Samsung GT-M8910 Pixon 12 cameraphone

The GPS was a more tricky beast. It geotags photos OK, and works when you fire up Navigator, which is Samsung’s own navigation software, but there’s no separate menu option for it so you can’t simply fire it up to check your location, and it isn’t the speediest at getting a fix.

Quite a dinky little thing really

The web browser has no pinch to zoom function. Instead you press one finger on the screen and use another to zoom. It is awkward and didn’t work well for us. Thankfully, you can use the side mounted volume/camera zoom rocker to zoom and then fingerpan around. It is a bit tedious that Web links need a double tap to open them, and that fingerpans tend to run on of their own free will, which can mean tedious backtracking through longer Web pages.

Tapping the on-screen Qwerty keyboard to enter text was a quite comfortable affair. Physically the Pixon 12 is not that different to other full frontal screened handsets in size and weight coming in at 107.9mm x 53mm x 13.8mm and 119g. The three buttons beneath the screen are familiar offering Call, End and menu features. Long press the menu button and a display of running apps opens up making it easy to switch or close any you don’t need.

The main screen houses Samsung’s usual four touch shortcuts to keypad, phonebook, messages and menu, while sitting on the left edge of the screen is the Widgets bar from which you can draw shortcuts onto the main screen. It’s all very familiar.

One novelty in this department is what Samsung calls Smart Unlock. There is a lock button on the left side of the casing. You use this in the usual way to lock the handset and then to call up the main screen when you want to use the phone. The novelty comes as you can draw a letter on the screen having first matched this up to an application, and then launch straight into that app. It is quite a time saver, though if you set up lots of shortcuts to apps in this way you’ll need to memorise them.

Basic control for calls and a fair bit of space too - it's not all touchscreen

Another nice touch is that the main menu of applications extends across three screens and you can rearrange the icons to suit your preferences. The most effective way to do this is to turn the handset so the screen drops into wide mode. All three menu screens are then shown side by side and you can drag items between them as you choose.