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The Samsung Pixon 12 M8910 is full to bursting with connectivity options, with 7.2Mbps HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP as well as microUSB synchronisation.
The data connection is pretty good, with a small blue square in the top left-hand corner with a lovely little 'receiving icon' showing it's connected and receiving data on 3G. And when you move up to 3.5G, it heads into a red square, which might seem superficial but we liked it a lot.
We liked the GPS a lot less though - mostly because it seemed to never work. Not only did the aGPS take ages to kick in (what's the point in having it if it doesn't offer you speedy access to your rough location?) but the full GPS seemed to be having a snooze whenever we fired up Google Maps.
Yet when we used Navigator, Samsung's paid for navigational software, it seemed to run like a dream, with the little GPS symbol popping up and suddenly finding a fair few bars to play with.
We're not saying that Samsung has made Google Maps harder to use on purpose, but if there is some way of making it work faster we couldn't find it, and that means that those out there less bothered to spend hours trawling through settings won't be able to either.
The Bluetooth connectivity is good though, and takes its lead from Samsung's decent performance in this category, and pairing up our Altec Lansing BackBeat 906 BackBeat's worked a treat. We like these phones because they give good sound quality and are comfortable to wear, and especially because they always pair easily with phones, which is a bizarrely hard thing to do with a lot of Bluetooth devices.
PC Connectivity
We've said it before, but the Samsung PC Studio software is among the best out there at the moment. Nokia's Ovi effort isn't bad, and allows you to do things on the web (such as mapping a route) and send it to your phone. However, PC Studio from Samsung just works simply and adds to the phone, whereas a lot of others just complement it.
Being able to easily organise all your files in a quick and easy to use way is a very underrated thing on a mobile phone, and given the performance of even the most basic feature phone is such that connecting to the PC is a necessary occurrence, you can see why it's important to have some decent software on board.
