Samsung Jet Review

In a nutshell: The Samsung Jet (or Samsung Jet Ultra Edition) is a slimline mid-range touchscreen phone that gives a lot, for a modest price. It's a superfast phone, with a responsive touchscreen interface, plenty of online widgets, an excellent web browser, multi-tasking and a superfast processor to power it all. With a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, a music player, FM radio with RDS, and the capability of playing DivX & Xvid videos, it has plenty of entertainment on board. We have to mention the incredible AMOLED display, the 2GB of built-in memory, the 3.5mm audio jack, WiFi and HSDPA. There are just too many good features to list!

Best buy: *Free* with half-price line rental or £130 auto cashback from Mobiles.co.uk (Black) or Mobiles.co.uk (Lilac); or £149.95 on PAYG from the Carphone Warehouse (Black or Lilac) or £199.90 from Mobiles.co.uk (Black or Lilac).


Review: June 2009. Last updated March 2010.
The Samsung Jet has been launched with the slogan "Impatience is a Virtue" and according to Samsung it is "the must-have product for those who live fast paced lives and want to pack more of everything into their day."
Yes, the Jet is fast, with a powerful 800 MHz processor (theoretically even faster than the processor used in the iPhone 3G S), a responsive touchscreen user interface and fast web browsing with HSDPA. But for us, the real story is the price. Even though it's only available on Vodafone initially, you can buy the Jet for just £20 per month on contract, which seems like a bargain to us.

The Jet looks pretty much like all other touchscreen phones, with some nice detailing on the three buttons below the screen to set it apart from the common herd. Apart from that, it's almost identical to phones like the Tocco Lite - quite impressive, when you consider how much hi-tech wizardry is packed into this slimline device. So, not only is this a fast device, but it's also sleek and streamlined too, and will easily fit into a shirt or jeans pocket. The TouchWiz 2.0 user interface is tried-and-tested technology and shouldn't cause any problems for most users. And it is very fast and responsive too.
We've got to be impressed by the AMOLED display on this device. It's slobberingly gorgeous. AMOLED is bright, with high contrast, so you can see it outdoors much easier, and the resolution on the Jet is an incredible 800 x 480 pixels, which makes it the best screen we've ever seen on any Samsung phone. In fact it beats most high-end smartphones, yet costs half as much! At 3.1 inches, it's large and this makes a real difference for any touchscreen user interface. This display is so good, it's worth buying the phone for this feature alone!

So, in terms of usability, we'd give the Jet a 10 out of 10. But let's look at the features now. For a mid-range phone, the featureset must rate about 9 out of 10. The camera has 5 megapixels, with autofocus, smile detection, digital zoom and a dual LED flash. It's not going to be shortlisted for the best camera phone ever, but it still beats most of the others in its class. The Jet can record video too, and can play back videos in high resolution in DivX & Xvid formats without conversion. A second camera enables video calling over a 3G network. Musically, the Jet delivers, with a music player capable of playing most common music formats. With DNSe and a 3.5mm audio jack, this ticks our boxes. There's also an FM radio with RDS, so you can see what station you're listening to, and even the name of the artists and song playing.

One of the other strong points of the Jet is the whopping 2GB of memory built into the phone. This will probably be enough for most users, with the capacity to store around 1,000 music tracks, but can be expanded to 16GB with the addition of a microSD card.

Although it's not a smartphone, the Jet does have multi-tasking support, and the TouchWiz interface includes online widgets that can deliver applications like Facebook, weather reports, etc. So unless you're a geek who likes to download and customise, you'll find the Jet answers most of your needs. And if you're one of Samsung's target users living a fast-paced life, you probably don't have time for the downloading and installing stuff anyway. If you do need to download, you'll find the 3G HSDPA and WiFi connections to be nice and fast, whether you're watching YouTube videos or just surfing the web. The web browser is excellent too. Thanks to the huge screen and the one-finger zoom feature, viewing full web pages is easy. The web browser is very well featured, with support for Flash and even multi-window support. It's not quite a laptop, but it's definitely a good mobile web experience.

As well as WiFi support, the Jet has Bluetooth and USB, naturally. The 3.5mm audio jack is very welcome too, enabling the use of standard headphones, or the possibility to connect to an external speaker system or a car stereo. A GPS receiver is included too, but no Google Maps.

So, the Samsung Jet: it's a fabulous phone, with some truly exceptional features. Just remember that it's not a smartphone, so don't compare it with the iPhone, or phones like the Samsung i8910 HD (which both cost twice more than twice as much as the Jet!) Really, this is a fabulous phone for someone wanting more than the Tocco Lite, but not willing to fork out £40 a month for a top-of-the-range smartphone. We guess that ticks a lot of people's boxes.

