Technology.Design.Creativity.Web 2.0: Wow, should I get SAMSUNG PIXON or NOKIA XPRESSMUSIC 5800? Which One?

Further to the short video demo that I uploaded yesterday, here is the point by point analysis of the phone. I hope you enjoy it.

Phone Hardware

1. Samsung has clearly taken the pole position in the phone-camera category. In a short span of months, Samsung has pushed out her second 8 megapixals (MP) camera – Samsung M8800 PIXON after i8510 INNOV8. Clearly, no other phones except LG perhaps can come close to Samsung in this area. PIXON is the slimmest phone with a 8 megapixals resolution, a record previously held by LG RENOIR KC910 (a successor to LG KC990 VIEWTY).

2. PIXON is a 3.2 inch touchscreen phone but it's not the first touchscreen phone launched by Samsung. However unlike OMNIA, M8800 PIXON is not a windows mobile phone. It is also not using Symbian OS which is the OS for INNOV8. Instead, it uses Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz interface (I'll touch more about the phone OS and applications in the later section)

3. Let's talk about the camera feature first since this is the key USP for PIXON. The new PIXON is equipped with the core functions that you will find on any Samsung's low end point and shoot range camera. PIXON's camera features include auto-focus, 16x digital zoom (which, to me, is pretty useless if you want a high quality shoot. Optical zoom will be much more important), fast-shutter and face detection. And of course, being a phone, it provides the geo-tagging function and easy uploading via the mobile internet.

4. It's natural that that we compare PIXON to LG RENOIR since both have 8MP camera. While I have not tested LG RENOIR, I learnt from third party sources that RENOIR uses Schneider-Kreuznach lens and Xenon flash. PIXON on the other hand uses plastic lens and dual LED flash. In addition, RENOIR has active autofocus whereas PIXON uses passive autofocus. But the report also commented that camera speed-wise, PIXON has an edge over RENOIR and PIXON has a more friendly user-interface. ( http://technorati.com/posts/OpbBYGK7SrgKE3pAz_SSxWJrJcNHyvOX4y9G993i3j0%3D ).

5. Putting aside the camera feature, I tend to compare this to Nokia XpressMusic 5800 as well. Both are very lightweight (PIXON 121g and Nokia 109g). Both have long battery life with Nokia winning by a slight margin (Samsung has talktime of upto 3 hours and 40 minutes and standby of 290 hours; Nokia has talktime of up to 4 hours and standby of upto 300hours). However, unlike Nokia, Samsung has only 256k colors. Nokia 5800 by contrast, supports 16m colors.

6. Some other similar features are the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and full virtual Qwerty keyboard and built-in GPS. PIXON uses Google Maps whereas Nokia has its own Nokia MAPS (which requires a subscription). However, Google maps is free and to me Google maps serves my purpose as I don't need a turn by turn voice navigation.

7. Samsung PIXON also uses a resistive screen and as mentioned in my earlier post on Nokia XpressMusic 5800, I am not very used to the "touch" on resistive screen. It requires you to exert pressure on the screen to scroll down. It requires more deliberate efforts to scroll than the multi-touch capacitive screen on iPhone.

8. PIXON uses proprietary headset jack. But all is not lost. You are able to connect a 3.5mm normal earphone to the connector provided by Samsung. The only thing is you can't afford to lose this connector. In addition, the phone also has the ability to do TV out. You have to purchase the accessories separately.

9. PIXON has an internal storage of 200M (much larger than Nokia 5800's) and similar to most phones today it has an expandable memory slot using microSD card.

10. In terms of its speakers' quality, Samsung included its own SRS (surround sound system). By comparison, I feel that Nokia 5800 is a cut above Samsung when I play the same song using the speakers. The music player also boosts some presets (in total 8 of them). However, unlike Nokia's XpressMusic, you can't change the presets to customise your own. (More about this in the later section)

11. While PIXON has a 3.2 inch screen, its browser is not friendly. You can't open several tabs at one go. And because it has resistive screen, it is not using to navigate with fingers as you need to press against the screen as you move around on a web page. But what I like about the phone is that you can zoom in and out by using the volume up/down button or to use the virtual buttons on the screen. Both are easy to control. I don't' encourage you to buy the phone if you intend to browse a lot. Besides the less-friendly browser and browsing capability, PIXON does NOT support WiFi. WiFi is important for me because I tend to put my phone on WiFi when I'm at home or in the office so that I don't have to pay for cellular data charges. PIXON is not the right phone for web-browsing. iPhone or G1 are clearly far better choices.

12. Last but not least, PIXON has several physical buttons to provide one-click access. It has 3 buttons at the bottom of the screen. The left and right buttons are self-explanatory (making and ending calls / power switch). The middle button is NOT a home or menu button. Rather it is a "Back" button. I had thought it would be easier to have a Menu button but Samsung has designed the Menu button as a virtual button (read on to find out). On one side of the phones are the camera button and the volume buttons (which can act as zoom in/out and and scroll up /down depending on the application that you are running). On the other side of the phone are the hold button and a menu button that provides a virtual menu for quick access to "call", "music player", "messages", "browser", "main menu" and back.

