots instead to make yourself feel better, and of course 2GB of internal storage means no more worrying about filling up another memory card.
The video recording on the Jet S8000, a VGA 30 fps offering (with a 120fps slo-mo mode too) is pretty darned decent, and probably a shade better than the iPhone 3GS (which people have been going a little crazy for if you haven't noticed), with manual or auto exposure adjustment keeping things nice and crisp.
It's not going to take over from a dedicated camcorder, nor does it even hope to be in the same league as the Samsung i8910HD, but for taking a video of your mate trying to leap over a ditch, failing and then slipping up when trying to get out this is perfect.
How our Samsung Jet S8000 camera compares to a fancy Olympus SP-565UZ:
The Samsung Jet S8000 in 'backlight' mode:
The Olympus SP-565UZ
The Samsung Jet S8000 in a low light foreground, bright light background with flash:
The Olympus SP-565UZ with flash:
The Samsung Jet S8000 in sunset mode:
The Olympus SP-565UZ
The Samsung Jet S8000 in night mode:
The Olympus SP-565UZ:
The Samsung Jet S8000 same shot with flash:
The Olympus SP-565UZ with flash:
The OLED screen is currently the piece of hardware on a phone that brings the 'Wow factor' and Samsung is rightfully pushing it for all it's worth, with the Jet S8000 being the third or fourth from the Koreans to make use of the technology.
Not only that, but we're also treated to a headphone jack, so media on the go will be a lot less wire-filled than before, and we won't have to fork out time and again for a new adaptor when we break them.
Another nice touch is the fact hat music and video are given their own categories in My Files, meaning you don't have to sift through hundreds of icons to find one episode of Supernatural.
Video
Watching a video on the Samsung Jet S8000 was predictably a lovely experience, with the AMOLED screen oozing colour and dripping with high-contrast ratios. The 3.1-inch screen is far too small to watch a full length movie on, but juice up the memory with a few music videos and you've got a perfect fit.
We managed to flick through a number of different standards of video easily on the Samsung Jet S8000, with a huge number of codecs pleasingly supported. That said, it would be nice to have the likes of Android Market to help boost the range of playback options, like the whole world and his dog does when phones like the HTC Magic.
For instance, there's no way to create a video playlist, so for the aforementioned music videos you need to manually scroll down the list (which is the only way to search through unfortunately, another problem which would be fixed should third-party applications be allowed).
At least the video player is given its own place on the menu, rather than being hidden in the applications section, although there's no RealPlayer for easier video streaming.
Music
This is a tricky one to assess. On the one hand, there are some excellent touches, like the audio recognition and FM recording. On the other, it's a little basic (we won't go into the third party argument again about how apps would solve the problem... though we just did).
The music player is basic and the same as we've seen in most Samsung phones. The 5.1 Channel SRS is a real improvement to audio quality, although on some lower-bit rate videos it distorts things terribly.
There are some good playlist and playback options, and if you flip the phone on its side you can access a 'flow' of 'covers' (what would be a better name for that?) which is a little juddery, as described above. Also you can't alter the volume when in this mode, which is strange as it's a big feature on the S60 phones.
Annoyingly you can't add album art from within the phone on the Jet S8000 (you can on the more high end handsets). This means you have to connect up to the PC if you don't want to view your music as a bunch of pink squares.
The visualisation on the music player is also a little on the slow side, and we would have expected this to be sprinting along as a showpiece of the new 800MHz processor.
FM Radio
We liked this application a lot, mostly because it was easy to set up, had very good reception for a phone, and you could not only identify tracks but also record them too.
The Find Music function simply asked you to record a section of the track, which is then sent to the server. Once completed, it then sends you the name of the song, the artist, album art and a link to download it from the Samsung music store.
We had to applaud such tight integration from Samsung on the method of bringing users from the radio to the store - not even Apple can boast such integration on the iPhone 3GS.
But what lost us right at the end was the exorbitant price of purchasing said music, with each track costing £3 as far as our tests could show.
And why is there no bigger show of this 'Find Music' option? Or the fact you can record music directly to the phone? It would be nice if you could retroactively record like you can on the Sky+ boxes (where when you press record, the recording starts from the moment you began watching, as that would be the point when you realised you wanted to save what's on) but it's a minor niggle.
