MWC 2008: Samsung overview

Samsung gracefully allowed us some private time with the latest and greatest of their mobiles announced here at the Mobile World Congress 2008.

Samsung F480, U900 Soul and G810

First off, it's the Samsung G810 - the 5 megapixel Symbian slider that's in for a match with the almighty Nokia N95. It has the GPS, it has the Wi-Fi, and it's got the guts to take on the champion with 3x optical zoom and xenon flash.

The Samsung G810 with its splendid brushed metal finish certainly looks the part. It leaves the impression of an expensive and luxurious device (which it is in fact).

Samsung G810

The front panel has four soft keys and a D-pad - all unmarked to keep the minimalist looks in tact. The upper couple are the context keys. The lower row is another story. The lower left button is the Symbian key that opens the main menu. Upon a press and hold it activates the Task manager (or Task switcher), which lists all the running applications.

The red and green receiver keys are nowhere to be seen on the front panel: they were dismissed to the lower deck and share beds with the alphanumeric keys. That's an understandable solution, which however doesn't prove that convenient. In fact, we couldn't help getting annoyed with it during the time we had with the device.

Samsung G810

The display of Samsung G810 is better than the ones of F480 and U900 under direct sunlight. Yet, none of the trio is capable of surpassing the Nokia achievements in this area.

We hurried up to take some camera samples - you will see that it's a really cloudy Barcelona day. The camera interface of Samsung G810 is the same as the one of its predecessor G800 - which is quite a feat since the G800 doesn't run on the same operating system.

The camera of the G810 smartphone makes use of the built-in GPS receiver to geotag your photos, so you can use them in geotag-enabled blogs and galleries.

All images have been downsampled to 1024 x 768 pixels with no further corrections made.

Samsung G810 camera samples: 3x optical zoom

Samsung G810 camera samples: 3x optical zoom

Update 19 Feb: We have added full resolution samples along with these downsampled images. The full samples clearly show the loss in quality at the longest telephoto position (3x zoom):

Samsung G810 camera samples: Image 1 full res (2MB) • Image 2 full res (2MB) • Image 3 full res (2MB)

We also took a video with the Samsung G810 - we thought you guys would like it. The maximum video resolution of Samsung G810 is VGA. The framerate at this resolution is 22 fps - not exactly a killer achievement. Nokia N95 is still unchallenged in this respect.

"...First off, it's the Samsung G810 - the 5 megapixel Symbian slider that's in for a match with the almighty Nokia N95. It has the GPS, it has the Wi-Fi, and it's got the guts to take on the champion with 3x optical zoom and xenon flash..."

Update 19 Feb: Here is the Samsung G810 sample camera video. The traffic conscious users should bear in mind that it's about 5MB.

Those are our first impressions of Samsung G810 - enjoy our photos and remember we'll be posting full-res images in a few days when the fever of the new announcements has hopefully subsided and our servers are feeling a little better.