Samsung i8910 HD mobile phone review

Posted by Gareth Beavis on Wed 10 Jun 2009

The world's first 720p handset arrives

The i8910 HD (or Omnia HD as it was announced at Barcelona) has finally made its way into the shops, and with its large AMOLED screen and 8GB of internal memory it promises to be a tip top multimedia handset.

- Gallery: See the i8910 HD up-close

When excitedly yanking the phone out of the box, the first thing you’re hit with is the sheer size of the phone. A 3.7-inch touchscreen is always going to be hefty, but it still comes as something of a surprise. However, it’s still skinnier than the iPhone (albeit a bit longer) and has a larger display to book.

The AMOLED (which stands for Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) is by far the most sumptuous-looking on the market, with vivid colours and deep contrast ratios well highlighted by Samsung’s vicarious colour scheme.

The touchscreen is also the most responsive we’ve seen from Samsung as well, with neither a hard press or a lag in fingertip recognition in sight thanks to switching to a capacitive, rather than resistive, screen. This does mean a stylus is out of the question, but given how large the screen is, you really don’t need it.

Either pop in a memory card or attach the phone to the computer and you can throw over up to 40GB of content for the media player to get involved with. It’s a shame that the video player isn’t already on the TouchWiz icon side bar, especially as it’s such an important part of the phone.

But once you get going with a movie, the phone really comes into its own. The screen is large enough to watch a full length film, it’s small enough to comfortably hold in the hands, a3.5mm headphone jack on the chassis itself and you’ve got a PMP-beating phone.

The camera, which is able to take 720p video, is a little less impressive, although the footage is still clear as day. However when we pushed the video onto a 40-inch HDTV it didn’t look as clear as dedicated camcorders, which we suppose you should expect. It’s still one of, if not the, best video recording we’ve seen on a phone though, and for taking footage of your mates down the park or the like it’s great.

The 8MP camera is also a great addition, especially in the thin frame, and builds nicely on Samsung’s growing photography credentials. 8MP suddenly doesn’t seem like much when you’re hearing all about 12MP handsets at the moment, but it’s hard to imagine you’ll need a phone with a better imaging device than the one packed on the i8910.

As you’d expect on a phone with a nearly four-inch screen, the internet browsing is brilliant. Built on the standard Symbian browser we naturally worried it would suffer the same slowdown we’re used to on a number of Nokias, but we were pleasantly surprised. From being able to quickly zoom in to a web page to being able to click a link with surprising accurately, it was a really pleasant experience, although bookmarking could have been a little simpler to work.

Overall, the i8910 is a sublime effort from Samsung to boost its multimedia offering, with a beautiful AMOLED screen and decent storage on top of an improved touchscreen making it arguably Samsung’s top phone of the year so far.

Link: Samsung

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