Design
The desk of a CNET.com.au editor is invariably littered with a range of tech devices. While preparing our thoughts for this review we sat the G800 on a desk next to two LG phones, the Shine Bar and the Shine Slide, which were sitting on top of one another. To our surprise, the G800 matched the thickness of both LG phones together. While there's a lot of tech under the hood of the G800, the chunky, pocket-straining size will be its last first impression.
Samsung G800
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
With the exception of about 10mm of unwanted girth, the G800 is a sharply designed mobile handset, and a far cry more attractive, and seemingly more sturdy, than most of Samsung's range. A big part of this is attributable to the stainless steel casing with brushed-metal finish, as opposed to the plastic handsets Samsung tends to produce.
With its sliding mechanism closed, the majority of the front of this phone is taken up with its bright, colourful 2.4-inch QVGA display — an absolute must for a serious camera phone. Samsung has taken a minimalist approach to navigation and selection keys, featuring only what's necessary; a five-way nav pad, a flat, large numeric keypad, dedicated camera shutter key, and a microSD expandable memory slot on the opposite side.
Searching through the G800's menu screens is an intuitive exercise and a familiar one for anyone who has used Samsung's proprietary operating platform, seen recently in the G600 amongst many other Samsung releases. While it's functional and attractive, we do prefer it when Samsung uses Nokia's S60 operating platform, such as with the i450 and i560. The S60 platform opens the door to a vast range of third-party applications to expand the functionality of a mobile device.
Features
Is it a bird, is it a plane? Is it a phone or is it a camera? Not only is the G800 about the right size for a point-and-shoot digital camera, it has the spec list to back up this claim. Featuring a 5-megapixel image resolution, a bright xenon flash, auto-focus, and 3x optical inner zoom — it's an industry first.
Supporting the camera hardware is a decent suite of photographic software and settings, though it's not quite as extensive as we saw in LG's Viewty. In shooting mode, the basic raft of settings are added to by face detection, though there isn't an image sensitivity setting. After you've taken your pictures or video, the G800 features a nifty video editing tool where the images can be married with your favourite music to make videos; though this doesn't guarantee anyone will ever want to watch them. The video tool is a breeze to use and the finished videos can be uploaded directly to a blog.
The G800 is far from a one trick pony, also featuring HSDPA (7.2Mbps) data download speeds and a front facing camera for making video-calls. There's also A2DP stereo Bluetooth, the standard Samsung media player, though headphones are connected using a Samsung proprietary port so you'll need an adapter if you plan to use headphones other than the bundled hands-free set. To store all the high-res photos you take, Samsung has generously included a 2GB memory card in the box.
Performance
We were looking forward to taking the G800 out and taking some happy snaps, especially after the surprisingly good performance of the G600's camera. Perhaps our hopes were too high, as the photos taken by the new and higher specced G800 were disappointing.
In fairness, the G800 takes decent photos compared to standard camera phones, but its price tag and generous proportions promise so much more. Broadly speaking, we saw desaturated colours, consistently soft focus, and the "hot" areas of our images flaring. On the plus side, the optical zoom worked a treat, maintaining good detail across all lengths of the 3x zoom, and is leagues better than any digital zoom we've seen in the past. Overall, the G800 takes great (though enormous) pics to send to your friends across MMS, but we don't imagine you'll be framing these photos to display over the fireplace.
The combination of the large, clear 2.4-inch display and the HSDPA data speeds makes the G800 a half decent mobile Web browser. The pre-installed NetFront browser does a good job of rendering pages, and navigating with the nav-pad is helped along by magnetic hyperlinks — where the on-screen cursor "snaps to" page links when scrolling across the website. While browsing on the G800 isn't a desktop-replacing experience (nor is it meant to be) it's more than adequate for checking movie times and cheating at pub trivia.
The G800 battery life is generous to say the least. We managed to do a majority of our basic testing on a single battery cycle; lasting approximately five days between charges. For a phone with HSDPA this is reasonably impressive. The only downside we found was poor on-screen battery life monitoring. For around 90 per cent of a cycle the on-screen icon displayed full or two-thirds remaining battery power, then would quickly lose its charge and power down. Accurate battery cycle monitoring is obviously optimal, especially for people on-the-move.
Overall
For picture quality alone we'd recommend considering another handset. Nokia camera phones currently produce the best and most consistent picture quality with its ongoing partnership with Carl Zeiss lenses — available in the N95 and N82. But for people looking to avoid an enormous handset, but still want great pics, Samsung's G600 comes out on top as the best and slimmest.
Comparisons aside, the G800 is a stylish handset, and easy-to-use, but with the phone in your jean's pocket it looks like your smuggling a bar of soap, and for some this will be a deal-breaker. As a phone, the G800 lives up to Samsung's consistently high standard, but for the RRP of AU$799 the camera would have to meet this high standard to receive our full recommendation.