It's strange Samsung has part buried a part of the phone with brilliant features when it could have made such a song and dance about it, rather than some less functional options.
The applications on the Samsung Jet S8000 are standard fare, but at least this time they're much more on show.
There's the usual tight integration with Google, giving us access to Maps, Mail and Search, although these are run in Java and as such are pretty basic.
Maps does offer the My Location service, but there's no double tap to zoom or Streetview on offer here, and Gmail is stripped of a lot of key features (still better than using the Jet's on-board email system though).
The other options are certainly worth taking a look at, even though they're never going to be deal breakers for a phone like this. Photo contacts, which lets you tag parts of a photo with a person's contact information, seems a little bit pointless, although it is fun to play with. It just assumes you'll enjoy staring at the same photo time and again to get your friends' details, which you probably won't.
Video editing is fairly comprehensive (much more so than the iPhone 3GS, and we know how giddy the world went for that when learning you can TRIM A VIDEO) with the ability to splice, cut, copy and more, as well as adding audio tracks, although MP3s weren't compatible for some reason.
Dynamic canvas sounds a lot more fun than it is, by the way, as it's nothing more than a glorified Paint program allowing you to rather haphazardly daub over things using your finger. We can't imagine you'll ever take a picture of your boss, draw a moustache on it then show him, for instance.
The gaming on the phone is among the better options from Samsung, as it allows you to play Rollercoaster, which uses the motion sensitivity to guide a rollercoaster around a track safely (it sounds better than it is), as well as other trial games such as Tetris, which are cool but leave you a bit angry at the prospect of having to pay for them after shelling out so much for a handset.
GAMING ON THE JET: Rollercoaster makes use of the motion sensitive controls
The rest of the applications are such standard fare that they're not worth going into, as you can probably work out what a world clock, timer, voice recorder and converter all do (although the voice recorder does pick up sound impressively well when we tested it out at a recent interview).
One other thing the Samsung Jet S8000 brings to the table is the ability to unlock the screen by writing a letter on the lock display - not only was this a laggy system, it refused to recognise if we'd written a C (our unlock letter) and sometimes instead decided we'd written a T, which started the internet.
If a company is going to put a feature like this on the phone, it should include some pretty wide parameters, or else the rest of the world will do like we did and swiftly turn the feature off.
One of the big plus points of an OLED screen is the fact it uses a lot less power than its LCD counterparts, which means a longer lasting battery - and the Samsung Jet S8000 certainly makes use of it.
We managed to get around one and a half days' usage out of it when leaning on the phone fairly heavily (one manufacturer once called us a power user... we didn't like that label as we have neither a Filofax nor do we 'do lunch' with 'Samson from Accounts') and even managed to coax two days' worth of use out of it when we realised late on that we'd forgotten our charger.
Using the 3G heavily isn't too bad either, with trying to download a million emails not de-juicing the battery too much at all, although we've yet to see such a system used over months and months, where it might suffer a lot more.
On the organisational side of things, the calendar and the memo functions are the only things that will really make a difference to your day-to-day life. The Memo application annoyingly doesn't let you scrawl down notes to yourself, which we find really helpful in a lot of phones, but the calendar works well enough.
The calendar on the Samsung Jet S8000 lets you work through all the important things and list them by importance, so if you need to see all the upcoming anniversaries (we assume Samsung means birthdays, not that this is a phone for polygamists or the unfaithful) then you can flash past the normal calendar screen to find them.
Samsung has bundled the new PC Studio 3.1 with the phone, and it provides a simple-to-use and easy interface should you want to ever mess about with your phone with your PC.
Software
The new PC Studio 3.1 software has allowed Samsung to re-think the way people use their phone with a PC, and this looks and works fabulously. It essentially turns your phone into a PDA portal, and while the functions might not look or work as well on the handset, they look almost Mac-esque on the PC. There are separate windows to access your organiser, calendar, movies, photos and almost everything else, as well as being able to send text messages from your PC.
We've often said we're fans of this interface, and nice touches like being able to configure the system so that drag-and-drop files were automatically converted to a more phone-friendly format were a real bonus. A common feature of mobile phone PC software is the ability to encode files to fit the handset, and while this is possible here (for instance with MP3 playback from other less well-liked formats) the sheer amount of codecs supported (MP4, DivX, AVI) mean that you're very unlikely to need to, which is a real bonus.
