Disclaimer: The author was invited for a Samsung Jet bloggers meet at the launch and offered a review device for hands-on experience for a week, which was duly returned.
Let’s get this straight. Samsung Jet is not ‘smarter than smartphone’ as the Samsung marketing folks would like us to believe. This doesn’t imply that it is a bad phone, but it’s not a phone you’ll put on the table when you talk Windows phones, Blackberry, Nokia E-series, or even iPhones.
All in all, Samsung Jet is a fine phone… a multimedia/lifestyle device at its best, but absence of a few critical capabilities hurts at its price-point.
The non-smart Smartphone
The Samsung Jet is a high specification phone, but totally misses the boat to smartness because of lack of applications – third-party or otherwise. After the super-success of iPhone’s App Store, RIM, Nokia, and Microsoft have come up with their application stores to feed their smartphones for utilities, productivity applications, and even leisure applications and games. Samsung offers no such service and the user has to satiate him with the limited bundled offerings.
However, Vikas Tagra, Brand Manager for Samsung Jet and Ankur Sharma, Digital Manager, Samsung Mobile indicated that something similar was in the works. They didn’t share the specifics, but indicated a period of 6-10 months for some more announcements.
The goodness
Everything, as you power on the phone. The new version of the TouchWiz interface that visualizes the different homescreen pages onto the sides of a cube, similarly to the LG’s S-CLASS 3D UI, A-GPS, 800 MHz processor, 3.5mm audio jack, 5MP camera, 2 GB internal memory, a 3.1-inch AMOLED display with WVGA resolution, and the long battery life.
If you need one reason to buy the Samsung Jet, it’s the AMOLED screen. Bright, crisp, and watching photos and videos is immersive experience.
The 5MP camera really impresses, and the flash is bright. Hours of internet browsing (and tweeting) and playing games only drains about 40% of the battery. The AMOLED screen, supposedly, reduces the power consumption by a great degree. The internet browser is simply awesome with inbuilt flash player and the one-touch zoom option. The music player is great, with twelve profiles to choose from giving an amazing listening experience. The universal 3.5mm audio jack for headsets is a fine thought.
The negatives
This might be a little issue for some, but for a Windows phone user like me (so with other smartphones), the absence of threaded SMS makes me cringe. So does the missing copy/paste and push email feature. It also hurts that while Samsung provides for a universal 3.5mm audio jack, it misses a standard mini USB port.
(Originally posted at Techie Buzz)