You may have heard of something new called the Samsung Jet Ultra Edition. Relax, it's virtually identical to the Jet but exclusive to O2. It comes with a BBC iPlayer widget, and has a silver band running around the edge.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10

In a nutshell: The Sony Ericsson X10 is a superphone! It's a touchscreen smartphone running Google's Android operating system and layered with Sony Ericsson's unique user interface specially designed for the phone. It's supremely powerful, but very easy to use too. Tech specs include an absolutely enormous 4 inch screen, an 8.1 megapixel camera, GPS, HSPA, 1GB memory plus an 8GB memory card, and a monster battery.
Best buy: *Free* with half-price line rental from Mobiles.co.uk (Black) or Dialaphone (Black) or Dialaphone (White).

Review: March 2010.

The X10 is Sony Ericsson's superphone and is one of the most anticipated handsets of 2010. What does it do? It does everything! We recently reviewed the HTC Desire - another Android phone - and described it as virtually the perfect phone. Well, The X10 is a phone that can rival the Desire. Android is certainly the operating system of choice if you want the very best that's available in 2010.

Sony Ericsson were slow to enter the touchscreen market, dipping their toe in cautiously with the Xperia X1 (running Windows Mobile) and the Satio (running Symbian). We had the impression of a company desperately in search of a strategy. But we needn't have worried, because behind the scenes they've been busy working on their own implementation of the Android operating system. As regular readers of mobile-phones-uk.org.uk will have spotted, Android has become our new favourite operating system, now that the early adopters who bought the first Android phones have found all the bugs and the Google guys have graciously fixed them. Android is now a smooth and powerful OS, and the Android Market is shaping up nicely, so there will be loads of apps available for the X10.

What SE have cleverly done is to layer the Android OS with their own user interface, a bit like HTC have done with HTC Sense. So what you see when you power up the X1 is interface screens such as Timescape, which gathers together all your communications for any one of your contacts. Text messages, emails, Facebook, Twitter, and even photos are all gathered together, so there's no need to open apps to see what's going on. Similarly, Mediascape brings together all your music, photos and videos. The Infinite virtual button is used to gather together all the related information for a contact or media type. The whole system comes together and works very well. It's very much like a mini computer, but geared to mobile use.
Let's get physical now. The X10's a big machine, that's for sure. But it's the same weight as the iPhone 3G S and only a millimetre or so longer. Yet it's got a screen that puts the iPhone to shame. Yep, you read that right. The X10 has a 4 inch screen, compared with the 3.5 inches of the iPhone, and almost three times the number of pixels. It's bigger than the screen on the HTC Desire and even the Nokia N900 internet tablet for that matter! We think: wow! When it comes to touchscreens, bigger is always better. It makes the virtual keyboard so easy to use you don't care that it's virtual. And the X10 supports handwriting recognition too, if you like that. The screen is capacitative, which makes it very responsive to the touch.
In fact a bigger screen is better for all kinds of things. It's certainly better for viewing photos taken with the impressive 8.1 megapixel camera. Naturally the camera has autofocus, flash and a digital zoom. It also has a smart face recognition feature which not only recognises faces when using the camera, but also recognises faces in any pictures stored on the phone. If you name a person in one of your photos, the X10 can then recognise that person in other photos! By touching the person's face, you can access contact details and other information for that person. If you're thinking that this kind of face recognition is a hard problem for a computer and that it might not have a 100% success rate, you'd be right! But it works surprisingly well most of the time.

The big screen also makes web browsing and apps like Facebook work like a dream. And with internet access via HSPA and WiFi you have a fast always-on connection to the web.

The X10 isn't Walkman branded, but fear not because it has an outstanding music player, with full support for all the features you'd expect, including a 3.5mm audio jack so you can plug in your own stereo headphones. You can also use Bluetooth stereo headphones if you prefer.

aGPS is present too, as you'd expect from a device of this type. It's integrated with Google Maps, and comes with a limited license for the Wisepilot Turn-by-Turn navigation software. As we've already noted for other applications, the enormous screen really makes the most of this feature.

A machine with this much functionality needs some heavy-duty hardware to power it, and the X10's got what it takes. The processor is the Qualcomm 1GHz Snapdragon processor as used on the HTC Desire and one of the fastest processors available. The phone has 1GB of memory built in and is supplied with an 8GB microSD card too. This is expandable to 16GB. The battery has a huge 1500 mAh capacity, which is about as big as it gets in the mobile world.

