Phone Review

Here's our 10 minute video review of the Samsung Jet. It provides a walk around the device and covers the TouchWiz 2.0 user interfaces (2D and 3D), widgets, on-screen keyboards, web browser and more.

The Jet is the first TouchWiz 2.0 phone on the market, but we're sure others will follow quickly. Sadly, it's unlikely that existing 1.0 models will see an upgrade to 2.0, so don't expect to see this on your Eternity, Behold or Memoir. Most user interface conventions and elements remain the same, so there's virtually no learning curve if you're used to TouchWiz 1.0. What is new is the three screen home screen; similar to Android on the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G (HTC Magic) and the G1, you can flick your finger left and right to see two additional screens. This is a godsend since one screen wasn't enough to hold a decent number of widgets. Now you can clutter three screen's worth and even impose some order on the chaos by putting news and weather widgets on one screen, calendar and reminders on another and so on. Samsung's selection of widgets are useful: WiFi control, Bluetooth control, notepad, month-view calendar, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, profiles, music playback control, CNN Mobile, Google (shortcuts to search, gmail and maps), international news sources such as Das Bild (this is a Euro phone), Yahoo finance, weather, a calculator, a widget that controls widget settings and a widget to download more widgets. The Facebook, MySpace and YouTube widgets are merely shortcuts to the mobile websites for these services. Widgets start life on the widget bar on the left side of the screen. Using widget settings you can hide those that you don't want and you can download new widgets from Samsung. Samsung has released an SDK so that others can make widgets for TouchWiz too, which is promising. When you run most widgets, they pop out onto the "desktop" or home screen and take up some real estate. Though the Jet's resolution is much higher at 800 x 480 pixels than our US TouchWiz phones, you don't really see more on the home screen (effectively, the home screen and programs palette resolutions are the same as older models). That means you won't go blind looking at tiny fonts, but you also won't be able to fit more widgets on a given screen (hence the new 3-screen system).

If that's not enough, there's a second, 3D UI that you launch using a side button. Watch our video review to see a demo of this UI. It's used for launching a selection of programs such as the browser, music player and video player and you select these by spinning the on-screen cube with your finger or by shaking the phone. We found that the 3D UI was a bit slow and that shaking the phone to navigate the UI wasn't very reliable. The music player responds to phone shakes too, but we didn't get consistent results.

For a phone with an 800MHz CPU, the Jet doesn't feel faster than the Samsung Eternity or other Samsung touch screen feature phones. Perhaps few firmware revisions and optimizations will improve things, but we did see occasional minor lags when moving through the applications menu and when switching between home screen pages. There are a variety of pre-installed Java games, and these ran surprisingly slowly, even a BrickBreaker game with fairly low resolution graphics. Where the Jet does shine is video recording and playback. We loaded an SDHC microSD card with movies in AVI and MPEG4 formats and the phone handled 480 x 360 video encoded at high bit rates well.

The Jet's 3.1" display is responsive and quite good for a resistive display. We did occasionally note it missing our tap the first time, but overall it's a pleasure to use. Lists are controllable and the browser supports inertia scrolling.

Samsung's Dolphin web browser is responsive, though you'll want to use it over WiFi for desktop-oriented HTML web sites since EDGE is slow. Though the display's resolution is very high, the initial zoomed out web page view is nearly readable. Rendering is very good but it doesn't give Safari on the iPhone a run for its money (nor any other webkit-based browser for that matter). The controls and options are very similar to Netfront, Samsung's old standard full HTML web browser on TouchWiz phones. Like Netfront, Dolphin doesn't do the best job of re-flowing text to fit the screen, so we had to do side-to-side scrolling, even in landscape orientation. The web browser, like most every application, supports the accelerometer for display rotation and it has a large QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode (T9 in portrait orientation). The browser defaults to full-screen mode and it supports SSL, cookies, cache control and a good deal of Javascript. There is no Flash support. The phone can handle the mobile version of YouTube.com as a consolation.

The Samsung Jet S8000 is the kind of handset phone geeks drool over. It's got every feature under the sun except mobile TV rolled into a slim and attractive package. And surprisingly it's small, light and relatively reasonably priced. The camera is excellent for still shots, downloadable widgets and TouchWiz 2.0 give new life to Samsung's platform and it's a pleasure to see WiFi on a feature phone. TouchWiz 2.0 is new and we experienced growing pains on the Jet, including its seeming dislike of T-Mobile for reliable data connections, UI slow downs and a balky 3D UI with motion detection that seems more like a gimmick. On the upside, the phone can sync to Outlook using the included Samsung PC Studio, it supports Exchange ActiveSync email and it has WiFi to make up for the lack of US 3G.

Pro: Price is nice for all those features. Small and light, nice looking. Has WiFi and a very good user interface for controlling WiFi and Bluetooth connections. Good video playback performance. Downloadable widgets keep boredom from setting in. Takes excellent photos. Very easy to understand UI. Supports Exchange email and PC syncing.

Con: Bugs and niggles with balky 3D UI, poor game performance and issues with T-Mobile data connections. Camera takes mediocre video, despite the high resolution. No US 3G.