Samsung i8910 HD review

In that battle, the i8910 comes out as the clear winner. It's biggest strengths are its capacitive touchscreen, which is much more responsive and pleasant to use than the N97's resistive touchscreen, and the graphic design which makes Symbian a desirable, touchable system instead of a bland workhorse left over from a keyboard past, as is the case with the N97.

One area where Samsung's effort does suffer is with the widgets on the homescreen. Like the N97, the i8910 has a customisable homescreen, on which you can drag and drop widgets for things like contacts. But the N97's widgets show live updates from services like Facebook, or live news feeds. The i8910's widgets are more basic and won't give you live updates.

The i8910 offers three on-screen text-input choices: an alphanumeric keyboard in portrait or landscape screen orientation, a Qwerty keyboard in landscape only, or handwriting recognition. We found the keys larger than average for a touchscreen phone and easy to use at top speed, with no delay. The predictive text worked well in the alphanumeric keyboard mode, but there's no predictive text when using the Qwerty keyboard. We really missed this feature, which makes fast, error-free typing significantly easier on a soft keyboard.

Megapixel megastar
The back of the i8910 sports the large lens of an 8-megapixel camera, with an LED photo light. We were impressed by the photo quality, even without the LED light in low light conditions. But the LED light proved way too harsh in some shots, wiping out detail. Shutter lag is moderate, with about a second and a half between pressing the button and taking a photo. But looking at photos could sometimes be a slow process, as the photo viewer took a second or two to load the 8-megapixel image.

The 8-megapixel camera takes impressive photos, and its video is pretty good too

There's plenty of room for the big images and videos thanks to the 8GB or 16GB of internal memory, and there's room for up to 32GB more in the microSD memory card slot. You can also pack that space full of music. The i8910 supports heaps of formats, including MP3, AAC and WMA. You can listen to music on your own headphones too, thanks to the standard 3.5mm headphone jack. If it's all too much effort, there's also a good old-fashioned FM radio to keep you entertained.

Connect the dots
Getting more tunes, videos or applications onto the phone is made easy by the fact that Samsung has adopted the Symbian PC Suite software, familiar from a generation of Nokia phones, wholesale. It's too bad that taking up Symbian means Samsung had to ditch its PC Studio software, which was innovative and well-designed. PC Suite tends to do a solid job of transferring data, but it's PC only, so Mac users are left out in the cold.

You won't necessarily need a USB cable to get connected, thanks to built-in Wi-Fi, 5.76Mbps HSUPA and 7.2Mbps HSDPA. There's also GPS to keep you on track, but you'll have to install Google Maps yourself -- it wasn't included on our handset.

With so much going on, we were impressed with the i8910's battery life. It kept on trucking through a whole day of testing without breaking a sweat.

Conclusion
The Samsung i8910 HD shows Nokia how to make a fun, usable, attractive touchscreen phone sporting the Symbian S60 operating system. Without the Ovi Store, it won't be as easy to get apps onto this phone as it is with the N97, but that downside is far outweighed by the i8910's gorgeous 94mm (3.7-inch) AMOLED screen and responsive capacitive touchscreen. The i8910's support for multitasking occasionally makes it sluggish, but that's a trade-off you may be willing to make in exchange for the ability to keep so many balls in the air.

That great screen, huge memory of up to 48GB, 3.5mm headphone jack and support for a wide range of file formats make the i8910 an excellent entertainment phone. And, with unmatched video recording and speedy upload speeds, you can keep everyone else entertained with your own movies too.

Edited by Nick Hide and Charles Kloet