Samsung G810 Review

Samsung introduced G810 multimedia imaging device in February, 2008 GSM World Congress at Barcelona. The device gets its design from the not so old Samsung G800 which boasted of top notch photography performance. But the key difference here is that the G810 runs on s60 which means that it opens up doors to hundreds of nokia compatible applications to run on it. It feels inspired from LG’s shine. The handset boasts of slider form factor with metallic finish on the plastic which looks amazing and far better than those seen on Nokia’s models these days.

The handset comes in dimensions of 103×53mm and thickness of around 22mm across the thickest part of the phone. The thickness is partly due to the lens cover and optical focus mechanism in the phone. The weight of the phone is hefty 139 grams which is quite a lot comparing it with other handset models being launched these days for example the N81-8GB has weight of 120something grams inclusive of 8GB storage compared to just 130MB on this Samsung. The display screen is 26inches diagonally with resolution of 240×320pixels. The crispy screen is bright enough to be seen properly in direct sunlight. The handset though sporting the same platform as the whole crop of the Nokia handsets, still Samsung has made a lot of changes in the feel of the UI. The hardware part is very different as the handset has multiple CPUs each different for operating system, camera and radio function. This makes it a very good multi-tasker, but there is a serious compromise on the battery life.

Even though the handset has 1200mAH battery, it gives just over 2 days worth of standby time and just about 3 hours of talk time which is just average by any standards. The front face of the camera is just superb with the secondary camera for video telephony on 3G networks and the speaker grill being very delicately hidden under the plastic coverage of the screen. The build quality is superb, much better than many of the handsets available in the market. The slider mechanism is crisp, with the spring loaded mechanism; it takes least of the push to open the slider exposing the beautiful keypad. The best thing about the keypad is that the buttons are very big and tend to give good feedback while pressing. Though you may be bit disappointed by the sides where on the left side are rubber flap protected holes for USB and headset while the right side houses microSD card slot and a dedicated camera button for photography. The phone misses any hardware keys for multimedia, which maybe a setback as the model is targeted towards the infotainment audience.

It has a 5megapixel camera which has 3x optical zoom. The zoom is indeed better than the digital zoom which most of the handsets in the market currently offer. The flash is xenon based, thus offering superb lighting and good shots even under dark light conditions. Other standard things like multimedia player with video player, s60 browser, flash player, organizer, built-in GPS with A-GPS support are pretty much standard and similar to ones found in Nokia’s devices on same platform. However, for multimedia devotees, the phone has dedicated Ice-Mobile audio amplifier which comes into play when you plug in headphones. The quality of sound is class.

With such good specs and a decent price tag of les than 350$, this surely is going a good value for money. Just wait for the new crop of Sony Ericsson branded smart phones, if you want to invest in a handset overloaded with features and cost less than this Samsung.

Tags: g810, samsung

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 8:22 am and is filed under Gadget Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.