Samsung G810 Reviewed; Does S60 Need to be on a Nokia?

it's really unfair to compare phones with each other,by doing this you miss the whole point.

thanks for this. i actually requested this few days ago. i was holding myself from buying this unit and now...i'll probably hold longer...

@unregistered: why is it unfair? The two devices are EXACT competitors....

Where's the score?

It does depart a bit from your usual reviews by making it a direct comparison with a (direct or less direct) competitor. I am not sure if that's the style you want to pursue.

i absolutely agree with steve.
After all, these one on one only help us in our purchase decisions is a right manner. They have not compared omnia to n 95 8gig. But this is symbian vs symbian. Apples to apples and not oranges to apples.

Rafe, steve, ewan, tzer2, and everyone at aas, carry on with your super cool job. You guys rock!
These 'spams' will be coming!!!

Steve, from the G810 lens picture I see that its lens is much less light sensitive than that of the Nokia N95 (being a fixed Zeiss and all), The difference is factor 2 and more at f=5.6 mm. I also noted your pictures were taken in sunny conditions. What about some evening, twilight shots? How do they compare then? Also I wondered if your zoom shots were taken by hand or using something like a DT-22. Especially light cameras are difficult to hold stable in your hand and zoom is in a lot of free hand snapshots no better than digital zoom, so I wondered if the optical zoom comparison was best or worst case shots.

Any samples of the xenon flash of the G810 versus the N82 comparison available on flickr or elsewhere?

All feedback noted. This review is a bit unusual, but then the G810 is a bit different. The G810 clearly has commonalities with the N95 / N82 - they are positioned in the same (relatively small) consumer segment.

I did try and get hold of a G810 earlier, but by the time we did get it - well it was at the point where the value of a full review was less than a comparison - hope that makes some sense. It also worth reading the i550 review as many of the same thing apply. Outside the camera and physical design the devices are very similar.

Added to that is the fact I'm not sure many people will go for it with the i8510 / Innov8 around the corner unless it was notably better that the Nokia devices (especially given the cost). [at least those who read AAS]. As you have hopefully seen we've already given the i8510 an in depth preview and will follow this up in the review stage too.

snoyt - I didn't play with this for long, but I did notice the shake issue you mention when using the zoom. I don't have any direct comparison pictures, but I'm confident the Xenon flash was weaker. We'll try and do an updated camera shoot out in due course - need to get all the 5 MP+ phones in the same place at the same time!

The casing although solid,looks like it will scratch quite easily,in the review the back panel looks a bit scratched already...:con?

snoyt wrote:Steve, from the G810 lens picture I see that its lens is much less light sensitive than that of the Nokia N95 (being a fixed Zeiss and all), The difference is factor 2 and more at f=5.6 mm. I also noted your pictures were taken in sunny conditions. What about some evening, twilight shots? How do they compare then? Also I wondered if your zoom shots were taken by hand or using something like a DT-22. Especially light cameras are difficult to hold stable in your hand and zoom is in a lot of free hand snapshots no better than digital zoom, so I wondered if the optical zoom comparison was best or worst case shots.

The banana shot is a good test for lower light levels, since that was indoors on an overcast day. The shots were all taken free-hand, though with care taken to brace my hands and I did check that I hadn't introduced too much wobble...

If the competition was down to the wire then I'd do some proper tripod shots, but it was fairly obvious that the G810's sensor wasn't up to the same standard as Nokia's units..... it's a good camera phone but not the best. Even with the advantage of optical zoom, IMHO.

Can Samsung improve the images in firmware? Maybe. The colour problems could be compensated for in software . Anyway, looking forward to the INNOV8 and hoping that they've used decent recent firmware for it....

The different review style was partly because of it being a 'joint' review and partly because of the obvious N95 comparisons....

We do like to ring the changes every now and then.

for steve.......

this phone was chosen as the best camera phone for 08 and won an award, ture or false.

That's as maybe. And with the optical zoom it might even be right, in terms of awards. But the rest of the device drags the camera down and the pale colours really spoil the overall score....

Hey, a really good first article, Andy! Needed more detail which Steve filled in but I really like your writing style. Looking forward to more reviews!

-Jamal.

I know this is off-topic,but GSMArena has just reviewed the LG KT610,the S60 powered "mini E90", have a read: http://www.gsmarena.com/lg_kt610-review-276.php

the design seems quite interesting...😎

Unregistered wrote:Hey, a really good first article, Andy! Needed more detail which Steve filled in but I really like your writing style. Looking forward to more reviews!

-Jamal.

Thanks Jamal, i enjoyed writing it and im sure the details will improve over time 😉

slitchfield wrote:The banana shot is a good test for lower light levels, since that was indoors on an overcast day.

