Review of the Samsung i8510
At Mobiles.co.uk we have been lucky enough to get a hands-on play test with the Samsung i8510 before it's due to launch later this month. So let's cut to the chase and review this eagerly anticipated mobile phone.
The slide design is a cross between the Samsung Soul and the Nokia N95 8GB and it works incredibly well; any concerns that the phone would have to be too big to fit in all those features are immediately put aside. The i8510 excels in the build quality department thanks to the brushed black metal finish and a totally flat keypad that makes texting easy. When closed, the front is dominated by the screen which is given a mirrored finish which maintains good legibility under direct sunlight. Below the screen we find the D-pad with soft keys and an optical touchpad which is put to excellent use when web browsing. If the touchpad isn't to your tastes it can be switched off.
The i8510 runs on the Symbian S60 3rd edition operating system with feature pack 2. The home screen gives you quick shortcuts to your favourite applications and I found it very easy to navigate. Scrolling down lets you, among other things, hop into your calendar to check appointments effortlessly manage your music and have it playing in the background and you also have the ability to add extra shortcuts as well. The i8510 also has a nice auto screen rotation feature which gives you a landscape view when you rotate the handset onto its side in selected menus.
The Camera is the feature that really sets the i8510 apart and I can say on using it that it's every bit as impressive as I had hoped. Featuring all sorts of perks such as face, smile and blink detection, automatic panorama shooting and geotagging, the camera doesn't hide behind the 8.0 Megapixel count. The images the camera produces are stunning and unlike anything seen before on a camera phone. The colours appear natural but never washed out and the resolution is extremely high, even when using the digital zoom. The inclusion of a mechanical shutter helps to reduce distortion occurring when your hand shakes and the powerful LED flash did a great job when I tried a few low light shots. Unsurprisingly, I found the camera on the i8510 the best I've ever seen or used on a camera phone.
Other great features that I like include the 8GB on board memory (which is ideal as you're going to be taking a lot of photos with that camera), GPS support which you can either use the pre-installed applications or, thanks to the Symbian OS, download third party applications, a media player with support for a whole host of music and video formats even including DivX and Mpeg4 plus YouTube.com video playback as well. Plus the Web browser is among the best found on a mobile phone, rendering pages to fit perfectly on screen and also allowing you to view in landscape as well.
And I could go on, but quite simply, the Samsung i8510 has raised the bar for what a mobile phone can do. The eye-catching feature is the 8.0 Megapixel camera which produces stunning images, but there is a whole host of goodies to back this up and firmly cement the i8510's place as the must have phone of the year!
Dan, Mobiles.co.uk
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