Apr 29, 2009 by Adine
Upmarket chic, nonchalant cool.

If the Samsung Ultra Touch S8300 doesn’t capture the attention of the person next to you, someone should just throw a rock at him because its anti reflective full touch screen is hard to miss. Its distinguishing AMOLED feature on a scratch resistant screen significantly boosts visual clarity as images are more dynamic and videos are played back with greater fluidity.

Verdict
A brand that is constantly evolving to integrate functionality with sophistication, the Samsung Ultra Touch S8300 definitely deserves its brownie points. It takes a little getting used to but with an AMOLED display, attractive TouchWIZ UI, and an 8 megapixel camera, it’s a shade brighter than the rest in the market.

QUICK SPECS
SIZE/WEIGHT: 110 × 51.5 × 12.7mm, 116g
SCREEN: 2.8-inch touch sensitive, 400×240 pixels, 16M colours
STORAGE: 80MB internal, microSDHC external 16GB
VIDEO: DivX, XviD, H.263, H.264, WMV9, MPEG4
BATTERY: 880 mAh

Drag and Drop
A hidden keypad encourages consumers to take advantage of its interactive touch screen capabilities for the ultimate user experience. The Samsung Ultra Touch is complemented witsh a user-friendly TouchWIZ UI that allows greater flexibility and control when life needs to be organised on a mobile phone.

The effortless swipe of a fingertip over icons also creates an effortless customisation of the mobile widget. However, take a conscious effort to tap accurately or you could be going back and forth between options repeatedly.

Tagged
Also equipped with a face tagged phonebook feature, users are able to sieve through contacts graphically as opposed to regular letters and numbers. This helpful attribute might come in handy for contacts with common names; there’s really little need to include last names anymore.

Snap Snap
Loaded with an 8 megapixel camera that captures 3264 x 2448 images with a dual power LED Flash, this phone also holds a GPS chip that enables Geo-tagging – a function that allows users to conveniently tag and sort photos by location and upload them online on its 7.2Mps internet speed connectivity.

It’s further furnished with wide-ranging camera settings that include various scene settings, autofocus and face recognition options. It’s built-in accelerometer that switches images between portrait and landscape modes automatically.

Multimedia
For the motion picture addict, video editing functions are aplenty. A 30fps@VGA video recording function effectively documents life on the go and video playback is compatible with major video formats.

Its audio capabilities aren’t comprised on quality either. Though the absence of a 3.5mm jack may vex the audiophile, its stereo earphones are good enough to make the bad vibes go away.

Samsung UltraTouch S8300
SGD838 - www.samsungmobile.com.sg