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.
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