If you’ve been following my review series on the Samsung i8910 HD, this is the final part in the installment – the conclusion. Part 1 of the hardware review is here, Part 2 of the hardware review is located here, while the software review is located here. This part will also cover some sections that I neglected to write about in the preceding parts of this review series.
Call quality
I don’t make a lot of calls, but I did try the voice calling quality on my own unit of the i8910 HD, equipped with the Hongkong firmware version IH1. Call quality was expected, it was neither worse nor noticeable better than other smartphones I’ve tested. During my few calls, I did not experience dropped calls, nor degradation in call quality, although even if I had, it could be the network. For the record, I tested using DiGi’s voice network.
Typing and messaging
Creating text messages on the phone is slightly easier than using a feature-phone, or “dumb-phone” as I like to call it. Feature phones are non-smartphones, popularised by those cheap Nokia phones with alphanumeric keypads. The i8910 HD has a soft/virtual keyboard of course, and in landscape mode, displays in full mode – in fact, this is the only way one can use the soft keyboard. There is a small space between the keys of the keyboard, preventing accidental touches of nearby keys while typing. On the whole, the typing experience on the full virtual QWERTY keyboard was acceptable to me, it’s not as good as that on the iPhone, even when the keyboard on the iPhone is in portrait mode. The soft keyboard does not support predictive text (aka “T9″). T9 is only present as an option when using the alphanumeric keypad in portrait mode. There is also no auto-correct feature, so if you’re a touch typist, you may frequently have to go back to correct wrongly typed words at the end of your message.
Because the underlying operating system does not support multi touch, I experienced a little frustration when typing, on occasion. If you type too fast with two thumbs, sometimes if the key presses are too close to each other in terms of timing, the second keypress would not register, and sometimes the phone would mess up even the first character typed, requiring a frustrating correction. That is why I said that the typing experience on the i8910 HD is only slightly better than using a phone with an alphanumeric keypad.
With that out of the way, let’s do a recap of the phone.
Strengths
- 8 megapixel camera, taking pictures of rather good quality (to my untrained non-photographer eyes, anyway). The speed of picture taking and saving still cannot beat the speed of the Samsung Jet I reviewed earlier, though but of course it has to be mentioned that the Jet uses an 800MHz application processor, while the i8910 HD’s processor “only” runs at 600MHz.
- 720 pixel high definition video camera, a first amongst smartphones. Until today, if this is an important feature to you, I think it is the only smartphone with this capability, at least if we only take into account smartphones officially available in Malaysia. However, this is somewhat tempered by the fact that video is still captured at 24 frames per second (fps), so hopefully a future firmware upgrade will increase this to 30fps for “smoother” videos.
- large RAM enabling the user to open and leave open many applications for “multi tasking”. Even when I had around 10 applications open (built in, plus other applications) I did not experience slowdown in performance. The phone did not freeze or “hang” once during my review period.
- good support for multimedia files. Video files encoded using the DivX codec, in AVI format, downloaded off the internet is immediately playable on the i8910 HD, without conversion, which is more than can be said for other smartphones, which typically require conversion, which can be frustrating and certainly time consuming.
- inclusion of PDF and Microsoft Office reader applications is a plus as the user does not need to hunt for them.
- large, bright and vibrant-colour-producing AMOLED capacitive touchscreen which looks far better than resistive ordinary LCD screens.
- inclusion of GPS+ application which speeds up satellite signal locking when using GPS navigation applications.
Weaknesses
- slow handwriting recognition to make the feature useless. This is likely a Symbian shortcoming rather than a Samsung shortcoming. So far, the only decent handwriting recognition feature I’ve been able to use have been on Windows Mobile smartphones.
- user interface which is clunky and sometimes a little slow. Again, this is a fault of the underlying Symbian operating system. Sometimes you need to tap once, sometimes twice to open another menu or launch an application – you just never know which until you try! This is a common complaint of the s60v5, aka Symbian touch platform that many, if not all, reviewers have voiced when reviewing phones with this operating system.
- applications which are not “signed” cannot be installed on the phone. Yet again, a limitation of the underlying Symbian operating system. There are good software out there which are not signed because the developer does not have the money to purchase an expensive Symbian developer certificate. The user is then forced to hunt or get a certificate to “self-sign” these applications so that they will install.
- some of the usual Nokia branded applications cannot be installed without re-signing the application with a certificate for the phone, but once you have a certificate, installing Nokia applications such as Nokia Messaging, Mail for Exchange, etc is easy!
My conclusion is this – this is a phone with excellent hardware features that is killed by a poor operating system. If it was released perhaps three months ago, in June, it would have been a hit. For reasons known only to Samsung Malaysia, this phone was delayed time and time again, and only released in the Malaysian market a few weeks ago, and to top it off, we have not even had an official launching of the phone yet (if ever!).
