Samsung Pixon Review

Camera:

This is supposed to be a fun phone, right? Camera, videos, music… these are the key elements of the Pixon.  

In the first aspect the Pixon is a serious contender, breathing down the necks of the leaders. It not only has an 8-megapixel camera but is also equipped with plethora extras, and its interface – identical to the OMNIA’s – is very good as well. Despite being somewhat unpolished and not fitting the rest of the software, it is very convenient to use and should be an example for all other touchscreen cameraphones. It is loaded with options that will play nicely to the high tech junkies:  face detection, smile shot, 13 scenes, panorama, macro, white balance, effects and ISO adjustment. Add fast focusing (about 2 second during the day) and the almost immediate picture saving (about 1 second) and you’ll agree that using the phone is a pleasure. In contrast, the INNOV8  requires about 4 seconds to store an image. The Pixon is very fast and we like that but what matters is the image quality.


The Pixon did great here as well. There was noise present even in the pictures taken in broad daylight, which lowers the detail level. Although we didn’t like the way the images looked in full size, they are still more detailed than the Renoir and INNOV8 ;  and unlike the last one all objects are proportionate. Color representation is quite good and in the samples below you can see the realistic colors of the sky in different weather conditions. Macro (close-up) shots turn out really nice.


Unfortunately, the phone is equipped with a weak flash. The results are decent depending on the distance and the colors are grayish. We are somewhat disappointed that the flash is not as good as the one of the N82, which is a previous generation phone.




This model can record videos in DVD resolution (720x480) with pretty good picture quality. The manufacturers are no longer interested in the videos only being suitable for YouTube, but to look good on a large screen as well

Samsung Pixon sample video at 720x480 resolution
* Note that due to codecs support, you may not be able to play the file.


The Photo Browser application located in the main menu helps you view pictures and filter them by file name, folder name, date created, color and person on the photo. The last one is possible because the pictures can be tagged. However, we didn’t like this “gallery” and preferred to use the file browser in the image folder. Once you open a picture, you can slide to the previous/next by running your finger across the screen, and there also is a zooming option.



Multimedia:

The Pixon is not trying to be the best cameraphone but the best in all aspects.  Along with the OMNIA Samsung is trying to take away the iPhone’s crown of king of all multimedia phones. The OMNIA didn’t quite manage to do that, but did the Pixon fair any better?

Despite that the music player is not that attractive and has no large CoverFlow covers, it is good. It is pleasant to use, and the only thing is that it looks kind of old-school. It did visualize the album art of all songs we uploaded in contrast to many other models. We are happy not only to have such an option but to actually see results.

Moreover, the phone is equipped with an FM radio with RDS with a very pleasant interface.


Although it doesn’t support stereo, the loudspeaker sounds very good as both, quality and loudness. It easily fills up a quiet room but it’s more suitable for listening to the news. We know that the headphone sound is more important but unfortunately, there’s no 3.5mm adapter to take the experience to the next level. The set included in the package is like earplugs similar to the Walkman ones. They not only look good but are comfortable to wear and produce a decent sound. Personally, we don’t like that type of earphones but once we plugged in our own (higher class) we got even better results. In addition, there are 7 equalizer presets and SRS WOW effect, which change the experience to a great extent.


In our touchphone comparison we noted that the video playback in OMNIA wasn’t as good as iPhone’s, but the great advantage the Asian contender had was the multiple codec support. We findthe same in the Pixon, and since WM Mobile is not present, the colors are not limited to 65k. This results in great picture quality with DivX (version 5 and later), XviD files or MP4 with H.264 codec. A 720 pixel wide video played just fine, but the next one we tried (1280 pixels) was not supported (160KBit/s bitrate).


Software:

The OMNIA runs on WM6.1 Professional and that gives the user the ability to install many additional applications. In order to have programs on the Pixon other than the factory uploaded, you need to find them in JAVA variant, because it is not a smartphone. The games you get are trial versions and not very entertaining, so we won’t discuss them. The titles include Brain Challenge, Diamond Twister, Millionaire 3 and PyramidBloxx. The Aphalt and Fifa we’ve seen in INNOV8 are not present here.

Just like the phones from the BEAT Еdition series we have a music recognition feature, similar to Sony Ericsson’s TrackID. A short sample of the tune is record via the radio or the mic and is sent for analysis to the server, which gives you the artist and the song name.