Samsung Jet S8000 review

Calling on the Samsung Jet S8000 was a pretty decent experience, with call coverage better than average in most cases. The pleasing thing was this was mostly 3.5G HSDPA coverage too, meaning that where we could chat, we could also surf should we be so inclined.

Something Samsung phones do very well is give the full range of calling and contact options directly from menus. For instance, should you want to send a buddy a text message, but haven't got a recent message to reply to, then you can just head into the contact list and there's a messaging icon to press ready and waiting.

Similarly, pressing the Call button from the home screen will bring up not only a list of all calls made or received, but also text messages too, so if you have more often contacted friends, then there's an option to communicate with them easily.

The contacts book, as discussed earlier, looks nice thanks to the colourful screen and high contrast ratios, with icons to call and message clearly standing out.

However, the problem comes when trying to scroll through them, as unless you want to manually roll through around 200 names or so (10 friends and 190 cousins... Auntie Radar was 'into' the '60s) you've got to try and grab the little scroll handle, which as we said before, is harder than trying to fight a legion of rabid rabbits for the world's last carrot.

Perhaps that's over-exaggerating it a little bit, but needing two or three goes to hit it and a lot of concentration doesn't scream user friendliness to us. You could always use the up and down arrows to achieve the same thing, and given the system that's probably your best bet.

Each contact screen is also well laid out with the option to call (both voice and video) as well as message within easy reach, and the now-standard contact photo should you forget what your Mum looks like or something.