Is there anything missing from the Xperia X10? Well, yes a few things. There's no video calling and no FM radio. Our users tell us they don't use video calling, and you can access radio stations over the internet, provided you have an unlimited data package in your contract. Also the version of Android used is 1.6, not the latest 2.1. Is that a big deal? Probably only geeks will notice, but on the other hand many geeks will want to buy this phone. We think that these are minor issues, and they don't stop us awarding the X10 a full five stars.

Nokia 5230

In a nutshell: The 5230 is an entry-level touchscreen smartphone. Its key features are its large touchscreen, A-GPS with Ovi Maps, 3G, downloadable apps from the Ovi store and outstanding battery life. In other ways it's a disappointment, with a poor camera, a mono speaker, no WiFi and no video calling. We think that the 5530 offers a more rounded package, but otherwise it's a good addition to Nokia's range.
Best buy: *Free* with free line rental or a free Dell Mini Netbook from Mobiles.co.uk (White) or Mobiles.co.uk (Pink); or £64.95 on PAYG from Dialaphone (Black, Purple or White) or £68.95 from the Carphone Warehouse (Black or Pink).
 
Review: January 2010.

The 5230 sits alongside the Nokia 5530 in Nokia's growing range of entry-level touchscreen smartphones. You might think that the 5230 lies below the 5530, but that's not exactly true. They cost the same on contract (i.e. free at around the £15 per month level), and offer similar but complementary features. The 5230 and the 5530 enjoy a peculiar relationship: if one phone lacks a particular feature, you can bet that the other has it, and vice versa. So the 5230 has 3G, but is missing WiFi. It has an A-GPS receiver, but its camera is rubbish. Its display is larger than the 5530's, but the phone is bigger and heavier too. Are you getting the picture?

Let's rewind this review and get back to basics. The 5230 is a Symbian S60 smartphone targeted at pay as you go and contract users looking to pay no more than £15 a month. That's a big market, and we expect the 5230 to be a relatively high volume handset. The good news is that it's the latest in a series of similar phones, so you can be confident that the bugs have been ironed out of the firmware and that the phone will work.

Physically, the phone looks almost exactly like the Nokia 5800, which is the Daddy of this type of handset. That's a good thing too, because it means that you get a very large 3.2 inch display, with a high resolution of 640 x 360 pixels. That's not quite as many inches as an iPhone, but its more pixels, so that you can tell that to your iPhone-owning mates! It's a resistive touchscreen, which isn't as smooth as the capacitative type, but it works well enough and has the advantage of coming with a stylus. The display is fantastic for web browsing, multimedia and simply working with menus. It's a larger phone than the 5530, but that's because of the larger screen and bigger battery inside.

The 5230 is a 3G phone, unlike the 5530, and has high-speed HSDPA, offering download speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps. It is missing WiFi however, so if WiFi matters more to you than 3G, choose the 5530 instead. If you really need both, choose the 5800. It does however have Bluetooth and USB connectivity.

The 5230 is not branded as an XpressMusic phone, and it lacks stereo speakers. But it does have a music player, FM radio and a 3.5mm audio jack. It also has the bonus feature of an A-GPS receiver, with Ovi Maps supplied.

The most disappointing feature of the phone is probably its sub-standard camera. With just 2 megapixels and no flash or autofocus, this is suitable only for quick snaps. The video camera is better, but with no video calling option. The poor camera is the phone's weakest feature and is probably the biggest reason for choosing the 5530 instead.

The phone comes with a respectable 70 MB of memory and this can be expanded to 16GB by adding a microSD memory card. Sadly, you won't find one of these in the box, so be prepared to fork out a few quid for one of these. You might also need to buy a USB cable too, as this isn't included either.

We mentioned that the 5230 weighs more than the 5530. The main reason for this is probably the increased battery size. The 5230 enjoys excellent battery life as a result.

It's a funny one, the 5230. It has some great features: the large touchscreen display, Ovi Store for apps, 3G, GPS, superb battery life. But it also has some disappointments: no WiFi, no video calling, an awful camera, and an unexceptional music player. Still, if you're looking for a touchscreen smartphone, there aren't many in the price range, and the 5230 expands the choice available.

