Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH

Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH, otherwise dubbed as the Tocco Ultra edition, joins in on the bandwagon of full touch handsets that seem to be occupying the upper range of the market quite successfully. Nothing can compare to the ease of use of a touchscreen phone - given the user interface is done right. And Samsung have put a lot of effort in their proprietary TouchWiz interface.

The Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH is definitely among the most exciting devices that saw daylight during this year's MWC. We took a closer look at its beta-version and were impressed but the final one is even more impressive. No-one's claiming it's perfect, but it certainly has plenty to show off about.

The handset is known under different names across the world. You may hear people calling it UltraTOUCH, Tocco Ultra Edition (or Tocco Ultra) or just the S8300. But regardless of the name it's hiding behind, there's still the same classy touchscreen slider with an alphanumeric keypad.

Key features: Classy touchscreen slider with an alphanumeric keypad Commendable build quality Quad-band GSM and 3G with HSDPA support 8 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, geo-tagging, face and smile detection, image stabilization, wide dynamic range and D1 video@30 fps 2.8" 16M color AMOLED touchscreen display with 400 x 240 pixel resolution Anti-scratch screen surface Accelerometer for screen auto rotate Proximity sensor for auto screen turn-off MicroSD card slot (up to 16 GB), 1 GB included Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support, Google Maps Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) DivX/XviD video support Stereo FM radio with RDS, FM recording Document viewer Photo Contact Smart dialing

It's been a year since the announcement of the first device of this kind, the LG KF700. The Samsung S8300 takes over where the KF700 left off and attempts a huge leap forward. Just like the LG phone, the S8300 UltraTOUCH is a slick touchscreen slider with an alphanumeric keypad allowing users to experience the joy of having a touchscreen-equipped device without giving up the comfort of the traditional alphanumeric keypad. Usability-wise, there is hardly any replacement for hardware keys for typing text.

It's not the first time you'll hear us saying how great it is to use a capacitive touchscreen, but heavy typing is the touchscreen's greatest enemy and it can be a frustrating experience trying to knock out a long SMS or email using the onscreen keyboard. And this is where the alphanumeric keypad really comes into its own.

The Tocco Ultra packs a powerful 8-megapixel snapper, Bluetooth support, GPS receiver with A-GPS, you name it. The only thing that seems to be missing (considering the price tag) is Wi-Fi support.

Design and construction As you may have noticed when comparing the images from our preview and the review you're reading at the moment, there are some design differences between the final S8300 UltraTOUCH and the early pre-release sample.

As we already suggested, we find the design of Samsung Tocco Ultra Edition quite attractive. The black metallic frame and the rest of the seemingly high quality plastic give the phone a sophisticated and tasteful look.

The layout of the functional elements on the front panel is typical for a touchscreen-operated handset. You get three buttons at the bottom - Call and End keys and a Back button that is used for going one step backwards throughout the menu (and nothing more, it's not a D-pad even if it looks like one).

All the keys on the front are large and comfortable enough to use and provide nice tactile feedback.

At the top you get the earpiece, the ambient light sensor and the videocall camera. There is also a proximity sensor that is used for locking the display when holding the handset next to your ear.

The rest of the UltraTOUCH front panel is taken up by the 2.8" OLED capacitive touchscreen display. Now this is our favorite part of the handset - OLED picture quality and capacitive touchscreen (no pressing necessary - you just have to touch the display) create a great user experience when operating the phone. The amazing contrast on the OLED display ensures any image looks incredibly vibrant on the handset.

As for Samsung's claim that the display is scratch, reflection and smudge-resistant, we think the last two items on the list are more of a marketing gimmick than anything. Legibility under direct sunlight was by no means as bad as the Omnia, but it wasn't spectacular either. And it wasn't uncommon for the display to become a mess of fingerprints either. Unfortunately, we didn't have either the time or the inclination to check whether the screen of the Tocco Ultra Edition was scratch resistant or not.

The sensitivity of the display is excellent and the only downside is the inability to use any other object for pressing the screen (stylus, pen, gloves, fingernails) except for your bare fingertips. Well, this is the pay-off with capacitive touchscreens, but it does mean there's no option for handwriting recognition.

In fact, there is another turn-off related to the screen, namely the UI. Even if the touchscreen itself is very sensitive, the user interface can be a bit sluggish. Still, we're getting ahead of ourselves a little since that is something we'll discuss a little later.

Next on the list is the keypad which is revealed by sliding the phone open. It is quite spacious with large enough keys for comfortable typing. Some additional bordering wouldn't have hurt the typing capabilities of the device but it is good enough as it stands now.

