Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2

Here is the "Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2". If you want to see the previous part of this "Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2", Click Here to see "Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 1"

The Symbian S60 3.2 UI

Symbian in Samsung skin
Here is the "Symbian in Samsung skin" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. Samsung i8510 INNOV8 runs on Symbian 9.3 with Series60 3rd Edition user interface and feature Pack 2 preinstalled. It is the same as what we found on the latest Nokia smartphones we reviewed - the N79 and N85 - the INNOV8 however offers somewhat less eye-candy. The layout is quite familiar with status icons appearing on the top of the screen and soft key labels at the bottom. The i8510 INNOV8 also supports Active standby with two different layouts to pick from. The active standby screen is a nice and convenient way of bringing shortcuts to all favorite applications to your home screen. You can even assign shortcuts to websites of your choice for quicker access. The screen can be organized in either vertical or horizontal tabs, which can then be scrolled with the D-pad. If active standby is disabled, the direction keys of the D-pad can also be assigned a shortcut of your choice. Active standby or not, you can always change the shortcuts assigned to the two soft keys to best suit your needs. Thanks to the built-in accelerometer Samsung i8510 INNOV8 enjoys screen auto rotation. However, for some reason Samsung have decided to disable Auto Pivot - the Samsung name for auto rotation - on the homescreen and in the main menu, so it only works in the applications and sub-menus. At least they have kept the nice transition from one mode to another: the current screen smoothly zooms out, flips and then zooms back in. Samsung i8510 INNOV8 also features the new and improved task manager courtesy of the new FP. It has better graphics over what we saw in previous Symbian versions (think Samsung i550) and can now be accessed from every pop-up menu. Samsung claim the i8510 INNOV8 is powered by a single 330 MHz CPU with no hardware acceleration whatsoever. However, you won't know at all working with the phone as the entire UI is really responsive. You can hardly tell the difference between the INNOV8 and the Dual-CPU hardware graphic-accelerated Nokia N95 8GB in almost any scenario. Rumor has it, the INNOV8 is actually running on a much faster CPU with HW graphics accelerator contrary to Samsung's claims. We can't comment on that, but the INNOV8 performance is commendable. Things might be a little different if you run multiple heavy programs at the same time but the processing power of the INNOV8 is more than adequate for you usual everyday usage. We didn't experience any freezes or unexpected restarts either. Samsung i8510 INNOV8 has 72MB of internal memory plus 8GB or 16GB of mass memory. Accessing files from the latter isn't any slower so you aren't likely to feel a difference. And running out of space to install your software is out of question. If however, by any rare chance, you happen to need more storage than the already available 8Gb or 16GB you can use the microSD card slot and expand your memory by another 16GB.

Customization options aren't too many
Here is the "Customization options aren't too many" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. Unlike most recent Nokia phones running on Symbian 9.3, Samsung i8510 INNOV8 users have a choice between only two different menu view modes. Those are the all too familiar 3 x 4 grid and list. Classic and simple, those surely are the most widely used, so we don't consider it a disadvantage. The main customization option for INNOV8 users is changing the currently active theme. There are three preinstalled themes on the handset but new ones can easily be downloaded off the internet.

Can't beat the phonebook
Here is the "Can't beat the phonebook" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. Samsung i8510 INNOV8 surely has an impressive phonebook with massive functionality and generous storage space. Theoretically the whole internal memory is available to your contacts but filling it up is just hard to imagine. Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name and can naturally be searched by gradual typing of any of the names. You can also set whether the contacts from the SIM card, the phone memory and the service numbers will get displayed. Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like. You can also create new fields if you happen to be able to think of one. Personal ringtones and videos are also available for assigning. If you prefer, you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone. The Call log keeps track of your recent communications. The application itself comes in two flavors - accessed by pressing the Call key on the stand-by screen or from the main menu. The first one brings 20 call records in each of its tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls. If you access the Log application from the main menu, you'll see a detailed list of all your network communications for the past 30 days. These include messages, calls and data transfers (even WLAN connections are included).

Telephony: no issues
Here is the "Telephony: no issues" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. We didn't experience any problems with the in-call performance of Samsung i8510 INNOV8. Reception levels are good and there were no interferences whatsoever. The main disadvantage here is the missing smart-dialing feature on the Samsung i8510 INNOV8. A third party application will easily sort this but we can't imagine it was so hard for the developers to implement it in the OS itself. We also ran our traditional loudspeaker test on Samsung i8510 INNOV8. The handset performed impressively scoring an Excellent mark. Missing a call with the INNOV8 ringing volume set to the maximum is highly unlikely. Check out the table comparing the i8510 INNOV8 to some of the other handsets we have tested. In case you want to find out more about the test itself or a complete list of tested devices, hit the link.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overall score
Nokia N82	70.2	61.2	65.9	Below average
Nokia N79	66.6	65.8	71.7	Average
Nokia N85	67.0	65.5	71.8	Average
Nokia N95 8GB	75.7	66.2	70.2	Good
Nokia N95	77.3	66.6	78.0	Very Good
Samsung i8510 INNOV8	78.9	75.7	77.5	Excellent

