Pinoy Reviews

Thanks to a friend of mine, I was able to get my hands, albeit briefly, on the Samsung Jet. The Samsung Jet was launched during Samsung's unpacked event. What was that event? I honestly don't know but it may be Samsung's attempt at generating an iPhone-like buzz on their new products--unfortunately, the event went by without so much as a stir in the blogosphere. Anyways, let's dive right through

Design



The Samsung Jet has a 3 inch screen but mind you, it's resistive not capacitive. Like most of Samsung's new high-end phones, the Samsung Jet sports Samsung's AMOLED screen and colors are just so Vibrant. As for the design of the device, there's really nothing new except the center button which is not a directional pad but a back button. The volume rocker is on the left and on the right there's the camera button and a dedicated button which brings up the new Samsung Cube interface.

User Interface

The Samsung Jet makes use of Samsung's TouchWiz interface which if you're an Omnia user, you're already familiar with it. However, this time, the interface is REALLY fast and responsive. I hardly notice that it's a resistive touchscreen. The UI is definitely comparable with the iPhone in terms of responsiveness.

Messaging

Although I like the UI of the Samsung Jet, I really don't like its messaging capabilities. For one, in portrait mode, you only have a choice between the alphanumeric keypad or handwriting recognition, no QWERTY keypad. If you turn the phone in landscape mode, that's when the QWERTY keypad pops up which is really a bummer since I really don't text in landscape mode. Also, I wished Samsung tweaked their messaging app a bit kinda like on Symbian or Windows Mobile wherein you can see the sender's name while you're typing instead of bringing you to a new typing window everytime you try to type a message.

Multimedia, audio quality, camera

Multimedia-wise the Samsung Jet delivers. First off, the AMOLED screen is just perfect for viewing videos plus the Jet can handle DivX videos straight up without the need to convert it. It can play a 600MB video file without a hitch thanks to its super fast 800MHz processor. The speakers need a bit tweaking though as it's not as loud as it should be even at full volume. Of course, you really won't be using your Samsung Jet as a boombox so speaker quality is a non-issue for me. Audio quality through the headphones is great though. Very rich sounds. As for the camera, the Samsung Jet has an 8 megapixel camera with smile detection, face detection, etc. Image quality seems the same with the Samsung Tocco Ultra Touch S8300 although image quality becomes a bit washed out in low light conditions.

Connectivity

The Samsung Jet has a lot of connectivity options. You have 3G/HSDPA, WiFi, USB Connection, and it also has a GPS. I wasn't able to test the GPS since it doesn't have a software that supports Metro Manila but the web browser is okay. The web browser, I think, is Samsung's own proprietary browser. Samsung's browser lets you view up to 5 webpages and has a multi browser bar which you can use to enter webpages or search using Google or within your webpage.