Features of the Nokia 5230 include:

• Symbian S60 5th edition smartphone
• 2 megapixel camera with 3x digital zoom
• Video recording at up to VGA resolution and up to 30 fps, 4x digital video zoom
• Display: Touchscreen, 16.7 million colours, 640 x 360 pixels (3.2 inches) with automatic display rotation and proximity sensor
• Nokia Ovi player (MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA formats)
• FM radio
• Ringtones: MP3 & video ringtones, 64-voice polyphonic ringtones, vibration alert
• A-GPS with Ovi Maps 3.0
• Voice commands: speaker independent dialling and voice commands
• Voice recorder
• Integrated handsfree speaker
• Messaging: SMS, MMS, email (support for IMAP, POP, SMTP) plus attachments, Audio messaging
• Internet: HSCSD, GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA (3.6 Mbps), XHTML web browser
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0, micro USB 2.0, 3.5 mm audio jack, 2.5 mm Nokia AV connector
• Memory: 70 Mbytes plus microSD memory card slot (up to 16 GB supported)
• Offline mode
• 3G plus quadband GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
• Size: 111 x 52 x 16 mm
• Weight: 113g
• Talktime: up to 7 hours
• Battery standby: 450 hours
• Music playback: up to 33 hours

Apple iPhone 3GS 32GB

Smartphones were once almost exclusively the tools of high powered business users and road warriors. The original Apple iPhone, and more significantly, the iPhone 3G, were the single greatest catalysts in expanding smartphones’ appeal to the general consumer audience. The Apple iPhone 3GS (‘S’ for Speed) continues the trend of improvements we enjoyed with the 3G. Certainly more evolutionary than revolutionary, the folks at Apple listened to the criticisms that were leveled at the wildly popular iPhone 3G and actually took action on most of the issues. While competitors have made major strides in closing the gap between the iPhone and everyone else, this is still the phone to beat for most users.

We won’t rehash the well known features of the iPhone 3G. For details of that excellent smartphone, you can check out its review. Instead, we’ll highlight the improvements that make the iPhone 3GS a top choice for a wide variety of users.

As with its predecessor, there are two models that are identical except for the memory capacity. The top rated Apple iPhone 3GS boasts a whopping 32GB of onboard memory while the other lesser model still has a very respectable 16GB and costs $100 less. We’re still not particularly pleased that there’s no option for memory expansion but with that much storage embedded, the argument is irrelevant for most users. (The previous version had 16GB and 8GB options). Both models are available in both black and white.

Standout Features

• 3.0-megapixel digital camera
• Video recording capability
• Supports multimedia messaging
• Document editing functions

Features:

The Apple iPhone 3GS still has the features that made its predecessors so popular. Most notably, it’s a perfectly good smartphone that just happens to have an iPod built-in. Just as the iPod essentially created and continues to dominate the digital music industry, the iPhone invented and rules the world of mobile apps. Despite the launching of competing app stores by several other smartphone makers, they all pale compared to the tens of thousands, and rapidly expanding, of apps available for the iPhone.

Increased speed is the central improvement of the iPhone 3GS. Apps load faster and just about everything runs more smoothly. Network speeds also tend to be improved. Still, if multitasking is an important feature for you, this device will be a disappointment. You might want to consider the Palm Pre or a top rated BlackBerry.

Among the chief complaints about previous editions of the iPhone was the absence of a user replaceable battery. That hasn’t changed but at least Apple has equipped the new device with a battery that seems to be providing markedly improved performance. We like the AppBox Pro app that, among other things, estimates how much battery life is available for various phone functions. We’ve found that it does a good job of predicting actual battery life. If you’re a heavy user who likes to have a backup battery, you’re out of luck.
iPhone’s rather weak 2.0-megapixel camera has been updated to a 3.0-megapixel shooter which is better than its predecessor but is still not among the best available. Nonetheless, Apple has made great strides with the Tap to Focus system that give the user a lot more control over pictures to be taken. Oddly, there still isn’t a flash. The new iPhone does satisfy users who bemoaned the lack of video capture capability. That’s a feature that is rapidly gaining importance with meteoric rise in popularity of posting videos online. It also includes a great video editing tool that should help users improve the often dubious quality of those online posts.

The iPhone 3GS catches up with some of the top competitors by finally offering document editing features. Cut, copy and paste are available and work particularly well with the new landscape mode virtual keyboard.
Stereo Bluetooth capability is finally available on the iPhone 3GS, an omission from previous versions that we failed to comprehend on a device that has multimedia as a focal point. Less noteworthy but welcome additions include a voice recorder, tethering capability and turn-by-turn directions for the GPS functionality. As of this writing, tethering has still not been activated by AT&T and the turn-by-turn directions feature will require an as yet unavailable third party application. In the event that the iPhone 3GS is lost or stolen, individual users now have the ability of wiping data from the phone remotely. That was a feature previously available only to enterprise users.

