A dirty dozen
The race to make the latest, smallest, shiniest and most powerful gadget never stops, and to that end Samsung has taken another gigantic step forward by bringing us the world’s first 12-megapixel camera phone in the form of the Pixon 12.
We’re talking about a device 108 x 53 x 13.8 mm effort that builds on the relative success of the original Samsung Pixon, using a fairly similar design as well, merely changing the shape of the return button on the front and adding a chunky (and a little unsightly) lip to the back.
It feels weighty in the hand, but the strong plastic and metal chassis feels classy rather than unwieldy. This is the least we can expect from a mobile phone that costs around £500 SIM free, thus rivalling the iPhone in terms of cost.
The TouchWiz operating system is the option Samsung plumps for on most of its feature phones, and it’s not surprise it makes a return here. It’s not the worst UI in the world, and has been effectively used to re-skin other Samsung phones, such as the i8910HD.
It also lets you multi-task, with a 3D interface available when you press the central button for a couple of seconds. This lets you see all the open applications and shut them down with a simple tap, which is useful when memory gets a little tight.
The camera on the Pixon 12 is obviously amazing, as you’d expect from a phone that costs and promises so much.
The sheer range of options is giddying, with not only a variety of scene modes, such as landscape, candlelight, night version and sports shot, but also beauty and smile shot as well.
Add to that a Xenon and LED flash and you can see where the technology has been packed here.
But the sad thing is that while it’s very good, it’s not got the amazing ‘wow’ factor we were hoping for from Samsung’s flagship camera phone. Pictures are obviously detailed and colourful, with rich contrast and a startlingly fast shutter speed between one photo and the next, but blown up on the PC screen things look a little average.
Don’t get us wrong, this is a tip top camera on a phone, but it’s not enough to convince you it isn’t a better idea to buy a decent phone and a good point and shoot snapper for the same amount of money.
And the rest of the phone suffers as a result too. While the video recorder is pretty good (with video light thanks to the LED) and the option to edit video is excellent, there are some other glaring omissions.
For instance, the internet browser is again under-powered thanks to not being able to fully render HTML in a timely fashion (or at all in some cases) and there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack, meaning you have to make do with an adaptor.
The screen is a glorious OLED effort, and does look stunning, but isn’t as accurate as you’d like in terms of touch sensitivity. It also doesn’t deliver the battery savings we’d hoped for, so it’s hard to make a case for shelling out the large piles of cash unless you really, really want a 12MP camera phone.
Given LG and Sony Ericsson are also bringing 12-megapixels camera phone efforts out in the coming months (with the SE Satio being particularly hotly tipped) we’ll keep a close eye on the performance to see if the megapixel wars are actually delivering better phones or just a big case of willy-waving.
Link: Samsung Mobile
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