Messaging is nicely organized
Here is the "Messaging is nicely organized" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. Samsung i8510 INNOV8 supports all common message types - SMS, MMS and email. The first two share the all too familiar intuitive editor. It has a counter of characters left to the limit of 160. An indicator in brackets is showing the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending. Switching from SMS to MMS is as simple as inserting some multimedia content. The phone prompts scaling down photos that are too large for sending via MMS. Samsung i8510 INNOV8 also features a dedicated editor for instant recording of audio messages. You can either record the message on the spot or use a pre-recorder sound clip from the phone memory. Delivery reports pop up on the standby screen and are then saved in a separate folder in the messaging submenu. When exiting the message editor without having sent the message, the editor prompts saving it to the Drafts folder or discarding it. The email client is really nice, able to meet almost any emailing needs. Now, one thing Samsung i8510 INNOV8 lacks is the ultra easy email setup we came to know in recent Nokia phones. You have to enter every detail manually but that's basically all there is to complain about. Multiple email accounts and various security protocols are supported, so you can bet almost any mail service (be it POP or IMAP) is set to run on the INNOV8. The client can download headers only or entire messages, and can be set to automatically check mail at a given interval. A nice feature allows you to schedule sending email next time an internet connection is available. There is also support for attachments, signatures and generally, you can hardly think of something major that the Samsung i8510 is missing.

File manager has it all covered
Here is the "File manager has it all covered" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. Samsung i8510 INNOV8 is equipped with the typical Symbian file manager. Its functionality is practically limitless including copying, moving, creating new folders - you will hardly need something that the INNOV8 lacks. What the phone misses is a Search application, as seen on Nokia sets. You'd better keep that huge storage space shipshape or you will never be able to find the files you are looking for. Thanks to the ShoZu integration, all the multimedia content on the device, can be shared seamlessly to a variety of web services.

Image gallery is doing fine
Here is the "Image gallery is doing fine" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. Samsung i8510 INNOV8 has a nice picture gallery that can operate in both portrait and landscape modes, toggling between the two as easy as flipping the phone to its side. However it lacks the 3D rotating view that competing Nseries models boast. However, when viewing a single photo, you can only work in landscape mode. But since this makes best use of the display anyway, we hardly consider it a disadvantage. Zooming and panning speed is hardly record-breaking but isn't too bad either. The gallery offers a nice slide show with customizable effects and delay between slides. There is also a built-in image editor that allows you to do some basic photo editing straight on your phone.

Music player does it all
Here is the "Music player does it all" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. Barely surprising for a multimedia powerhouse, the music player of Samsung INNOV8 does its job with ease. With the huge number of supported formats you will hardly ever come across an audio file that the phone won't handle. Album art is also supported. There are also three visualization options, so the INNOV8 has it all covered. The equalizer bars in the two optional visualizations are synced with the rhythm of the currently running track and not just randomly going up and down as we've seen elsewhere. Your music library is automatically sorted by artist, album, genre and composer and searching tracks by gradual typing is available. You can also create your own playlists in no time. The process of adding tracks to the library is as simple as choosing the refresh option. You won't need to do that if you upload the music via the proprietary Samsung PC Suite application. The player comes with a massive count of equalizer presets. There are seventeen of them and new ones can be added in a matter of seconds. Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in the background. In this case a tab appears on the standby screen indicating the currently running track.

FM radio
Here is the "FM radio" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. The FM radio on Samsung i8510 INNOV8 has a neat and simple interface and can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. It also has RDS support and is capable of FM recording. Naturally, radio playback through the speakerphone is also available but you still need the headphones plugged to act as an antenna.

Audio quality is great
Here is the "Audio quality is great" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. Samsung i8510 INNOV8 went out of our audio quality test with flying colors, effortlessly scoring the pass marks on every reading and even excelling at some. We simply cannot overlook the outstanding noise level, stereo crosstalk and dynamic range readings. The total harmonic distortion is also among the best results we have ever seen a handset achieve. The intermodulation distortion is very good too and, with a frequency response graph like that, there is very little more to ask for. The only problem we see is the low-pass filter for the lowest of frequencies but we have seen far worse. Here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Samsung i8510 INNOV8	+0.79, -1.73	-87.6	86.1	0.0032	0.107	-84.6
Nokia N79	+0.30, -1.57	-91.8	91.8	0.014	0.482	-73.5
Nokia N85	+0.28, -1.19	-94.4	95.4	0.305	0.701	-88.1
Nokia N96	+0.52, -2.14	-90.6	90.7	0.016	0.364	-73.5
HTC Touch HD	+0.20, -2.29	-86.7	89.2	0.024	0.253	-86.1
HTC Touch Pro	+0.35, -1.12	-85.3	87.9	0.027	0.267	-86.3
Apple iPod	+0.41, -1.16	-91.6	91.8	0.0043	0.015	-83.6
Apple iPhone 3G	+0.52, -1.05	-89.9	90.1	0.0033	0.016	-93.1

Video player
Here is the "Video player" section of this Samsung i8510 INNOV8 GSM Cell Phone Review - Roaring V8 Engine Part 2. The Samsung i8510 INNOV8 video player can work in both portrait and landscape mode and can be switched to fullscreen. When in full screen, the soft key labels are hidden so that they don't spoil the viewing and only pop up when a key is pressed. The phone also has DivX and XviD support straight out of the box, which means you can just upload your .avi movies and enjoy. You can of course install a DivX and XviD player on any other Symbian but we are glad the INNOV8 saves us the effort. And as you might have guessed, watching a movie on a screen this size is quite an enjoyable experience. It's no HTC Touch HD of course, but this is as high as non-touchscreen Symbian goes for video watching (okay, we did like the Nokia N96 kickstand but it's not such a biggie).

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