Samsung GT-M8910 Pixon 12 cameraphone

The world's first 12Mp phonecam, apparently

So, while 12Mp might be overkill for any mobile phone, Samsung has come up with a gamut of easy to navigate photo features that, arguably, make this the best mobile phone camera currently available.

A front facing camera is included for video chats

Still on the audiovisual, we watched a few AVI movie trailers. While initially jerky, the handset only took a few second to get into its stride and play smoothly. The accelerometer comes in handy here, as elsewhere, pushing the screen into wide format for a better viewing experience. The speaker proved quite loud, albeit a little tinny, yet perfectly fine for short-term viewing. DivX fans will be pleased to note that this playback is ‘certified’ to a maximum 320 x 240 resolution.

Apart from its S8000 Jet, Samsung, once again, shoots itself in the foot by using micro-USB for the headset connector. Still, at least this time around there is a 3.5mm connector just past the microphone so you can use your own headphones or a Bluetooth headset.

Our review sample didn’t have Samsung’s headset included, but using our own headset the sound quality was good enough. There are plenty of equaliser presets to fiddle with. An RDS FM radio with oodles of presets and a recording facility helps the audio capability along. It also has a front camera for video calling.

There is 150MB of built in memory and a micro SD card slot for adding more. A 2GB card is provided to get you started. The manual states that the Pixon 12 supports micro SD and micro SDHC cards up to 16GB, although it didn’t like our 16GB SanDisk card for some reason.

Marked cards: supports 16GB cards, but not ours

This is an HSDPA 3G handset supporting download speeds up to 7.2Mb/s as well as Wi-Fi and GPS. With Wi-Fi networks, the Pixon 12 made and kept connections well enough, but didn’t find all the networks near us nor did it get very high signal strength. Still, the important thing is that, everywhere we tried it, the connection was good enough to get on-line.