Samsung M8910 Pixon12 review: By the dozen

Connectivity packs it all

The Samsung M8910 Pixon12 is perfectly capable of providing worldwide roaming with its quad-band GSM support. The 3G coverage is not as perfect with just the 900/2100 bands onboard. Luckily the phone supports both HSDPA up to 7.2Mbps and HSDPA to guarantee the fastest data speeds available.

Bluetooth is also available and comes with A2DP, which is no news on even lower end phones.

The microUSB port is quite welcome as it's a lot more popular than the proprietary port the previous gen Samsung phones used to come with. You can set up the phone to connect in mass storage mode or PC suite mode (Media player) or to prompt each time it's connected.

In mass storage mode it gives access to the memory card but not to the internal memory and you cannot use the phone for calls or data in this mode.

To round it all off, the Samsung M8910 Pixon12 is WLAN enabled. It sports a nice Wi-Fi manager that makes it easy to add an access point to your list, while throwing some nice graphics at the same time. The problem is that you need to update each application's profile every time you want to use it with a different access point.

The Wi-Fi manager is pretty nice

This means that if you are at work and you have set your browser to use your office Wi-Fi network, you will have to reach for the profiles when you go home and switch to your own network, or if you want to use it over 3G. We really hope Samsung will come up with a more intuitive solution to automatically handle the networks currently available.

Web browser is up for the challenge

Samsung M8910 Pixon12 and the Samsung S8000 Jet are the two pioneers of the new WebKit-based Dolfin web browser, which is an in-house developed application. With full Flash support and the new one-finger zooming, it is one of the finest web browsers we have seen so far (especially on a feature phone).

The new web browser allows up to 5 pages to be open at the same time. Multiple downloads in the background are also supported and there is also a built-in AdBlocker. Unluckily, it tends to run out of resources pretty fast, displaying a warning with only three not really heavy sites opened simultaneously. We cannot quite see it managing the promised five pages but then again we don't really use that many on a cell phones usually.

The one-finger zooming works like a charm. Of course you can also rely on double tapping a block of text or an image and the handset will automatically zoom in on it. Another double tap and you are back to the previous zoom level.

The web browser is just great

On top of Flash and Java support, the new web browser also offers kinetic scrolling and fullscreen view mode. In all fairness, the kinetic scrolling is somewhat bumpy and not as smooth as on the iPhone but it still does the job.

The Pixon12 has full Flash support, including Flash video

Organizer fully equipped

The Samsung M8910 Pixon12 has a good number of useful time-managing applications.

For starters, the calendar offers three views - daily, weekly and monthly. You can choose which calendar view should be default and you can pick the starting day of the week - the options are Monday or Sunday. However, with the Pixon12 there are only two types of events available in the calendar. You can set the starting date and time of the event and set an alarm to act as a reminder.

There's nothing unusual about the calendar

The alarm is quite customizable. You can set up to 10 alarms, each with the following configurable options - custom ringtone, volume, repetition days and name.

Setting up an alarm

The calculator of the Samsung M8910 is pretty much as basic as it gets. Among the other organizer offerings are a voice recorder and a unit converter. The voice recorder limit is 60 minutes. A countdown timer and a stopwatch come in useful too.

The calculator only has the most basic features • Some of the other organizer apps

There are also to-do and memo applications for taking down tasks and notes. You can also use the memo widget to place a memo on the homescreen where you're unlikely to forget it. The widget and the application are separate so don't expect your memos to automatically pop up on screen. There's a to-do widget as well.

The Video editor also deserves a mention. It can handle videos of up to D1 resolution and there's the option to edit them - trimming, splitting or inserting text. You can even use photos instead of videos - you just set the time for them to be on screen (from 1 to 30 seconds).

The world clock allows you to quickly check out the time in any given time zone around the world.

The world clock app

Finally, one of the most important applications of the Samsung M8910 Pixon12 organizer is the office document viewer that supports Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF files. It's an application produced by Access and is one of the nicest additions to the software package.

The document viewer is quick enough when opening files; however, panning is rather slow. The document viewer also works in landscape mode (once again, rotating the screen automatically), which makes reading a little easier.