Summary:

When considering the remarkable abilities of the Apple iPhone 3GS, it’s easy to think that things just can’t get any better. On the other hand, when considering its shortfalls, one can see that, despite Apple’s noteworthy efforts, there remain many lost opportunities. Reality lies somewhere in between. From the perspective of a music phone, there just aren't any peers. Let's face it...this phone has an iPod Touch built in. Further, it's likely is the most capable, user friendly smartphone on the market for the widest range of users. For those with different sets of criteria, the good news is that there are a number of worthy alternatives.

Nokia Surge

Little could we have imagined when we first created the Budget Cell Phone category at TopTenREVIEWS that we’d be including a genuine, no-kidding smartphone on the list. But here it is, the Nokia Surge. While it certainly won’t gain the broad following enjoyed by Apple’s iPhone, garner the enterprise respect of BlackBerries or earn a place among harbingers of the future afforded to Google’s Android OS based phones, it is a fully functional smartphone in every sense of the word. It’s not likely to appear at many corporate board meetings…nor was it intended to…but for consumers who want more functionality than the typical messaging centric phone at a very low price, the Nokia Surge is well worth consideration.

Standout Features

• Slide out full QWERTY keyboard
• Full HTML web browser
• 3G, GPS and Bluetooth
• Good media player

 

The Nokia Surge has the general look of most of today’s touchscreen cell phones, i.e. a rather bare face with a small number of navigation buttons that is dominated by a relatively large screen. Admittedly that screen at 2.4 inches, measured diagonally, is pretty small by current standards and its 320 x 240 pixel resolution is on the weak side. But the big surprise is that it isn’t a touchscreen. Now we’re not saying that a touchscreen is the only way to go. Quite the contrary…many of the best smartphones don’t have a touchscreen. Still, it’s a surprise given the Surge’s appearance. Instead, there’s a pretty reasonable physical QWERT keyboard that slides out. Accelerometer equipped, the display on the screen changes from portrait to landscape when the phone is rotated.

Probably the biggest downfall of the Surge is, strangely enough, the way one places a simple phone call. Now if the number being called is in the address book everything is fine. Just select it from the address book with the phone in the portrait orientation. Things get interesting, read: awkward, when calling a number that isn’t in the address book. Doing so requires opening the keyboard and dialing the number from the QWERTY keyboard. Making the process a bit worse is that the rather basic keyboard doesn’t have dedicated number keys so dialing is from keys that are shared with letters. Press the send button on the phones face and slide the keyboard closed and you’re set. An unfortunate design to say the least.
On the other hand, the keyboard is reasonably spacious for a rather small device with well separated, responsive keys. It makes it easy to communicate via email, text (SMS) and multimedia (MMS) messaging as well as instant messages. Unlike most budget phones, not to many pricier ones, the Nokia Surge supports business email through MS Exchange in addition to all the popular personal email services.
The phone also comes with a full HTML web browser, putting it ahead of some great smartphones and connecting on AT&T’s 3G network renders web pages in a reasonably snappy manner. Display on the smallish screen isn’t the greatest but it isn’t catastrophic. The Surge operates on the aging Symbian S60 OS and seems pretty antiquated alongside the current crop of smartphones. Data can be transferred to and from a computer via a micro USB connection but, in another irritating twist, that doesn’t charge the phone. That requires a tiny, proprietary Nokia jack.
In the multimedia world, the Nokia Surge holds its own with many better known competitors. It has a 2.0-megapixel camera with 4x zoom but no flash. Picture quality seems to vary greatly from one shot to another but, interestingly, video recording seems somewhat better and more consistent. The phone has 128MB of integrated memory which can be expanded to 8GB with a microSD card.
The music player isn’t half bad and can be used while multitasking with other applications; however, accessing controls, except volume, does require navigating to the music screen since there aren’t any separate controls. The device also features access to both FM and XM radio for streaming content. Unfortunately, there’s only a non-standard 2.5mm headphone jack but, on the up side, stereo Bluetooth is available for wireless headphone use.
Among the many surprises on this phone is the presence of a built-in GPS/a-GPS receiver. Paired with AT&T Navigator, that affords voice guided turn-by-turn driving directions but, of course, requires a monthly subscription.

Summary:

The Nokia Surge packs an awful lot of features for a very low price. It’s not a competitor for the best of the smartphones on the market but it offers a terrific alternative for consumers who want more capability than the typical message oriented phone. It has several irritating shortfalls but if you’re looking phone that packs a lot of bang for the buck, the Surge is well worth considering.