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Messaging on the Samsung Pixon 12 M8910 was a particularly pleasant experience given the shocking text input options we've been subjected to by Samsung over the last year or so.
Texting was easy thanks to the messaging icon located at the bottom of the device, which also made opening and answering messages easy as well.
What we particularly liked about messaging was Samsung appears to have sorted out the accuracy of the touchscreen - this means that when using the phone in landscape mode and activating the QWERTY option you can quickly get a 90 to 95 per cent accuracy rate with the letters you're looking to hit.
In portrait mode you also get similar accuracy, although we were less worried about this as it's always been pretty good with other Samsung models. However, the old T9 conundrum appears with the phone in this mode - switch it on and it will cycle through a list of predicted words. No different to the normal predictive text, you might think, but this cycles through whole words you could be writing, rather than working out combinations of the letters you're using as is the normal way.
This means that more often than not it offers you the wrong word, and even selecting the correct one is a chore - you mostly need to activate the small drop-down menu to do so, and in doing that you have to significantly move your hand around.
We're just glad that Samsung fixed the accuracy issues with the QWERTY keypad (which re-orientates itself very quickly by the way) as otherwise we'd be as frustrated as before with the inability to put text into the phone in the way in which we've become accustomed.
Email set up was a little easier than usual too, although adding in our Google Mail account wasn't as easy it is on other phones, like the Nokia 6700 Classic, which only requires an email address and password, then does all the other hard work for you.
For the Samsung Pixon 12 M8910, you not only need to feed in this information, but also define IMAP or POP3 settings should you wish to get your email to the phone.
While it's not that hard to look on Google's home page to pick up help, having to mess around with SSL settings and getting the right port number and SMTP server settings right isn't going to be easy for a lot of users, who will probably just not use the feature in the end.
It would be a shame if people didn't make it this far, as email is actually very good on the Samsung Pixon 12 M8910. You have to set the time intervals it pulls down your emails (and that means that every 30 minutes or so you end up with an annoying buzz when the phone tells you that there are no new emails) but at least it gets those you need down in an efficient manner.
Sadly we couldn't get Exchange ActiveSync to work, so the chance to download contacts and emails that way wasn't offered to us. Apparently the settings have to be very carefully calibrated to make sure this is possible, but given the demographic this phone is aimed at isn't likely to be a businessman, we can't help feeling its very inclusion on the Pixon 12 is a bit pointless.
