Since this digicam has been out for long, i shall not go into the details as most would have been covered by other reviewers.
Straight to the photos...
Common settings
Wide Dynamic Range: Off, On, Auto
Recording Sound: On/Off
Shutter sound: Off, Shutter 1, Shutter 2, Shutter 3
Contrast: -100, -50, 0, 50, 100
Saturation: -100, -50, 0, 50, 100
Sharpness: -100, -50, 0, 50, 100
Default filename: Text, Date
Memory in use: Phone memory, Mass memory, Memory card
GPS tagging: On/off
Quality: High, Normal Economy
ISO: Auto, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600
Exposure metering: Matrix, Spot, Center-weighted
Single shot mode: Take and save, Automatic save
Blink detection: on/off
I shall not comment much on the quality, let the photos speak for themselves. Are you sure that's a cameraphone, and not a digital camera?!
Really impressed by how Innov8 handles this shot.
The lightings and colours turn out very nice.
First up, the phone comes preinstalled with 3 themes, the first 2 look pretty much the same to me, while the 3rd one is more cheerful in colours.
Besides the theme, you could also customise the standby screen. There are 3 types to choose from, namely the full page, basic idle and vertical icon bar. I prefer the vertical icon bar. Its a very neat tool, besides being able to access calendar, radio, media player, settings, there is also a shortcut menu where you could customised with your own favourite links! Very handy, as i do not need to access the menu most of the time to complete the task.
The vertical icon bar standby.
Not sure if its the same as other Symbian phone, on the Innov8, the message composer has been combined into one. So you will be brought to the same screen when you try to send sms or mms. In order to send a mms, you have to bring up the toolbar to add multimedia contents, and voila! Your message will now be sent as MMS.
Last but not least, look at the wealth of keys there! The 2 chrome keys could not be customised, one will launch the menu, while the other will launch the gallery. There are options to customise both soft keys and the 2 M keys flanking the clear button. This is a nice touch as it gives you 2 additional shortcuts key to launch application on top the usual ones, not to say the shortcuts available on the standby screen. On top of that, as there is an extra row, the first row of numeric keys are now much further away on the usual slider phone, this do away the issue where people with fat thumbs having trouble to press numbers.
A unique touch on the direction pad is the addition of the optical sensor in the middle. Definately would prefer this configuration over the Omnia's only optical sensor. You have a choice of using the usual way, where the optical sensor could be depress to fire the action key as per normal D-pad, or you could also use the optical sensor soley to navigate around the phone. Sharks, they should have done this for Omnia too. Navigation becomes much faster with this hybrid of optical sensor and normal direction pad.
More onto the preloaded application next time...
Newsflash! Newsflash! 'A new phone on the block'! Its the latest 8Megapixel camera phone from Samsung, the Samsung Innov8.
Basically, You will be overwhelmed by the features of the phone. It has a 8Megapixel camera phone with auto focus, auto macro, face detection, smile detection, blink detection, auto panarama shooting, auto white balance, auto flash, VGA video recording, slow motion video recording anti shake detection, WDR, GPS tagging, ISO settings, and exposure metering. Not satisfied? The phone is also preinstalled with Symbian OS 9, realplayer, music player, divx decorder, recorder, radio, video editor, digital frame, smart reader, units converter, zip manager, quickoffice, PDF reader, fring, DLNA, ShoZu, Yahoo Go, CNN, FIFA 08, Asphalt4, google apps, landmarks, dictionary, samsung widgets, bluetooth, wifi, 8GB storage, optical mouse, 3.5mm headset jack. That should be enough of the rattling.
First impression of the phone is great. When i first saw the photos on the web, the phone looks huge and heavy. But the real set feels nice on hand and the weight does not appear to be as heavy as it seems on the web.
On to the unboxing photos;
Small box for a feature laden phone
All the accessories that comes with my test set.
A closer look at the headset, both the normal earpiece and the headset uses 3.5mm....
hmm, wondering how they did it...
A lot of shortcut keys on the face, besides the usual left and right softkeys, there are 2 more shortcut keys (the ones in chrome), 5-direction pad, optical mouse. On the right side of the phone is the camera mode, shutter key and micro sd slot.
On the left, there's the volume rocker, the headset jack, and charger jack. At the back is the camera lens, LED flash and stereo speakers.
After plugging in the phone to the windows, a few interesting icons showed up. There's a I8510 on Local under Scanners and Cameras, the I8510 (PMP style icon) and the Samsung Phone Browser. Not sure what is the I8510 for, as it doesn't show anything when i open it.
Finally the startup sequence of the phone,
As I'm a forgetful person, I rely heavily on the built-in calendar, a.k.a organiser, of my phone to keep of my stuff. The calendar on the Soul, though simple, definately is not short on features.
There are total of 5 different categories for the events, namely appointment, anniversary, holiday, important and private. Each has its own representation on the cal (as shown on the picture from left to right). No worries on different events falling on the same day, the phone takes care of that by marking different corners to represent each category, and a different colour for the font for a holiday. One could readily have a quick glance on what's coming up, without having to open up the daily view.
The usual stuff are also present such as recussive events and event alarms. The calendar also allows me to import birthdays stored in the contact! This does save me some job on transferring the birthdays to the calendar manually. Another nice addtion is the lunar calendar at the bottom of the screen, comes handy for those religous events.
Another major revamp from old Samsung's calendar is the delete function. What so special about it? You could delete events based on a period of time, instead of the usual per event deletion. There are basically 5 different options. You could delete events on a single day, a period of days, a selected month, any events before a certain date, or basically delete all. In my opinion, the most useful feature would be deleting all events before the specified date. This has been the most important feature but has been missed out in majority of the calendars, this is even so for desktop calendars! All calendars' developers out there, this is a must-have feature! Why do i want to keep all my past events, at least provide some way to for the events to delete automatically or have this feature implemented such that users could delete all the previous events at one go!
Navigation through the calendar haven't been much a problem. There are few shortcut keys implemented for scrolling through the calendar;
-Direction keys : usual mechanism of scrolling through the days
-Up key : press the up key a few times, and the month would be highlighted, and you could scroll through the months
-Volume keys : simply for scrolling through the months
-Clear key: basically delete all the events on the selected day
-numpad: pressing any numbers bring up a prompt, you could jump straight to the day you want :)
This is a really neat calendar that suits all my needs. There is however one shortfall. On older models, there is an option to display the calendar on the standby screen, but has since left out in the new Samsung phones. Anyhow, the cal is nicely implemented for the majority of the normal users.
When i first saw the lens, i couldn't expect much from such a camera. However, as i checkout the photos taken by the camera, i was amazed by its quality. Despite the small lens, the camera onboard could really take great photos. The color reproduction is good, contrast and details are there. In addtion, the antishake feature sure does it job well as I am able to take sharp and clear photos while on the move.
Checkout some of the photos taken by the Soul
a panaromic shot taken by Soul :D
A few videos taken by the phone as well
