Samsung Jet S8000 review

As for switching between apps – it actually trumps the iPhone in that you hold down the button on the front and a grid of icons appears for each app running and you can tap to go to the one you want. This is where the fast processor comes in handy.

Email and messaging

To be taken seriously as a business device, the hook is clearly the exchange support and this does the job, pulling it data once you’ve plumbed in your details – though it didn’t pull down calendar and contacts by default.

There are some oddities though – there was no obvious way of creating a new message from inside the Exchange client – just to reply. Also, the client completely failed to handle HTML messages, leaving just text links. An attached word document was downloadable and viewable, but moving round it proved sluggish.

Entering data can be down in a number of ways. A T9 style keypad or if you tilt to the left a full size QWERTY keyboard comes up. If you tilt to the right the keyboard still appears, but not that way round.

Typing is reasonable but it doesn’t quite have the feel of something like an iPhone, and despite that speedy processor there’s just a fraction of lag.

If you don’t like the keyboard though, you can actually write on the screen, like an old-school PDA, and even in the brief time we had if did prove accurate, though a bit too slow for practical use.

Media Master

A feature that impressed us most while using the phone though was its media capabilities – Samsung has licensed the Divx video codec so many files you you download of the internet – of potentially dubious legality - will play straight away without the need for conversion.

The results look fabulous on the AMOLED screen with no dropped frames. It was also easy to scrub through files and skip between them and turning the phone on its side flicks it full screen – though only one way.

An audio boost feature also creates a pseudo surround effect, which actually does help with some types of content.

Going online

The web browser is also a cut above the normal ‘feature’ phones by supported ‘webkit’ rendering , which means things ought to look as good as they do on the desktop – but here the Jet fell down. It mangled the IT PRO web site for one, and proved more sluggish than the silky speeds we’re used to from the iPhone 3GS, even over Wifi.