Samsung i8510 review

Samsung has blasted its competitors out of the water, by launching the astonishing Symbian S60 i8510 smartphone.

It's not surprising that Samsung is getting stick about the Nokia-style interface of the Symbian i850, and the similarities with the design of the Nokia N95 8GB. Sure, it has its common ground but to be fair it, uses the same operating system with Samsung's UI. What is special though is the sheer number of features that Samsung has managed to fit into the i8510.

For starters, there's an eight-megapixel camera. This is controlled by a switch on the top, like on the LG Viewty. You can toggle between camera, video camera and gallery really quickly. It's not just the resolution of the camera that beats the likes of Sony Ericsson (its 8-megapixel snapper is due out in September too) and Nokia (rumours suggest a December launch of a higher resolution device), but the capabilities the snapper has are comparable to a standalone compact camera.

In the settings menu, you'll find a whole host of features, including smile detection, face detection and blink detection, which are fairly reliable to improve your snaps, but sometimes do slip up.

The camera modes also beat anything else on the cameraphone market. One of the most fun functions is the panorama mode, where you move the phone either right, left, up or down while the handset takes eight photos. It then stitches these together to make a panoramic shot. Although you do get some interesting results the first couple of times you attempt this, after a while when you have mastered hand stability, you can achieve some really stunning photos.

One disappointing factor with the i8510 though is the lack of an optical zoom. Sure, 8x digital zoom is pretty impressive, but is quite frankly pants if you want to get really close up to the action.

Photo friendly

When you've got your snaps, there are a number of things you can do with them. The Samsung i8510 features a TV-out port and a cable comes in the box so you can view all of your videos and photos on your TV. This extends to full-length films too, and as there's 8GB of built in memory onboard (with a microSD card slot to extend this to 24GB with a 16GB SDHC card), you can add up to 30 full-length films onto the phone. Nice.

If you don't want to plug your handset into the TV, you can use DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) to stream any media around your house, providing you have a compatible TV, PC or stereo. To stream the media, you jut need to launch the app on the phone, and find your other devices to connect to, just as you would with Bluetooth. If you just want to view the media on your handset, you can do this in a number of ways.

There's a pretty handy app called Photo River, which displays your photos in a slideshow with an attractive flowing water style design in the background. There's also a Photo Frame mode which is similar to a digital photoframe. Your snaps appear in a slide show, but the handy thing is, you can change the style to represent a calendar or a clock. For this to work effectively, a kick-stand as featured on the N96 would have been handy.

The UI is a completely new experience. The i8510 is the first handset on the market to feature an optical mouse-style navigation button, and it's this that makes the handset very easy to use. All you do is stroke the button to scroll through options - it's like a touch sensitive key, but looks exactly like a normal click button. Sometimes the optical joystick is a touch too over-sensitive and thankfully, you can adjust this just as you can change the tracking on a regular mouse. The optical joystick also doubles up as a four-way click button too, with the selection key in the centre.

There are two shortcut keys on the front of the Samsung i8510; one that takes you to the media menu, the other that takes you to the main menu. When you slide the screen up, there are two further menu shortcut keys that are programmable. The star key on the bottom left of the keypad automatically changes the screen orientation to landscape and then back to portrait if you're viewing a wide web page or video.

Surf star

The web browser on the Samsung i8510 is one of the features taken straight from a Nokia Nseries handset. It was demonstrated to us at the launch as 'revolutionary', but most people are pretty used to the Series 60 browser that keeps a history, so when you press 'back', you can view all of your previously visited pages. It is a really nice feeling browser though, with zooming operated by the volume keys. You can surf with confidence if your operator supports HSDPA at 7.2Mbps, or WiFi.

In terms of preloaded applications, the Samsung i8510 is the most fully-featured we've seen. Just wander into the applications menu and you'll see Fring for making VoIP calls and keeping in contact via IM, Route 66's SatNav software, Shozu for uploading your snaps to every blogging and social network site out there, Yahoo!Go, CNN newsfeeds, RoadSync, Gypsii, plus two full games installed. The two games are Asphalt 3 and Fifa08, but you can download a lot more if you're not really one for racing or football.

The Samsung i850 is one phone you're never going to want to let go of. Sure, it's very similar to the Nokia N95, but a lot more advanced in every aspect. Move over Nokia, the new Symbian king has arrived.