Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH Review

April 28, 2009 in Samsung

Upon opening the packaging, I was quite impressed with what I saw. The S8300 is a nicely styled phone with metal and strong plastic components. Picking it up in your hand and feeling the weight of it gives you the impression that it is of sturdy construction. The slide mechanism is flawlessly smooth and precise. The battery cover is well made. And opening it just requires you to pop it out instead of forcing you to pry it open. Upon turning on the phone and viewing the 2.8in OLED screen light up, I was impressed with the quality of the display. Colours were bright and well represented. The screen is also supposedly covered with tempered glass to make it scratch and glare resistant. Well, I didn’t want to do the “keys-in-pocket-with-phone” test, otherwise the nice folks at Samsung would have my head on a stake for messing up their review unit. As for glare resistance, the screen still suffers from legibility problems under bright sunlight. It seems that all handphone manufacturers have yet to tackle this problem successfully be it TFT or OLED screens. The touchscreen response for a capacitive display is a mixed bag. It may be because I have not adapted from a phone with a resistive display. Rather than just pressing with the tip of your fingers or even your fingernail, you have to use your whole fingertip (read: Skin contact) to get the screen to work. This may be great in most situations but when the button is tiny or even a tad narrow, you will tend to miss it and will be forced to tap a few times to hit the sweet spot to activate the button. It is frustrating at times, but let’s hope Samsung can optimise the touchscreen with firmware upgrades. Communication Generally, the S8300 does what a phone should do well — its speaker is loud enough to make it heard in a crowd. Reception is also good. As for typing SMSes, you only get the alphanumeric keypad to type your messages. There is no on-screen Qwerty keyboard. Also, because it is not always easy hitting the correct button when using the virtual keypad, I actually found myself using the physical one quite a lot. The keypad is not only precise but also gives you solid feedback. Connectivity The S8300 is a quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G HSDPA phone. It also comes with Bluetooth connectivity to communicate with peripherals wirelessly. There is no WiFi, although it would have been great to have it so that a user could surf the Web without having to pay exorbitant data charges. Those that have an unlimited data plan won’t find this an issue though. The microUSB port is where the charger, data cable and handsfree set all connect. This is a great step toward standardisation in handphones.

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