By the way, the S8300 previewing sample way back in February had an on-screen QWERTY keyboard while the final one doesn't, so you're stuck with either the hardware or touchscreen alphanumeric keypads.

The Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH keypad has a nice, even backlighting which, combined with the great display, give it a great visual appeal in the dark.

The right side of the S8300 hosts the camera key, the display lock key and the microUSB slot. The memory card slot is hidden under a small plastic lid to prevent dirt accumulating. We are glad to see Samsung using the standard issue microUSB ports on some of their latest phones, and it would be nice to see other manufacturers doing the same thing.

Under the battery cover is the 880 mAh Li-Ion battery as well as the SIM and microSD card slots. The battery is quoted at 350 hours of standby and up to 4 hours of talk time.

Having a lot of people complaining in or comments section about poor battery life, we paid more attention to our usage pattern and charging. The numbers seem ok for a device with such a large display. The Samsung S8300 lasted three full days and that included 1 hour of taking images and videos, 15 min of browsing the gallery, and 1 hour of voice calls.

As we've already mentioned, the device supports both microSD and microSDHC, and it didn't have any problem handling our 16GB microSD card. The only problem here is the slow first-time access of the microSD card, which may take several minutes. The back cover is made of thin plastic and to remove it you have to press it and slide it upwards at the same time.

The general build quality of the S8300 UltraTOUCH is commendable. No creaks or other disturbing noises of any kind were heard throughout the time of our preview. The slider is also nicely done - as is usual for Samsung, it's smooth and stable.

The only bad seed is the battery cover which scratches very easily. It took less than a week for our test unit to get covered in numerous fine scratches.

User interface The UI is the latest incarnation of Samsung's heavily promoted TouchWiz interface. We wrote about it in the preview, but since we used a rather early prototype back then, you should know there are a few differences that will be mentioned along the text.

The interface is quite slow in general and while the capacitive touchscreen is sensitive enough, presses do not always register, meaning that sometimes pressing a menu icon brings no response or the response comes so late that you've already pressed the thing several times. It can be quite frustrating at times. We really expected more from such a high-end device, and this unresponsiveness really detracts from the overall user experience.

Now let's look at the differences. First off - there aren't three homescreens; instead, there's just one. But the available space for widgets is the same as the homescreen is scrollable.

The three homescreens solution had its advantages, largely because you need to be careful not to put your finger on a widget when you want to scroll as that will drag the widget instead. There's a scrollbar on the right side of the screen, which we found to be a better option.

Leaving the homescreen aside and the new graphics on the menu icons, the rest of the interface has changed little. You have a panel at the bottom of the display that shows three keys this time - keypad, phonebook, and a button to switch back and forth between the homescreen and menu. There are also some nice animations and transition effects throughout the menu, but they're not particularly smooth.

The main menu displays as a 4 x 3 grid of icons, while sub-menus appear as numbered lists. If you wish, you can use the keys on the keypad to select them. Share pix gave way to the Messages menu - which is a good move - but the Navigation menu was replaced with a Google menu (more on that later).

The Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH has simple multitasking capabilities like the Pixon, but it doesn't have a dedicated key for launching the task switcher. Instead, you can set up the camera button to launch the camera, the task switcher or a menu that lets you choose what to do. If you go for that final option, the camera button goes straight to the task switcher if you're in a menu.

Widgets can be downloaded For those of you who have not seen a recent touch phone here's a quick description of what a widget actually is. A widget is a small application that sits on the homescreen and has simple but useful functionality - one shows the time in two time zones, another weather conditions and so on. Even the operator logo is a widget and can be tucked away.

Some widgets are useful like the AccuWeather widget that shows you local weather conditions and a clock with two time zones. There are others like the 'Go on a diet' or 'Quit smoking' widgets that count the days you've been 'clean'.

There are even widgets that are just a shortcut to an application, but there are also some widgets that help you set up the others. One brings up settings for both the offline widgets (clock) and online widgets (AccuWeather) and here you can set up the network connections for the online widgets. The other very helpful 'meta' widget helps you search for new widgets to download.

Selecting a widget to download launches the browser and directs it to a page with a short description of the widget and a screenshot. At the time of writing, there are very few widgets to download but this number should increase as the developer community grows.

