Samsung M8910 Pixon12 preview: Firing the first rounds

Introduction

It's only been a day since we went through the review of Nokia N86 8MP - the first cameraphone with a 28mm wide-angle lens. And we already have the Samsung Pixon12 on our hands - the first 12 megapixel cameraphone to ever hit the market and not only that, but also the first 12 megapixel cameraphone with the same luring 28mm wide-angle lens as on the Nokia N86 8MP.

If you've gone through the Nokia N86 8MP review comments like we did, you've probably noticed there are a lot of people out there that consider us... well, biased. We wish we had a dime every time some of you accused us of that.

Lately it seems you find us a bit too harsh on Nokia. The truth however is that we aren't, it's just that once top-of-the-line, Nokia products now come with less and less pioneering spirit.

On the other hand you are more than welcome aboard to see how Samsung have been treating us, regular users, and what they have to offer with the Samsung M8910 Pixon12. And bear in mind that they even have a rumored Samsung M8920 in the works - a 12 megapixel cameraphone with 3x optical zoom. How about that, Nokia? But we digress.

Today's show is all about Samsung M8910 Pixon12. We will most probably have a more detailed preview of the device ready for publishing some time tomorrow, but that stuff is too hot to keep it all to ourselves. So we went out of the box with this one, and we'll be publishing only camera samples today. We're just dying to find out what you make of our impromptu shootout with some quite unusual peers.

Samsung M8910 Pixon12 official photo

The images produced by the Pixon12 managed to impress us and you'll understand us as we were eager to share those with you (let's hope for some better weather tomorrow).

Samsung M8910 Pixon12 at a glance:

• General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100 MHz, HSDPA 7.2Mbps, HSUPA
• Form factor: Touchscreen bar
• Dimensions: 108 x 53 x 13.8 mm, 120g
• Display: 3.1 inch 16M color WVGA AMOLED resistive touchscreen
• Platform: Latest TouchWiz 2.0 UI with Smart unlock
• Memory: 150MB integrated memory, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
• Camera: 12 megapixel auto focus camera with Power LED flash and xenon flash, wide-angle 28mm lens, object tracking auto focus, automatic lens cover, geo-tagging, image stabilization, Smart Auto mode, face detection, Beauty Shot, Smile Shot and D1 video recording at 30 fps with auto focus and face detection
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, TV out
• Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate and turn-to-mute, FM radio with RDS, DivX/XviD video support
• Battery: 1000mAh Li-Ion battery

The Samsung M8910 Pixon12 runs the latest TouchWiz UI 2.0 as the Samsung S8000 Jet. It's really fast ticking (much like the final version of the Samsung Jet that we have here), so we guess a similar application processor might also be used. There's no Media Gate 3D (the 3D Cube) or Motion UI, but the Smart unlock and Photo contacts features are both on board. Of course, we'll get into more details about those as we prepare the preview tomorrow.

Samsung M8910 Pixon12 in our office

The Pixon12 is surprisingly compact, smaller than even the LG Arena, but its thickness (same as on the original Pixon) may be a bit too much to our taste. Still, thanks to the other quite compact dimensions, the Pixon12 makes a nice first impression and seems quite pocketable.

Samsung M8910 Pixon12 in hand • Pixon12 next to LG Arena and Viewty Smart, Samsung Jet and S5230