Samsung S8300 Ultra Touch

Samsung’s on a roll with this, the Ultra Touch being the third mobile handset bearing an 8 megapixel camera lens. They’ve gone with an amalgamation of form factors with this one – it has a touchscreen like the Pixon and it’s also a slider like the INNOV8. But enough talk let’s get on with the review.

Form Factor
What I love about the handset is that it’s extremely slim and sleek even though it comes as a slide down keypad that’s totally unnecessary, and it also has an 8 megapixel camera with an LED flash. It’s well designed for most part but there are few things that I was not too happy with. The 2.6-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen features a 240 x 400 pixel resolution with 16 million colors and a built in accelerometer and sensor. The display is also scratch resistant and very responsive.

What I didn’t like was the fact that the handset didn’t have a hot swap slot for the microSD card. Worse still you’ll have to remove the battery if you need to access it. Another problem I had was with the all-in-one micro USB port. If the battery was low I was unable to listen to music while charging. Thankfully the microphone adapter with the handsfree had a 3.5mm earphone socket so I was able to use my own set of earphones. On the same side as the USB port is a screen lock key followed by the camera key. Volume/Zoom keys were on the other side.

The reason I mentioned that the keypad was unnecessary was because the design was too flat and too thin, which made typing a little uneasy. Typing was not easy also because the delete key was onscreen (not physical). The distance between the keypad buttons and the delete was a little too far. I’ll also explain further on in the review how redundant the physical keypad actually is. The handset’s available in a Platinum Red or Platinum Blue option which gives it a very fresh look.

Features and Performance:

Interface
The TouchWiz UI is well worked out and very finger-friendly. The responsiveness of the large screen coupled with the large options for selection on the UI make it a very user friendly handset as well. TouchWiz comes with a widget section on the desktop for those who aren’t aware. This section is loaded with quick access icons you can dump onto the desktop for one touch activation of features. The Widgets section can be neatly tucked away when not needed and the shortcuts can be customized. Very handy.

The one place that Nokia has most handset manufacturers beat is when it comes to screen rotating via an accelerometer. It does tend to be a little silly to have only specific screens rotate and the choice not to be in your hands. If a handset has an accelerometer, it should make allowances for rotating the entire menu and not just what the company deems fit for this purpose.

Some screens like the Photo Browser can only be viewed in landscape and like the Pixon you can tilt the handset to either side and watch the images slide on by. It’s easier to select the first image and use the flick control to navigate. But if your picture is in portrait, well, there’s nothing you can do about it from this menu. The tilt system also works from here. But the good thing is the categorization. The system can sort files out according to file name, time and even colors. This app takes its own sweet time to render hi res images sometimes.

Now, the reason why I believe that the Ultra Touch could have possibly been slimmer as well as lighter (not that it’s heavy at all) is if the physical keypad were non existent. The handset also has an onscreen keypad which is user friendly but if you make a mistake or need to make an addition in your text, getting to a specific point is not easy. This is the only time I’d go with a stylus. At least the iPhone and Arena offer a small preview for cursor placement and others usually have a nav-pad to move around. This is one of the two times the UI pi**ed me off.

The second was while web browsing and I had to enter data into a field. I tried using the slide down keypad and suddenly realized that there was no erase option for when I made a mistake. It was quite unnerving, till I tapped the screen twice and it pulled up an onscreen keypad. In landscape mode, the onscreen keypad stays in alphanumeric mode. There’s no QWERTY option. I’ll say it again. The keypad is practically useless. The only use it has for the upper portion is that it covers the camera lens.

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