We'd go as far as saying the new software was actually a new reason to connect the phone to a PC, other than as a modem or to back up contacts, as it adds a whole new dimension to the Samsung Jet S8000.
MEMORY: The Samsung Jet S8000 has an easy to swap microSD port
You can always use the phone as a modem as well, which might not please your network (especially if it's O2), although if you don't constantly use your Jet for surfing day in, day out, you might just get away with it (and also be sticking two fingers up to Apple iPhone 3G / 3GS users as well).
We recommend you check out dashboard bar at the bottom of the software, which lets you quickly access key phone functions. Other software, bar Apple and its iTunes love in, is only just starting to catch up to the phone and PC party, so we're overjoyed to use a program that actually does what it's supposed to. If it had a tin, Ronseal would be probably having a word over trademarks.
Connectivity
There's a real bundle of connectivity options on here, from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth to GPS.
We liked to put all these options together on one home screen, although we were disappointed in the difficulty of setting up some of them.
For instance, the Wi-Fi, which is usually a case of picking a network and entering the network key should you need to, asked us which encryption we'd like to use, and had different fields for other options as well. We consider ourselves pretty tech-savvy, but we still had to have a look at the box to work out what was going on, which is a pretty big failure as many will simply give up on the feature.
That said, Wi-Fi connectivity was swift and easy, and led to some snappy web browsing too.
GPS was pretty erratic, certainly not in the same league as Google and HTC's Magic or G1 or the iPhone 3GS, as the only software that used it, Google Maps, could very rarely find our position. Even the estimated zone (which had a 1KM tolerance radius) was wrong on most occasions.
But we're happy to report Bluetooth was nice and easy to connect - sometimes you have to accept the easy wins when you can.
We've noted the Samsung Jet S8000 feels a little cheap on numerous occasions. To be fair to the designers, it's meant to be a slightly less expensive handset in order to entice the more tech-savvy consumer who doesn't want to throw oodles of hard-earned cash at his or her new phone.
We liked
Overall, although there's a lot to pick at with the Samsung Jet S8000, as a package it just works. We're not sure what it is that tickles our fancy, whether it's the near perfect palm-sized dimensions or the glorious OLED screen, but when we usually find niggles with a phone we start to dislike it quickly.
The opposite has happened here. We weren't sure with the hands on, but quickly warmed to a phone that does manage to do a whole lot and do it well. The music and media on it may be a little lightweight, but is certainly up to the task (especially recording from the radio) and the camera is an excellent bit of hardware in a teeny package.
We disliked
Sadly there's a lot to dislike as well, which is mostly the result of using the TouchWiz 2.0 OS. We obviously have no idea how the cost structure of pricing phones works, and Samsung wants to position this as a low cost handset against the spiralling price of the likes of the iPhone and HTC Magic, but surely the Jet together with Android would be a much better proposition, even if it cost £30 more?
The internet browser was by far the worst thing on the phone, which is actually a backhanded compliment, as it was a lot better than before, with multiple tabs and three way searching via the address bar.
The home screen and widgets just don't do it for us either - we can happily set up a bookmark link to YouTube or Facebook Mobile without the need for a fancy graphic, and it feels like a little bit of a cheat to pretend there's social networking integration on there just by placing these on the widget bar (which can't be added to with the widgets of your choice, just Samsung's suggestions).
The verdict
The Samsung Jet S8000 is a phone that does a lot of things, and does them pretty well, and all in a small and well formed package. We're not sure about calling it affordable when it's hitting the market at around £350 SIM free, although it is significantly cheaper than its rivals and is on offer for some pretty cheap contract deals too.
When reviewing these products you start to get a feel for the star rating as you go, and we believed this was going to be a nailed-on 3.5/5 as we started to explore the intricacies of the Samsung Jet S8000. But weirdly there's a sense that it works, the package comes together to offer a good proposition that will satisfy many but heavily impress few, so the final score isn't too bad in the end.
Samsung has had a really good effort with the Jet S8000, making a phone full of decent hardware and not forcing users to break the bank to pick it up. It's good, but we feel it could have been a lot better with some very minor tweaks.
Overall, the Jet S8000 is worth looking at for those that love their technology but have a bit of a budget to work to.
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