Considering the smartphones now on the market, from the HTC Hero running Android, to the (very) soon-to-be-released HTC/Samsung phones equipped with Windows Mobile 6.5, the i8910 HD running Symbian is looking increasingly dated and old. Had the i8910 HD been equipped with Android and TouchWiz, it would probably have been a very different story. Now it is only a (relatively expensive) smartphone vying for a share of our wallets. If one were to ask me whether to buy an i8910 HD now, or buy an Android phone, for example the HTC Hero, my answer would be that if you require a lot of third party application support for your new smartphone, Symbian is still the platform to choose. But if you are satisfied with the applications which are pre-loaded on the Android smartphones and are willing to wait for newer and better third party applications to emerge, then Android’s the place to be. I’ve always maintained that the Symbian platform as it exists today is in need of a serious, dire refresh, but unfortunately we are not going to see any significant improvements until at least late in 2010. And that’s a great big pity for Symbian indeed as the other smartphone operating systems are not going to sit still waiting for Symbian to play catch-up.
My advice to Samsung? Focus on Android and develop TouchWiz like HTC has developed Sense UI for its Android smartphone line. Focus on Windows Mobile and do a similar thing with TouchWiz. Until Symbian can develop something that can match the “usability” of these other platforms, it’s probably best to stay on the sidelines watching things unfold. Even Nokia is playing it safe by placing its bets on more than one horse with the maemo 5 equipped N900!
[Disclaimer] I was not paid to do this review. I did not receive any benefits-in-kind, nor discounts for any products sold by this company. The review unit has been returned to its rightful owner.
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android is still a ‘young’ platform with a lot of drawbacks of its own as well and you advising samsung to focus on samsung rather than symbian isn’t exactly what i call a good advice.
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Da Alpha Dog Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 10:15 am
@Anon, why Android? It’s open source, capable of being customised far far more than Symbian ever will. Look at what HTC and Motorola have done for it. While still young, the potential is there. Symbian is dead as far as I’m concerned – doesn’t the lack of new products from Nokia bother anyone? Also, look at the amount of publicity they’re pouring into maemo – will this be the future? Who knows?
The next Symbian failure will be the SonyEricsson Satio – this one will be killed by a combination of high price, as well as the exact points I brought up on why Symbian is not the best platform to focus one’s development efforts on right now.
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You say symbian is dead but how about the recent ‘migration’ from being an OS for keypad phones into the current touchscreen OS? Sure, the ‘migration’ is a bit buggy, but that sure proves symbian still is working on it. So to kick it aside before watching how everything plays out in the end spells bias for those doing phone reviews such as yourself.
I would say that samsung themselves did a poor job on the i8910hd. the software is so buggy and there are different firmware releases all over the world for different countries. Extreme phones users have taken things into their own hand by cooking up roms and combining good parts from every different firmware update there is out there. You don’t see people doing that to nokia phones.
I believe Sony will have a different level of customization thrown in symbian for the satio. And if the satio sucks, it’s simple because their newest ‘multimedia’ device doesn’t have a 3.5mm jack and smallish battery to support the xenon flash.
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Hawke Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 12:42 pm
After experiencing with N97, I felt Symbian are not good enough with touchscreen. It’s better off with regular phone with keypad/full qwerty like E71/E72. Not for touchscreen.
Symbian is still alive, but if the developer doesn’t do something to it, it’s dying. And the reason why Nokia use Maemo to N900 platform is another alternative for their touchscreen phone.
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Da Alpha Dog Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 1:10 pm
@Hawke, so how? Got rid of that piece of trash yet?
What phone are you waiting for next?
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Hawke Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 2:19 pm
If the upcoming v20 firmware doesn’t satisfy me, yeah I’ll change. Change to HTC Hero i guess. Wanna try Android.
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Da Alpha Dog Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 1:05 pm
@Anon, Symbian is not yet dead. Not yet. But it soon will be. Nokia has just done a piss poor job of porting an ageing operating system to support touch. It’s a poorly implemented migration. Simple as that. It’s like building a Ferrari body, but only having a Proton engine inside. That’s the analogy. If you’re forced to use a Proton engine, there’s nothing much you can do except pray that it works. And in this case, Symbian touch just doesn’t deliver.
Bias? Of course I’m biased. Anyone who has an opinion is biased. That’s what sites like mine are for. Don’t like the bias? Go somewhere else which agrees with your opinions and views of the world. That’s how life works – we’re only friends with people who share similar opinions.
Cooking up ROMs improves the phone. Again, it improves a piss poor underlying system called Symbian. We see custom ROMs for almost every HTC device. Personally I’d rather buy something that can be customised to my liking, like my iPhone and to a certain extent, the i8910 HD, than being tied down to what Nokia thinks I should use.
SonyEricsson? The Satio will die a death similar to the Xperia X1. Trust me. It’s only a matter of time. Just because a phone doesn’t have a 3.5mm jack doesn’t make it “suck”. Battery? I’ll reserve my judgement when I see reviews of its battery life. Unless you’re one to use the Xenon flash a lot, that is not a consideration. And if you do use the flash a lot, get a digicam, that’s what they’re for. These are phones first, cameras second or third. Or fourth.