Phone OS and Applications

1. As mentioned earlier, the phone uses TouchWiz OS. It has several widgets on the home screen that you can pull out from the side of the screen to the main screen. Some neat widgets include Google Search, Weather Channel, Favourite Contacts, Photo Album, Music Player and others that are already pre-installed on the phone and many more that can be downloaded from Samsung FunClub website.

2. Pixon's organizer application comes with some handy tools such as Calendar, Memo, Task, World Clock, Calculator and Converter.

3. For the music player, the interface is very friendly and easy to use. You can set any piece as voice or video call ringtone or caller ringtone. You have the option to decide whether to allow background music playing. It has an additional feature similar to the Shazam. PIXON has this application called the "Music Recognition". It will try to identify the song that you are playing. I have not tried out too many songs (in fact, only a few), hence it's not fair for me to comment on the accuracy. So far it recognizes most of the songs I bought from iTunes. Between the two phones, I'll recommend Nokia XpressMusic 5800 over Samsung PIXON for music not just because Nokia 5800 has better music player features and speakers but also because Nokia is targeting squarely at the iTunes market with the music store via its Come with Music service.

4. Nowadays most phones have both music and video players. Given the 3.2 inch screen size, it's comfortable to play a video or movie on it. What's neat about the video player is that you can choose to upload to web or to send via email/MMS or Bluetooth (same for music) and even add tags to it (only for videos). You can view the video in either portrait or landscape mode.

5. In addition, PIXON has this Video Editor application that allows you to insert one video track and two audio tracks. You can choose 176x144 or 320x240 for the resolution settings. You can choose from 5 different effects (Emboss, Black&White, Sepia, Solarise, Sharpen) to apply on the video. Interesting tool for you to make your own little impromptu video.

6. Just to also mention that the phone has a voice recorder application but it can only record up to a maximum of 60 minutes. I thought if Samsung really wanted this to be a "fun phone" for photo-taking and video editing, it should perhaps include some effects to make some tweaks to the voice. What you can do for video editing is only to trim the length.

7. Don't bang on this phone too much for games. PIXON has some pre-installed games (mostly for trial only). It doesn't have the depth and breadth of an iPhone appstore.

9. The phone can be used easily for mass storage. It has a Documents Viewer application that allows you to open Microsoft Office (only 2003 and not 2007) documents. This is a pleasant surprise to me. I have tested it out on a few powerpoint files (since I tend to deal a lot with powerpoint files). You can view in portrait or landscape mode. And more surprisingly it has a Search Function. This means I can go to certain particular slide easily if I can remember the keywords in that slide. The viewer has a zoom function too.

10. Okay, I just want to say that this phone is not cut out to support heavy duty email. Of course, PIXON is never provided for that. It can support POP3 or IMAP. I have tried setting up using IMAP. I realised that it seems slow in processing my emails. There is also a limit on the size of the file that you can download. Only up to 5Mb. Most powerpoint file that I receive tends to be bigger than 5Mb. So this is practically of no use to me. If you just want simple text reading, this phone serves the purpose. If you read my earlier post on Nokia 5800, I mentioned that Nokia 5800 supports Mail For Exchange which allows synchronisation of Inbox, Calendar and Tasks. For PIXON, only basic email function is supported.

11. What I find strange is that Samsung includes ShoZu for MobileBlog (which also allows you to upload your photo to ShoZu). I thought it would be more useful to include a Flickr or Facebook application since this is primary a camera phone. But then again, Samsung may want to encourage people to do micro-blogging and hence ShoZu application will fit the bill.

12. PIXON has a Photo Album application that uses its built-in accelerometer sensor. Not only does it auto-rotate the screen when you change the orientation of the phone, it also allows you to advance back and forth easily by tilting the phone. Cool way to view hundreds of photos quickly.

13. There is another neat thing I like about this phone. At times, we may send a sms to the wrong party. This phone has this "precautionary" feature built in by requiring you to click the "Done" virtual button so that you can preview your entire message again before sending out. In addition, when you type your message, the textbox is enlarged so that you can view your draft message easily. You can choose to use the normal phone keypad or handwritten (using the stylus) mode or the virtual Qwerty keyboard. However, I somehow feel that it is a little slower than most phones in sending out the messages. Not sure if it's because it has the dialog box that shows "Sending" and hence the perception that it's taking a bit longer.

14. Lastly, I just want to say that this phone supports RSS. This means you can import your favourite feeds into the phone easily. That's something I must have for all phones. Feeds are my daily needs.

So in summary, I would say that if you are looking for a phone that can double up as a proper camera and have decent music and video players. This is the phone to go for. It has long battery life. This is important for taking photos and playing videos. Plus with the light weight, I really won't mind carrying one more gadget with me.