Samsung Pixon 12 review

There's an easy way to tell if a phone is geared towards media or not, and that's if it has a 3.5mm headphone jack. This one does not, and in omitting that Samsung has firmly classed the phone as good, but a long way from perfect.

We know that barely a year ago the headphone port was a high-end luxury, but now we want it on all our phones as memory gets larger and screens get easier to watch for longer periods. And we know Samsung can do it, as it has done on the Jet S8000 and the forthcoming i7500 Galaxy phone as well.

There's not a lot wrong with the adaptor, but it adds a huge amount of length to your probably already pretty long headphones, and has the added possibility of breaking, or at least ruining the quality of your audio.

The music player on the Samsung Pixon 12 M8910 is OK though, despite the presence of the adaptor. Plug in some decent buds (and coil the metres of cable around your arm) and you're good to go.

Sound was a little on the tinny side, and when using the speaker things got a lot worse, but then again we luckily don't know many people that like to play music out loud on their mobile.

The music can be viewed in two ways - using the portrait mode allows you to see the album artwork or visualisations, and flipping it into portrait will enable a 'flow' of 'covers' (or you might call it a 'cover flow'), which is strangely laggy, meaning it'll take you a while to parse through all the albums you have on offer.

The video player is of decent quality, and allows you to play a whole range of files, such as AVI, MP4 and even DivX too, which is a nice touch on a mobile phone.

We've been incensed recently by Nokia's apparent ceiling on video resolution on its handsets, so it's nice to see that issue's being addressed here (and to be fair on most Samsung phones). As you can imagine, the OLED screen gives lovely colours and deep contrast, but isn't as beautiful as the Samsung i8910 HD's for instance.

It's also a little bit glossy for watching videos, meaning you can be checking out Match of the Day on the train and for much of it you'll be watching yourself watching the football, which could lead to an endless internal loop that will leave you weeping.

The FM radio on board is of decent quality, and the headphone antenna worked well, with much less distortion than we're used to on mobile phone radios. The self tuning didn't automatically save the stations with their names, which is weird as RDS was present.

The FM radio also seemed to be a battery drainer, but with ability to record music and find it as well (thanks to being able to record a snippet of the track, and find it for purchase on the Samsung music portal) it's another good effort from the Koreans.

The gallery for viewing photos on the Samsung Pixon 12 M8910 is pretty good too, although it has that annoying 'tilt-to-view' function, where instead of swiping through photos (although you can) you have to tilt the phone to scroll through, which gets tiresome when it doesn't accurately respond to tilts. It's an interesting experiment, but we're not sure it works properly.