Samsung Pixon Review

Messaging:

Despite of the presence of an e-mail client, you’ll be disappointed with the lack of automatic settings for the most popular web mail servers. In order to check our Gmail with the Pixon, we had to even enter the server ports manually.


Talking about text input however, there is a major improvement compared to F480. We were not happy that Samsung offered only two writing methods in a touchphone via a screen keyboard seen in regular phones. Here we have three types of handwriting recognition, and a QWERTY, activated by simply rotating the phone. We preferred the last one, because of the good sized buttons, which are arranged normally and the only complaint we have is that if you’re writing fast some taps are not detected. Because of the vibrating feedback however, you’ll realize that quickly.


Connectivity:

Do you like the Pixon so far? Don’t rush to fall in love if you are in the States, because there are some bad news. Same as the OMNIA, 3G support is not offered outside of Europe (2100 MHz). Otherwise, it is a global quad-band GSM which gives us at least a 2G on all GSM networks. It’s the same story with LG Renoir and Samsung INNOV8, but they have Wi-Fi.

Nowadays, cellular phones are more and more often used for surfing the Web. Thanks to the combination of an excellent browser and easy controls via touch sensitive displays, the iPhone proved that the PC experience can be brought to mobile phones. In contrast to the OMNIA (Opera Mobile 9.5), the non-smart Pixon doesn’t fit in the group of the leaders.


The page visualization and the navigation are easily done by finger scrolling, but what we lack here is the same method of zooming in/out. Meanwhile in Safari and Opera you can close in on any part of the site you are browsing by finger, with Pixon this is a step-by-step procedure, which brings you back to the upper left screen after each change. This forced us to use the regular zooming, which resulted in slow navigation and made reading a hard task. Overall, we have a browser with fast and correct page rendering and bad navigation. The rival phones are a proof that this element can be greatly improved and we hope that this will be achieved by a software update.