Samsung Pixon Review

Introduction:

It’s an 8-megapixel camera, it’s a multimedia player… it’s the new Samsung Pixon. The latest model from the Korean company falls in the highest-class and is a direct rival to the Renoir by LG. It’s also one of the many contenders for the title “King of the multimedia phones”, which is currently held by the iPhone. Under the Pixon’s hood you’ll find many features, including an 8-megapixel camera marketed as “better than an actual camera” and multiple video file formats in order to play clips without having to convert them. The only thing it lacks specification-wise is Wi-Fi and global 3G.

The package includes:

Design:

The Pixon is advertised as the slimmest 8-megapixel phone, though certainly not the slimmest of all. Though it shares the same form-factor as the iPhone and OMNIA, the Pixon is considerably thicker than its two rivals. Unfortunately today’s technology has not reached the level needed to hide an 8-megapixel module and a whole bunch of extras in an extremely slim body. Do not think that Pixon is “fat”, but it doesn’t have the same profile as the fashion conscious phones on the market. Since the lens and the bottom are also protruding (resembling a regular camera), when placed next to the INNOV8 it is nearly as thick, but feels slimmer in the hand. This makes it slightly thicker than the rival Renoir, although in theory it’s the other way around. Don’t get us wrong, the Pixon is not fat, but is not as slim as the iPhone or OMNIA. Its design would not win an award, and it’s the typical multifunctional model. Nevertheless, it is user-friendly and well made. The Pixon is heavier than the Renoir, but that gives it a massive feeling.



You can compare the Samsung Pixon with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The overall appearance of the phone is characterized by its form factor and reminds us of other models with large displays, taking up most of the face of the phone. In our case, it is 3.2” (3” for LG Renoir, 3.5” for iPhone), with a 240x400 (WQVGA) resolution standard for a wide screen and support of only 262k colors. It’s kinda strange that Samsung, known for its beautiful displays, doesn’t offer 16 million colors as in iPhone, and 64 times less. Nevertheless, it produces decent images even when watching videos. A nice addition is the brightness sensor, which when activated makes the display usable in sunny days. The videos will not look good, but you’ll still be able to dial a number or read a message. It is slightly less sensitive to the touch than iPhone but we have no complaints. Renoir on the other hand, is a few steps behind regarding pressing buttons and scrolling.

The Pixon primarily uses touch for its input method, but there are physical SEND and END keys. They are small but protruding and very well distinguished by touch. There’s a small round button between them, which in contrast to OMNIA’s optical mouse can only be pressed. In most cases, it is used to take you a step back. All three have a very good tactile feedback.



The majority of buttons are located on the rugged sides. On the left we have the Hold (used for locking) and Shortcut keys. There is also a microSD card slot, covered by a lid. The right side houses the only easy to spot side key – the camera trigger. You’ll see the rest of the camera buttons; play, one for switching to different modes, and the digital zoom rocker (also used as a volume rocker of course). The top side houses the charger connector, which surprisingly is not microUSB but Samsung’s proprietary one also used for headphones and data cable.

Interface:

In contrast to OMNIA, the Pixon is not a smartphone and uses software similar to the one used in F480. We weren’t happy with it when we did the review, but at first glance here, we noticed some changes so we’ll see what’s the story now. The homescreen has widgets, which have the same functions as in previous models, but some of the applications have been modified. There are also a few additional ones, which act as shortcuts to various applications, including alarms, messages, calculator and Bluetooth.

As we’ve mentioned in the other reviews there’s a certain charm to that idea but it’s not very handy. The main drawback is that the small display can hardly fit more than one application so there’s no variety.

The menu style is almost identical to the one seen in the TouchWiz phones with colorful icons, reminding us of the “Care Bears” cartoon. Unfortunately however, you get no chance to get out of the cartoon due to the lack of additional graphic themes. You can freshen up the look with various wallpapers and by changing the system fonts (3 types). Moving through menus is assisted by transition, which also cannot be modified. However, it slow and looks good, so we will not complain about it.

Of course there are at least a few elements which remind us of the iPhone. When setting the time vertical scrolls characteristic of the Apple device will appear. They are smaller and not that user-friendly. Deactivating a ringing alarm is also similar; in iPhone we have ‘slide to stop alarm’, and the same thing will visualize here with corrections in the design. It looks like the discontent we expressed from the F480’s interface has been addressed, and now scrolling in the lists is done in the same way everywhere, making the navigation through the menus much easier.



Phonebook:

The improvements here have made more contacts visible at the same time, and searching is done by finger scrolling through the alphabet. There are multiple fields for each new contact and you can  have multiple entries per label, allowing you to input two cellular numbers for example.


The onscreen numeric keypad is large and user-friendly, but there isn’t an option to search for matches in the names or numbers. The contact pictures are visualized on half of the screen during an incoming call and look good.

Organizer:

The Pixon is not a smartphone nor a business oriented device but is equipped with a decent organizer targeting the mass consumer. Only the most frequently used options appear when adding a schedule to the calendar;  there is a button which reveals the rest of them (description fields, repetitions) though. Moreover, you have memos and tasks with priorities at your disposal. The World clock has an interesting though not very convenient to use interface (no search). We also have a simple calculator and a handy unit converter, which shows the values of all units simultaneously. Another menu houses the timer and the countdown timer. There’s also a Dictaphone, which is good enough for voice memos. The file browser is a separate icon in the main menu which is well made and can be viewed as a list or as icons and allows the easy selection and relocation of multiple files.

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.

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.

Performance:

We were pleased with the Pixon’s ability as a pocket multimedia player, and it did pretty well as just an ordinary phone too. We have a few comments about the sound in the receiver, because it is somewhat muffled at times, but overall, it’s good. Your collocutor will have no troubles hearing you either. To our regret, the loudspeaker doesn’t perform at a very high level and the incoming sound is muddled (which is strange, because the music did sound good.)  On the caller’s end you’ll sound weak, even when you are speaking from a very short distance.

Conclusion:

Samsung has chosen the right direction for development of their touchscreen phones.  The experiments with the Croix interface were not successful so the company had to follow the trends. Colors were added to the menus, but neither the software nor the functionality of F480 was finely designed. First the OMNIA, and now with the Pixon, everything is changing. The new model not only has a very user-friendly interface but excellent functionality.This is probably the first phone which can actually compete with the iPhone and although its music player is not that attractive, it performs very well with quality sound. The video playback is slightly behind Apple’s phone but this is compensated by the multiple codec support. Add the 8MP camera and the only comments going to the not-so handy web browser, which is way behind the leaders in the category. However, we hope that a future software update will resolve the issue. We recommend the Pixon to everyone who wants to have a fun phone.