Samsung Pixon M8800 Review

Overall Rating

Now, I ' ve got a Samsung Pixon M8800 recently and was having rather high expectations to use it as my PIM gadget, the ultimate device for all my contacts, notes, schedules and emails. Reading on all the specifications, GPS, 8 megapixels autofocus camera and all, it was a phone good on paper for a very good price compared with the others. The plus side is that the camera is so full of functions, you will have heaps of fun toying around with advance features like face detection, smile shots and such. That ' s all there seems to be to this phone, a very powerful camera system.

GeoTagging of photos, I took 2 weeks to figure it out. Firstly you have to turn on the GeoTagging feature in the camera settings. And by accident I discovered GeoTagging does work. Only after turning on the camera for 3 minutes or so before I noticed the satellite dish icon showed a 2 bar stable status and stayed that way. If the icon is in a transition state, it means the GPS receiver is still trying to log on to the GPS signals. One does really need to hold the phone high, run around a little and try all sorts of holding the phones in all imaginable orientation just to get GPS logged on. If a picture is successfully tagged, you can see the long-lat information via the info functions while browsing photos. Loading the image into Picassa/Google Earth is also another way to know if your pictures had been tagged. When you have successfully tagged pictures (one out of 15 times), it could be quite fun to view them in Google Earth. Bringing GPS features further, using Google Maps, just waiting for GPS to logon while driving is a nightmare. It is especially a big pain when near critical traffic junctions, the blue dot remained very still on the screen as the Pixon had lost it GPS signal. Which means, Samsung did't do a very good job here, on this GPS thingy. They could have done better.

What about the organizer? One will orgas with frustration just to make it working. The great Samsung New PC Studio is truly a software written just to corrupt your Outlook. I ended up with 800 over double entries in my contact list (both outlook and in Pixon) and all my calendar schedules were squeezed into one single day after a synch. I had to spend one whole day just to restore all my schedules and contacts manually in my Outlook after the synch. I do not want to use this software ever again.

Samsung, they did a nice product and that ' s about it. Cosmetically appealing, but functionally, very annoying. It ' s more of a phone for the camera and that is the only good thing about it. This product seemed rushed into the market with appealing paper specs to compete with others, but without much sensible functional testing. Use this only as a fashion and camera gadget. Pixon - a partially functioning phone guarantee to drive you mad if you use it for more then a phone (especially GPS).

Members' Comments onjewie404's Review

• jonad724 on 10th Mar 2009

  I found this review helpful because...I agree with it totally.