Fast? Definitely. Good? No. (Samsung GT S8000 Jet)

Member Name: dps83

Product:	Samsung GT S8000 Jet
Date:	10/09/09 (419 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast, good camera, great colour screen.

Disadvantages: Lacking in features and add-ons, Temperamental touch screen and motion sensitivity. Can freeze

Well, where do I start? Samsung have clearly spent hundreds of thousands of pounds advertising the Samsung Jet phone. TV, radio, newspapers, billboards, everywhere you look you see them. It's a real credit to their marketing department that they can get so much exposure for what is actually a spectacularly average phone.

Now first things first. To be fair the Jet doesn't claim to be a Smartphone like, for example, the iPhone, even though this is clearly the market they are aiming for. With a swanky touch screen, motion sensitivity and 5 mega-pixel camera and 800mhz CPU you'd think it was a worthy opponent to the very latest of Smart phones. Let me assure you that it isn't. It's true, the phone is very fast, the applications launch in a split second and operate, for the most part, very smoothly. Problem is though, they're rubbish. The phone comes with all the usual features that any phone has nowadays, calculator, calendar, stopwatch, voice recorder blah blah and all work fine. But, as any iPhone user will tell you, one of the best things about having a Smartphone is the seemingly endless choice of "apps" you can download. So, in case you were wondering, no, iPhone apps don't work on the Jet, what you have instead are what are rather cutely names "Widgets". These can be downloaded directly to the phone with the built-in widget browser. I was so excited when I found this I nearly wet, dreaming of endless hours of browsing the possibilities, the tricks and treats my new phone had in store for me. However upon further investigation I was confronted with no more than a handful of largely useless features. A BBC news widget that is too small to read or navigate, a weather widget which, to be fair DOES work , but only on a very basic and somewhat difficult to use level. Various clocks and calendars which do pretty much what the phone already does. As a whole it was a waste of time.

Now the Jet does come with YouTube and Facebook widgets, very handy, I thought, as these are 2 of my favourite websites. Unfortunately the term "widget" might be a bit over-enthusiastic for these, they are icon links to the websites, handy sure, but seriously Samsung, use your imagination. The Google widget is a little better allowing you to search directly from your "desktop" and also links directly to Google maps and Google mail (now there's a good way to eat your mobile internet allowance).

Anyway you get the picture so enough about the widgets, on to the phone itself. This is the first touch screen phone I've had so I knew it would be strange at first. However, a month later it's still a pain. I'm no technical idiot nor do I have big clumsy fingers, but I find it damned difficult to slide through the menu pages without launching several features that I didn't want. "So rearrange the menu, idiot" I hear you say. Well I'd love to, but you can't. It seems Samsung think they know best and won't let you rearrange the icons, the only things you can customise are the font and the background picture, gee, thanks.

On the subject of the touch screen I move on to texting. I love texting, you love texting, we all love texting. The Samsung Jet hates it. When composing a message you have the standard alpha-numeric ABC2 - DEF3-GHI4...keyboard that appears on the screen, works well enough. One thing that does but me is on capitalisation of letters, especially names and "I". You have to press 2 buttons to turn this on, I've found no quick "shift" button and it doesn't remember which words you capitalise you have to do it each time. BORING. The solution is (or rather should be) the QWERTY keyboard (WITH a shift key) that appears when you turn the phone sideways. Again, this does work, but the keys are very small, and unlike the iPhone is doesn't take an educated guess at which keys you were going for, it just takes your typing as gospel and throws up whatever rubbish you are hitting. Fair enough I should be more careful but it does get tedious having to retype, especially when the touch screen isn't sensitive enough to realise where you're trying to place the cursor in the text you've already written, and there's no button that lets you scroll through the text manually, it's all done on the touch screen. I usually find it's quicker to retype an entire word rather than trying to correct one letter in the middle of it.

So, turning the phone sideways changes the keyboard? That's right, the phone is motion sensitive. You're supposed to be able to scroll through photos with a mere flick of the wrist, but believe me, it doesn't work like this. Even the tutorial that shows you how to use the motion is temperamental at best, and the game that uses the motion simply doesn't work.

Games, ah yes, one of the first things you check when you get a new phone. Don't bother. Let me list what the Samsung Jet has to offer in its "Games & More" section.
-"Tumbling Dice". I thought this might be some exciting casino simulation game, but alas the name says it all. It's a couple of dice. You tap the screen, they roll. Handy if you're playing a board game and lose the dice I guess but not much of a game in itself.
-"Motion Tutorial", I mentioned this earlier, it does exactly what it says on the tin, just doesn't work very well. This is also where you'll find the non-working motion game.
-"Google Maps" - well that's not much of a game is it? Let's play find the house! There it is, I win. Whoop.
-Yeah that's it. No more games for you unless you want to pay several quid for the privilege.

So while I'm in the menu I'll go through some of the other features in more details.

The internet. This is actually OK, it's very fast to load you can scroll smoothly though web pages, and turning the phone sideways gives you a wider and very usable view. I've yet to find a way of saving pictures from the browser (and as I mentioned before, I don't consider myself to be a technical idiot, though if anyone reading this wants to prove me wrong please do feel free). My other moan is the favourites feature. An essential of any phone browser it does what it's supposed to, though as with the main menu you can't rearrange the order and are stuck with a whole load of default favourites linking to various parts of the Vodafone website at the top of your list, you have to scroll through all of this to get to your own pages, (this is after launching a few on the way by accident of course). I've also yet to discover how to bookmark the page that you're currently on, I don't think you can. Nor can you view your history, that's annoying.

My files - that lets you view your files. It works, great.

Video Player - plays your videos (which you can do from the my files bit anyway).

Photo browser - lets you browse your photos (which you can do from the my files bit anyway). Supposedly this also uses the motion sensitivity but as far as I can make out it just likes to do this randomly when you don't want it to just to p**s you off.

Music Player - plays your music, though it does set it out a little better than the My Files section. Hallelujah.

FM Radio - this is novel for me, none of my previous phones had a radio. You have to plug the headphones in for it to work. Personally this doesn't bother me as I'm not one of those chavs who plays music out loud on the bus but I'm sure this would vex some people. One thing that is annoying though is saving your presets. When listening to a radio station the name appears on screen, however when you save stations they're listed by their frequency, another minor moan but boy are these adding up.

Camera - This is actually OK as phone cameras go. The photos are crisp and have fantastic colours. Not quite so good in low-light conditions (the lenses on camera phones just aren't up to the job). There is a light to help with this but it's not a flash, it stays on for a few seconds resulting in everyone in the photo squinting. Handy for finding your keys though.

Well I'm boring myself now so I'll wind up.

Don't be fooled by the adverts. The Samsung Jet is mediocre at best, if Samsung had put even half of what they spent on advertising into further developing the phone and "widgets" it might be pretty good. It has massive potential that is just not being fulfilled. Something else I should mention (this is actually quite important) is freezing. The phone has frozen on me about a dozen times sicne I've had it. It usually springs back into action after about 30 seconds but on a few occasions I've had to disconnect the battery. This doesn't necessarily happen when doing something that would use a lot of memory either, it has happened when reading a text or scrolling through the phone book. Not good. All in all there are plenty of phones on the market that are better, MUCH better even. Seriously.

Sorry.

Summary: Samsung can do better. Other phone companies already have

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