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Samsung i8510 INNOV8 |
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Samsung i8510 INNOV8 at a glance
The Samsung i8510 INNOV8 is about the size of Samsung G810 but slightly longer. It also has the same weight. Nokia N95 8GB is close to those dimensions too. It's slightly shorter than the i8510 INNOV8, but it's also thicker. But the Samsung INNOV8 seems way longer than the N95 when the slider is open. Design and construction The Samsung i8510 INNOV8 follows the design trend of all recent Samsung sliders - ingenious combination of metal and plastic and a totally flat keypad. The front panel is taken by the really large 2.8-inch 16M color display. Above it there is a video calls camera and an ambient light sensor for automatic screen brightness adjustment. The 8 megapixel camera on the back is styled really nicely - a lot similar to Samsung digicams actually. On both sides of the lens you will notice the stereo speakers. However they are positioned so close to each other that we found it hard to spot the stereo effect. The camera is also equipped with a Power LED flash - it's not a xenon one unfortunately, but it packs dual LED design. The battery cover, which is all-metal by the way, has a really nice locking mechanism. In order to release the cover, you need to slide the whole bottom part of the back panel. The battery powering the Samsung i8510 INNOV8 is a standard Li-Ion one with a capacity of 1200 mAh. The manufacturer promises up to 310 h of standby time and up to 8 h 30 min of talk time. Truth be told, the Samsung i8510 INNOV8 is a big handset. And when the slider is opened, it gets too long to allow convenient operation with both the navigation pad and the alphanumeric keys, which in the same time balancing the weight of the upper half with your index finger. The Samsung i8510 INNOV8 comes with the Feature Pack 2 of the Symbian OS S60 UI, which was announced back in February 2008. The Samsung INNOV8 screen rotation is more attractive than the Nokia one. Much like on the Samsung Omnia, the screen of the INNOV8 first zooms out nicely then rotates to landscape and zooms back in. The Samsung INNOV8 will have two variants - 8GB and 16GB. There is also a hot-swappable microSD slot. And with the DLNA support you can now mount locally remote folders shared on desktop computers and stream multimedia content from them. When connected to a PC via a data cable you get a choice of several connectivity modes. In the Mass Storage mode the large 16GB (or so) memory, as well as the memory card, both become available as removable drives on the computer. The internal system memory of the INNOV8 is not accessible in that mode. Image gallery Speaking of multimedia, the image gallery of the Samsung i8510 INNOV8 holds no surprises. Besides the auto screen rotation it has nothing special to offer. The Nokia N-series trademark gallery looks much better. Music player The Samsung i8510 INNOV8 has the regular Symbian music player, there are no news in that department. You can sort tracks by by artist, album, genre and composer and searching tracks by gradual typing is also available. By the way a video editor is also available as a separate application that allows you not only to actually edit videos but also create videos out of still images (video slideshows). There's also an FM radio with RDS support. The INNOV8 can record radio broadcast too. However no equalizers are available for the FM radio. Video player Video playback is among the touted features of the INNOV8. It's said to be able to play a really wide range of video formats among which even DivX. We managed to confirm that the INNOV8 plays superbly DivX .avi videos shot at VGAres@30fps. The same goes for MPEG4 VGA@30fps videos. By default all videos play in landscape mode and there's no setting to change that (not that anyone would want to). You can also fast-forward and rewind videos as you please.
Browsing the internet on a Samsung INNOV8 is a pleasure much like on any other Symbian S60 smartphone. Thanks to the great page rendering content fits perfectly on screen and looks exactly like on a PC. There is flash support but you can turn that off if you like. And now before you ask, yes, it does YouTube videos too - straight from the desktop version of YouTube.com. Unfortunately, the web browser doesn't have a true fullscreen view mode, but offers an interesting overlaying toolbar (not visible on the screenshots) with several shortcuts that can be operated with the mouse pointer. GPS navigation is promising The Samsung INNOV8 has a built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support. The Landmarks application allows you to setup various points of interest (obviously called Landmarks) by either storing your current GPS coordinates with a name, description and category or by picking a random spot on the map (provided by the Route66 Samsung Navigator app). You can also preview a previously stores Landmark position on the Route66 map. The GPS Data application gives you raw satellite data (coordinates, time, latitude, etc). It also allows you to setup basic navigation routes - to either an already stored Landmark or to a set of GPS coordinates. It doesn't offer a map of voice guidance, it's pretty basic. It also integrates a Trip Meter, which has some pretty self explanatory functionality. The Samsung i8510 INNOV8 packs a serious cameraphone punch. The INNOV8 produces images with a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels. And if that's not enough, it also offers all kind of goodies such as geotagging, automatic panorama shooting, face detection, smile detection, and even blink detection to prevent photos of people blinking (which happens to an awful lot of people). The camera also has a mechanical shutter (much like Nokia N73, Sony Ericsson K800 and K850), digital image stabilization, and the proprietary Samsung Wide Dynamic range, which is used to lighten up shadows in high-contrast scenes. The mechanical shutter is a nice plus - as a mechanical way of stopping light making its way to the sensor it takes care of the vertical stripes that appear in the highlights of high-contrast images also known as smear, as well as the wavy distortion that sometimes appears if you move the camera while shooting. There's also ISO control (50-1600) and various everyday settings such as white balance, preset shooting scenes, color effects, etc.
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