Full Review

Touchscreen phones are many, but the Samsung Jet just struck the right balance between features and performance at a competitive price.

Features

The Jet doesn’t fall short of any features we could think of. The 3.1-inch AMOLED touch screen with WVGA resolution was vivid and bright. Even with its resistive nature, it still registered our finger input accurately and responsively.  Below the beautiful AMOLED screen were just three physical buttons for call handling and for going to menu and multitasking. The compact black body sports all the required shortcuts on its sides. It has a 3.5mm jack port for headphones and a microUSB port for the data cable.  The glossy back sports a 5MP camera with an LED flash. It packs many advanced features like Anti-Shake, Face Detection, Panorama Shot and many more. For connectivity, the Jet also has Wi-Fi, 3G with HSDPA and Bluetooth v2.  GPS with AGPS is also present. The phone has two notable intelligent features like gesture controls that let you unlock the phone with a pre-determined gesture on the screen and motion control that will let you control media playback by shaking or tapping the phone.

The Jet's 800Mhz processor aids in displaying the animation heavy menus without noticeable lags.

Design & Usability

The interface is taken care by Samsung’s own TouchWiz 2.0 which has a simple and straightforward design with all icons arranged page wise like the iPhone’s menu design. The 800Mhz processor aids in displaying the animation heavy menu without noticeable lags. The widget based interface on the home screen also and the 3D cube interface with multi desktop option were also easy to access and use.

The phone has good call reception quality and the loudspeaker volume is also sufficient. Typing on the onscreen alphanumeric and landscape QWERTY keypad was among the best we’ve experienced on a resistive touchscreen and even bettered the capacitive screens seen on LG Arena and LG Viewty Smart. Over the air synchronization using the Mail for Exchange support is one of the most useful features the Jet has. For Google users, pre-installed maps, Gmail and search were also preloaded.  The Dolphin browser with its tabbed browsing feature offered a smooth online experience and the phone also offers a number of social networking widgets.

Multimedia

The Jet handles multimedia effortlessly as well. The 5MP camera captured very vivid images without many issues regarding purple fringes and white balance. Capturing low light photos was not as good as expected though and the dual LED flash did not brighten up things. As a result low-light images lost a large amount of details. Videos captured were quite good at D1 (720x480) resolution though. DivX and Xvid files were played smoothly thanks to the beefy processor. Sound quality was decent too. Gaming was fun but the phone came only with demo versions.

Bottom Line

The Samsung Jet is priced at Rs. 18,000. Overall, it is a beautiful touchscreen phone that offers impressive multimedia experience without sacrificing on features or commanding a high price.