So again, yes, I am biased. Anyone who has an opinion is biased. Even Switzerland, who declares itself a neutral country, is biased. They’re biased because they took a stand in something.
By the way, if you’re a Nokia fanboy, there are sites in Malaysia for that. Head on down here to join the local community of fanbois -> symbian.smashpoop.net
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I had both the 5800 and the N97. The OS seemed alright when I had the 5800 but then later I realised it was because it was something “new” and the phone was cheap, so I “forgave” a lot of its shortcomings.
Then I switched to the N97 due to its beautiful design (some may disagree with me here, but wtf) and I wanted a slide out qwerty keyboard. After the initial euphoria of having the first iteration of touchy feely s60, which quickly wore off, I too realised that the os was “clunky” to use.
And someone said the i8910 was buggy? HHhmmmppphhh! So was my bloody N97! And it was getting a bit slow and laggy for my usage. After 2 months usage and one “hanging” session too many, I decided to get rid of it a.s.a.p. before it lost too much value. I had updated the software to the latest version 12 and it still wasn’t happening for me. And the GPS was really quite hopeless too.
For me, the main culprit ruining my experience with the N97 was the pitiful amount of RAM, the rather hopeless GPS and the unpolished OS. So, in the end, I thought to myself: If I bought the N97 for RM1,600 or less, then I can forgive the shortcomings, because you get what you pay for (which was the case with my previous 5800). But since I paid RM2370 for it, no way is this acceptable, so [put your fav swear word here] it!
IMHO, s60v5 is in no man’s land at the moment. Everyone is waiting for the new Symbian Foundation OS. But obviously, it has been delayed for some reason. SE couldn’t wait any longer and decided to go ahead with s60v5 in their Satio. However, I wonder how much more development is going to go into s60v5 in the meantime? Spend lots more money to develop s60v5 only to have it replaced by the SF OS in a few months or a year? Or just pretty much leave s60v5 as it is, but spend a little money to tweak it here and there in the interim?
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Hawke Reply:
October 1st, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I fully agree with your statement about the Nokia N97.
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Ya, sorry for me to think that you’re running some ‘realible source’ tech site. you should just name yourself malaysia mobile tech news except nokia or something. and I just had to laugh. I understand your tendency for tying nokia with symbian, but just because i said a few words for symbian doesnt automatically mean that i am a nokia fanboy. you might think nokia with symbian is a bad combination to some extend, but it has given many a chance to own a touchscreen smartphone for less than 1k (in the case of the 5800). and if those user get any wiser, of course they would switch to something better and complicated, such as a winmo device. those dumbs ones just rant on and on about how symbian should be a better phone OS, dying etc. I kinda pity those buying a ‘flagship’ n97 thinking that they have hit the jackpot but i guess it’s their basic understanding of phones which have led to such thinking. Longer users would have foreseen that n97 is nth so special to shout about.
You may diss the satio all you want, thinking it would die a horrid death because it lacks a ‘proper’ smartphone OS, but the fact is, it will not go down so easy. I know you’d like that (Satio die), i for one as well but sony always has that way to make things seem right and attractive. Real smartphone users will dismiss it immediately, but for those who think that getting a 12mp cameraphone would be cool, it still has a selling point. and the none-standard pop-port on the SE does make it ‘suck’. the fact is, everyone wants to use standard connections!
I guess you’re too high up in your mobile tech thinking that you forgotten that somethings on the lowest ranks of mobile tech such as symbians, do have their appeal to a certain group. There’s always something for somebody.
[Reply]
Da Alpha Dog Reply:
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:41 am
@Anon, sorry to disappoint you. Go to other Malaysian tech sites that give you reliable tech info then
Why laugh? If you think you’re so good, set up your own website and see how you do. That’s the problem with typical Malaysians – good at bitching, but when it comes down to the crunch, the vast majority just don’t have the balls to do anything about it. And you seem to epitomise this characteristic.
I repeat again – the Satio will die a death identical to the Xperia X1. No amount of good hardware is going to save a phone from piss poor operating system. Me high up? Nah, I’m just a nobody. Who cares about what I say?
I say again – go to symbian.smashpoop.net – it’s a Nokia fanboy site, it’s reputedly the Nokia Malaysia blue-eyed boy fansite. You will find a lot of people there who will share your sentiments, so all of you can go all cuddly and get along famously. Meantime, once you’ve set up your fanboy site, do drop me a line – I’ll make sure to visit!
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But we are on the subject of smartphones which are in the same category as the i8910 here, right? We are not really talking about “lower end” smartphones, right?
If Nokia puts s60v5 into cheaper phones like the 5800 and its subsequent clones, then yes, its ok. Like I said, its ok cos’ the phone is sold as a cheaper phone and “non-flagship”.
But when you tout a phone as a flagship phone and putting a comparable flagship price on it like the N97, we SHOULD all expect more, but the N97 disappointed.
Buy a Vios, expect a Vios. But buy a Camry, we should expect a Camry, not an Altis, or worst, back to a Vios!
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