Phonebook has its highs and lows The S8300's phonebook holds up to 2000 contacts with multiple fields. You can assign a photo to each contact, or even a video if you so wish. On the downside, those pics can only be used as caller id and are not visible in the contacts list. You can view contacts from the phone memory, the SIM card, or both. The phonebook is quite clever. There are fields for first and last name for the contact but there's an additional field for the name of the contact. That is you can have a 'Joseph Plumber' but you can have it appear just as 'Joe' in the contact list while still keeping the contact's full name on record.

Another useful feature to prevent duplicates is that the phone will display a warning if the number for the new contact you just entered is already in the phonebook.

The S8300's phonebook offers an alphabet scroll as usual, but there's an option to put the scroll either on the left or on the right. This helps usability as left-handed people have to reach across the screen with their thumb, covering most of it, and vice versa for right-handed people.

It's not all perfect, however. First off, the contact photos don't appear in the list. That does save some space but apparently not enough for a 'Send message' button. You have to either click the 'Send message' button under the list and then select the recipient you want, or view the details of the contact and then press the virtual receiver key for the selected number.

This brings up an icon bar that lets you make either a voice call, video call or send a message. If you click the virtual receiver key in the contact list however, it directly initiates a voice call. This leads to quite a few clicks to send a simple SMS from the phonebook, and the lack of consistency is a little confusing.

There's more - when searching for a contact by name, the contact at the bottom is not visible as it's hidden under a row of buttons. It's not that you can't get to that contact, but it's an annoying inconvenience.

Dialer as usual, Photo Contacts are cool There's not much to say about the dialer. You dial just like you would on any slider or touch phone depending on whether the keypad is opened or closed. It's not very well though out however. There's a virtual button for making a voice call, but in order to make a video call you need to press 'More' and video call is the only option there, besides 'Add to Phonebook'. This is strange as there's a physical call button just a centimeter under the virtual one, so they could have easily replaced the virtual call one with a video call button.

New events like missed calls or a new message show up on the homescreen as a widget. It has three tabs each notifying you about a different type of event. It also displays the number and time of the missed call or SMS.

While the dialer itself is not very interesting, there's a flashier way to dial. Swiping your finger to the right on the homescreen brings you to the Photo Contacts shown as a stack of pictures.

Each face in each photo is tagged, and if it's linked to a contact in the phonebook clicking the tag (a white rectangle around the face), it brings up a menu with options to start a voice or video call or send a message

Telephony and speaker performance The Samsung S8300 is very good at its main job - making calls. If you turn the earpiece volume all the way up the sound gets a little distorted but it's not a problem at lower levels.

When using the built-in speakerphone you have to take care to point the mic towards you (it is on the bottom so it's a little awkward) or the other party will have trouble hearing you.

File browser The Samsung S8300 file browser can display the files and folders from the phone memory or the memory card, and even both at the same time.

There are folders for different types of files (images, video, sounds) and this allows the handset to sort the memory contents. However, you are not forced to follow this structure - you can place your files wherever you want and the phone will have no problems handling them.

You can copy or move files - both one by one or in bulk, and you can create and delete new folders (except the predefined folders, like Images, Sounds and so on).

When deleting multiple files you can choose to delete protected images, contact photos and so on. By default those options are off so you won't accidentally delete a contact photo or a ringtone.

Files can also be sent via Bluetooth, again one by one or in bulk. Throughout the whole file manager, you can pick files you would like to lock to prevent accidental deletion. Reading from the memory card is quick and won't bother users at all. Listing the thumbnails of pictures stored in the respective folder on the memory card now happens very quickly.

Unfortunately, dealing with memory cards is not among the Samsung S8300 strengths, as their initial recognition can take quite some time (typical Samsung). What is more, operating with the files on the memory card once it's initialized is still slow as well.

Gallery excels with the accelerometer Once again in the Samsung S8300 we have a few different picture galleries. Accessed from different parts of the menu they are optimized for touch operation and are reasonably user-friendly. The first is an inherent part of the file manager and accessing it is as simple as opening any folder that contains images.

Once you open a picture to view, you can sweep you fingers across the screen to see the next image without having to return to the image list. The sweeping is responsive and relatively fluid, but not as well implemented as on the Pixon.

The alternative to the picture gallery is PhotoBrowser. It has a dedicated icon in the main menu and is the quickest way to access you images. Sorting by face is not available.

Music player provides lots of bang for the buck The music player of the Samsung S8300 hasn't been greatly altered from the M8800 Pixon. Some additional visual effects have been added but that's as far as the changes go.

It allows filtering tracks by author, album, and genre. Automatic playlists (recently added, most played etc.) are also generated and can subsequently be used as filters. If that doesn't seem enough, you can create your own custom playlists. The music player can naturally be minimized to play in the background.