THe impression is less colorsensitivity and heroic efforts for contrast from the Samsung. But a nice multicolor object with subtle colorshades would have been more interesting.

Looking forward to the definitive AAS cameraphone of 2008 award. And I am putting all my bananas on the N82, in case the innova is not participating. And no doubt the double diode 5MP's Nokia's will win the video mobilephone award ;^)

;^)

wow . This is amazing the way you have found out minute details from the review. Things to learn!

It certainly seems to speed up getting a GPS fix. No idea why it has a different name ('XTRA'?) or fails for you.

GPS (with Google Maps) works as well as any other S60 device I've tried, and better than most.

The Music player is a little tricky to use, but the sound quality on my Nokia BH-503 Bluetooth headphones is great. This is the first device I've loaded music onto - ever since I had an early Sony Walkman I always get the headphone wires tangled or caught on things - A2DP rocks!

ttfn

This is first time for me to post here and I would first like to say that I love AAS. And I do not even own a Symbian phone!

I'm trying to decide on my next phone and am having a difficult time of it. Money is somewhat of a concern for me because (sad to admit) I don't make that much. But I love the IDEA of a owning a smartphone, the IDEA of creating my own video podcasts, and I REQUIRE great calendar functionality and the ability to play music loud enough to drown out the sounds of the train-station when I go to work in the morning.

I live in China. I tried out the G810, which here goes for around 2500RMB. The N95 8G goes for around 3800RMB. This is the price for warrantee-less models that have been imported without tax. (Phone for the China market are more expensive, and lack 3G AND lack Wifi, but do have warrantee).

There are some things that should be pointed out, which were left out of your review:
1. Sound volume is MUCH louder on the G810 compared to other non-N81 n-series phones. I cannot comment on quality of sound because it just sounds great to me but I may not have the right "ears" for noticing much difference.

2. The keys next to the d-pad lack labels. That's sort of annoying. On the other hand, being a left-hander, I found the c key to be nice

3. I don't think USB charging was mentioned. I used to have a motorolo which can charge over usb. That's a VERY nice feature.

4. It was not mentioned in the review if it is a 4 frequency phone or 3 frequencies. I have read different things on this.

5. Give me advice: wait for N85, or get this G810?

ashu wrote:wow . This is amazing the way you have found out minute details from the review. Things to learn!

You can see the colorblotches and stronger graininess (and more strongly filtered too) in the G810 bananas. They are less present in the N82 images, which I think is caused by a better color to noise quality, requiring less effort (filtering, enhancing) of the N82 image to get a nice picture. Then again, without doing some extensive testing, I would not bet my car on it ;^) Hence impression.

ogami_ito wrote:
5. Give me advice: wait for N85, or get this G810?

The N85 is like the the other N95-based models a much better smartphone than the G810. Partly because of the large collection of Nokia additional software.
Smarting the phone to you personal flavor. The N95 packs a lot of speaker noise. More than the speaker setup of the N82 which looks like that of the N81. If you have the cash wait for the N85 with wmv support, the oled display, the dual-led that is great for filming. The G810 only films at 15 Hz compared to the Nokia's at 30 Hz.Which is a significant difference.

If you don't care about that or expect to take more pictures and want a xenonflash, buy a black N82 and save some hefty cash.

both of guys are stupid?they could set up color saturation on g810 manualy and results are same ''nokia overcolored wow style''another think is every day freezing nokia's soft but g810 works w/o freeezing.i own both devices.cheers!

Thanks for this review - I couldn't have asked for a more pertinent article considering I own an n95 classic and have an upgrade available. This does look like a good phone but as you mention, it's a shame it doesn't really give me anything more than my N95 which I've had for well-over a year. Shows how far ahead of it's time the n95 was (especially if you kept up with the firmware).

It's a shame because optical zoom and xenon flash were really all that was missing from the n95 and here they have proved that the lens and the s/w are still a deciding factor. Interesting point above about manually setting the saturation - it would be interesting to play about with that and maybe Samsung will tweak the out-of-the-box settings in later releases of the firmware, but in the end I would've still expected better results from the Samsung given the spec.

Guess I'll have to hang on for the Innov8...or whatever Nokia decide to bring out in the 8mp arena (they do seem to be taking their time though). Oh and if I do end up getting the innov8, I too will sorely miss all those nice pieces of Nokia s/w (maps especially).

More reviews like this please - glad to see a review where the reviewer is concentrating on the important stuff and who isn't banging on about the boy-band-of-phones from Apple.

Good work guys.:icon14:

ILG

Some other reviews claim this is the best camera phone and even compared it against actual cameras.

I'll take this review with a grain of salt as i understand many are used to 'Nokia'.