My Samsung 8300 Tocco / Ultratouch Review

I've been using this phone since May this year. It's a graduation gift from my mom because I lost my Nokia 3230 last January and have been using an ancient Nokia model as substitute phone. Orginally, I was supposed to wait for the release of Nokia N86, my previous dream phone, because its Nokia's first 8MP and I was a loyal user of such brand and I love taking pictures with my phone. Compared to a digicam, my cp is something I take with me everywhere and it should be ready to take those impromptu stills. And upon researching about it for the nth time, as if fate decided for me, I discovered this beautiful Samsung touch on gsmarena.com, my favorite phone web resource. And it was love at first sight.

It was one of the prettiest mobiles out there. Still is, actually. Plus, it has everything I ever wanted in a phone (except wifi). It has an ultra responsive touch screen that pops with vibrant colors. I still have so much fun changing the wallpapers because all of which I tried looks great.

You need not press the screen for it to respond. The phone is heat sensitive so it measures the amount of heat of your thumb instead of the pressure on the screen so you just have to 'touch' it, literally. Downside is that, stylus, nails, pens, other items and cold-blooded vampire Edward Cullen cannot be used in handling this mobile. Otherwise, this feature is pretty cool.

Key features:

• Classy touchscreen slider with an alphanumeric keypad
• Commendable build quality
• Quad-band GSM and 3G with HSDPA support
• 8 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, geo-tagging, face and smile detection, image stabilization, wide dynamic range and D1 video@30 fps
• 2.8" 16M color AMOLED touchscreen display with 400 x 240 pixel resolution
• Anti-scratch screen surface
• Accelerometer for screen auto rotate
• Proximity sensor for auto screen turn-off
• MicroSD card slot (up to 16 GB), 1 GB included
• Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support, Google Maps
• Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP)
• DivX/XviD video support
• Stereo FM radio with RDS, FM recording
• Document viewer
• Photo Contact
• Smart dialing

Main disadvantages

• User interface sometimes lags, especially when viewing pictures. Can be irritating.
• No Wi-Fi connectivity. That means I'm stuck with Globe's horrible internet connection with appalling fees.
• It's hard editing text, going back to a word and putting the cursor in the right place using only your fingers as there are no navigation keys. Takes practice but it's doable.

No virtual QWERTY keyboard, but who needs one? I text with one hand, sometimes even looking at another direction and the virtual keypad works great for me. I hardly use the actual keypad anymore as I find it hard texting with it with one hand because the phone is hard to balance with an open slide as it is too long.

As for its main feature, the camera works fantastic. Every shot looks crystal clear. The problem is that viewing the pictures you have just taken requires patience. Lots of it, as picture browsing sometimes hang and the transition is not as smooth as I would have preferred. Just transfer the pics to your PC with the handy dandy USB cable for viewing and problem solved.

With regards to battery life, the standby time's more than what I expected. The phone could last up to 2-3 days with minor usage, profile set on silent and no vibration, (as what I did with the Ondoy blackout phenomena). However, I could have set the backlight brightness and duration to a minimum and I'm pretty confident it could last another day.

Heavy usage of the phone's features (especially the camera, web browser and games) may drain your phone in less than one day's time. A flaw on the otherwise superb phone. :(

All in all, this mobile definitely suits me as I love touch screens and an amazing camera built in my phone. I'm not the kind of person who changes phones every month (I've only had 3 phones my entire life, this is the 4th one) and I'm pretty sure I'd be staying with my Tocco for at least a year. Hopefully, it doesn't get taken away by professional snatchers like my other phones. That would be pretty depressing. And costly.