If wishes were horses…the i8910 would ride

Note: this arti­cle is not fac­tual. It’s a wishful/sarcastic post meant to high­light the poten­tial of the i8910 and what Sam­sung could do with it.  I’ve included details and ideas that I mean to present to Sam­sung in my meet­ing with them. This may not be real now, bit with more pres­sure on Sam­sung it could soon be a reality.

Excit­ing news guys, Sam­sung has just released an awe­some update for the i8910! Pure gold of an update! This update is packed to the brim with fea­tures and fixes I don’t even know where to begin! That’s a lot com­ing from me after that report and peti­tion fiasco.

Sam­sung i8910 Updated

1. The browser has been over­hauled. It works like a breeze now, nav­i­gat­ing through the browser is like run­ning your fin­gers across a small pud­dle of water, it’s pure fluid. It pans smoothly, respond­ing to the slight­est stroke with no stut­ter at all. Zoom­ing in and out is far smoother, it feels more nat­ural now, it’s almost like there’s no other way to do it bet­ter. Flash con­tent now runs like a charm with major improve­ments to sites like YouTube. The browser now at least matches that of the iPhone in gen­eral brows­ing, beat­ing it with flash support.
2. The cam­era has also been improved across the board. First off, after you press the cam­era but­ton, you are greeted imme­di­ately with a trans­par­ent menu that has 4 options; Photo, Video, Gal­ley and Can­cel. These allow you to jump straight to the mode of choice or to exit in case you hit the but­ton by acci­dent or you change your mind. Tap­ping on the cam­era but­ton twice gets you straight into the Photo mode. The cam­era itself is now much faster, it takes pho­tos much faster. In tests it took about 5 sec­onds to take a pic­ture before it was ready to take the next, a 3 fold improve­ment from its pre­vi­ous 15 sec­onds before the update.

   HD video record­ing has been improved now push­ing up to 30 frames per sec­ond. When frame rate drops, it never drops below 24 frames per sec­ond and the result is pos­si­bly the best pock­etable HD video recorder on the mar­ket. Sound for the video record­ings has also been improved with higher bit rate audio. The result is that videos occupy more space in mem­ory but with the price of micro SD cards so low and with video qual­ity that good, there’s noth­ing to com­plain about. Pic­ture qual­ity has also been vastly improved with pic­tures appear­ing more vivid than ever. More tweaks made to the expo­sure set­tings mean that pic­tures appear in focus even with a shaky camera.

   It doesn’t end there. Also included is a new fea­ture called Spot Focus. It allows focus­ing in video and photo mode. All you do is tap on an area on the screen and the cam­era focuses on that area. How it dif­fers from other mobile phones out there is that you can focus dur­ing video record­ing. That’s right, as you’re record­ing video, if you decide to focus on some­thing else you can do that on the fly with­out stop­ping the record­ing. Just tap on an area and the cam­era will adjust its focus to that area. Sam­sung went a step fur­ther and included a method to sup­press the noise pro­duced as the cam­era focuses such that it is barely audi­ble. You can eas­ily switch to macro mode in video record­ing in this way.

3. The mes­sag­ing app has also been upgraded in a huge way. Gone is the old bor­ing s60 5^th mes­sag­ing app, say hello to Sam­sung Mes­sag­ing+. This blows almost every mobile mes­sag­ing app out of the water, lit­er­ally. Mes­sages are now threaded and colour coded. They are arranged in col­lapsi­ble man­ner sorted by con­tact, date or sub­ject. Mes­sages from the same per­son appear together like a con­ver­sa­tion with received and sent mes­sages appear­ing chrono­log­i­cally com­plete with avatars. A sin­gle thread can con­tain a com­bi­na­tion of SMSs, MMSs and emails sent and received between you and the contact.

   The email app within mes­sag­ing allows auto­matic con­fig­u­ra­tion for com­mon email ser­vices such as Yahoo and Gmail with more to come. All you have to do is enter your email address and pass­word and it will fig­ure out the rest for you. The email app also sup­ports receiv­ing, view­ing and send­ing HTML, .pdf, .doc and .docx mes­sages together with sev­eral other com­mon for­mats. Also included is a Twit­ter app which is on par with the rest that are out there allow­ing sta­tus updates, view­ing time­lines, direct mes­sages, re-tweets, search­ing etc.

   Sam­sung Mes­sag­ing+ was really well thought out and its addi­tional fea­tures and cus­tomi­sa­tion options make it a great stop for all your mes­sag­ing needs.

4. Add to all that a faster UI with sev­eral new effects (sim­i­lar to Kas­tor Effects we’ve seen), flaw­less Kinetic scrolling through out the UI, phys­i­cal music con­trols via the vol­ume but­tons, a torch func­tion using the cam­era LED, wid­gets for launch­ing vir­tu­ally all the apps on board, updated Java engine, cus­tomis­able menus, por­trait key­board, equaliser in music player, video edit­ing and a myr­iad of other tweaks and you have one of the best phones on the mar­ket once again.

i8910 Super again!

This Update also comes at a time when Sam­sung just announced sup­port for the i8910 in the App Store. With almost 50 top qual­ity apps to start with includ­ing sev­eral iPhone ports, the i8910 looks set to top­ple its newer counterparts.

With the same hard­ware and face lifted soft­ware, the i8910 has proved that with a solid foun­da­tion and a bucket load of hard work, any­thing is pos­si­ble. It makes me a proud owner of the i8910 and it gives me so much con­fi­dence in Sam­sung prod­ucts know­ing that they care. Good on you Sam­sung Elec­tron­ics, good on you.

*sigh*