FM radio finds and records music The Samsung S8300 features an FM radio with RDS. It displays the station name on one row and the additional information on the other. Furthermore, the Samsung S8300 radio offers intuitive controls and it even has an integrated music recognition feature called Find Music, which works much like Sony Ericsson's TrackID.

Video Player - DivX FTW! The video player is another noteworthy application. It has a nice touch-optimized interface and all the essentials are covered. It can play video files in fullscreen landscape mode (auto-rotated of course) and you can fast-forward and rewind videos in the same way as the music player.

The Samsung S8300 has no problem playing VGA or even 720x480 videos at 30 fps. Not a great surprise but worth noting since compressing videos to view on mobile devices can be a time-consuming business.

The Samsung S8300 has support for DivX and XviD videos. Out of the randomly downloaded videos we tried, the playback of only one video clip failed, so we guess the S8300 fares better than your average (though LG Renoir played them all).

Poor audio quality Now that caught us totally off guard. The audio quality of Samsung handsets is usually top-notch but the S8300 is an unexpected exception to this rule. Our guess is that this has something to do with the microUSB to 3.5mm adapter, which might as well be the weak link here. However since the phone is meant to be used with this adapter this is hardly too great consolation.

The Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH performs poorly in virtually every reading in our test, except for the total harmonic distortion which is acceptable.

The frequency response graph suggests that the handset has its treble cut off for some unknown (and maybe again having to do something with the adapter) reason.

Camera is excellent The Samsung S8300 makes use of the same camera module as the Samsung M8800 Pixon but in reality we got even nicer results by the S8300 due to the enhanced image-processing algorithm.

The Samsung S8300 is capable of taking photos with a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels. The videos recorded by the S8300 can go up to D1 (720x480 pixels) resolution at 30 fps, which still qualifies as pretty good even with the upcoming Samsung i8910, which can record in 720p HD.

The camera also has a number of nice built-in features including the Samsung proprietary wide dynamic range option, the anti-shake digital image stabilization, geotagging, face detection, smile shot as well as viewfinder gridlines.

The camera interface is nicely touch-optimized and is certainly one of the most comfortable camera interfaces on a touchscreen device so far. The only complaint is that the auto focus settings are not visible in the viewfinder but instead must be changed from the menu. For instance, we took a few shots of buildings before we realized the phone was in macro mode.

Video recording can change the speed of time Video recording is among the best we've seen. It can record D1 video at 30 frames per second but unlike some phones where the video looks choppy even at 30 frames (some of the frames are interpolated so it's not really 30fps), this is flawless with excellent vibrant colors and unusually high levels of detail.

S8300 is also capable of recording slow motion video shot in QVGA resolution at 120fps. The video quality is not very good however with a few artifacts visible.

Connectivity lacks Wi-Fi The Samsung S8300 is a globetrotter with its quad-band GSM support, although the 3G coverage is not global - it supports just the 900/2100 bands. The phone supports HSDPA up to 7.2Mbps and EDGE for whenever there's no 3G coverage.

Bluetooth is also present and comes with A2DP, which is as to be expected on such a high-end phone.

The microUSB slot is also quite welcome and it's a lot more popular than the proprietary slot the Samsung M8800 Pixon came with. You can set up the phone to connect in mass storage mode or PC suite mode (or Media player) or to prompt each time it's connected to the computer.

In mass storage mode it gives access to the memory card but not to the internal memory and you cannot use the phone while in this mode. Annoyingly, with S8300 it would often be impossible to access the memory card for a couple of minutes after connecting in mass storage mode.

The web browser is very good and pages are easy to navigate thanks to the touchscreen. However, a major omission is WiFi, something that would have enabled the S8300 to stand its ground against most other touch phones. Instead, you have to settle for internet over 3G.

Web browser has Flash The Samsung S8300, much like the Samsung Pixon, features a great web browser - NetFront 3.5, which makes web surfing a really enjoyable experience. Except for a few minor problems here and there, the browser is truly worth the praise, and an added bonus is that is supports Flash.

The web browser renders pages well in both portrait and landscape modes. The browser switches between both modes seamlessly when you rotate the handset to and from the landscape position. The available fullscreen mode coupled with a little zooming makes the most of the 2.8" WQVGA display.

You can zoom in and out using the volume keys, which is quite handy. Even at minimum zoom text remains readable enough for you to find what you're looking for and it fits most web pages in landscape mode. Zooming in and out is quite fast.