Smarter than a smartphone. Hmm. Honestly, when a phone is launched with such claims, it only goads us to see if the product will live up to the hype. After all, in the dog-eat-dog world of smartphones, that’s a pretty tall claim to make. So, does the Samsung Jet really have the smarts, or is it a one-trick pony? Let’s find out.

With the specs, the Jet does pack some awesome hardware under the hood. I’m talking an industry-leading 800MHz processor powering the performance from a rather petite frame (108.8mm x 53.5mm x 11.9mm) on a 3.1-in screen.

Take a look at the specs — the Samsung Jet is choc-a-bloc with multimedia features as well, with full Flash support — still quite a rarity among today’s handsets — DivX/XviD video codecs and pretty good music package. There’s an obligatory 5MP camera as well, with some pretty good features such as geo-tagging, image stabilisation, face detection, Smile Shot, Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) and D1 video recording at 30 fps.

And then there are the looks — the side profile of the Jet resembles a flattish speeding bullet — fitting. From the front, it looks like Samsung’s regular line-up of all-touchscreen phones, but one with a lot more finesse. Although it has to be said, this phone loves dirt — any sort will do. I was left wiping fingerprints off the piano black glossy plastic body all the time!

Where this phone really scores is in the use of its AMOLED (Active Matrix organic light-emitting diode — quite a mouthful, right?) screen. The 3.1-in beauty features WVGA (480 x 800 pixels) resolution and supports 16 million colours. Image quality is really good, and there’s a hidden pleasure in just going through your photo album just browsing pictures, enjoying all the image details and the lovely rich colours. Fortunately, out in the sun, the handset remains completely usable — the images become somewhat washed out, but you’re not left shielding the phone from the light just to read your message.

The Jet runs a proprietary OS —Samsung’s own TouchWiz 2.0 user interface. With the more powerful processor, the interface is much smoother than any of the TouchWIZ phones from Samsung that I’ve seen. No stylus required here a la iPhone, and the screen responds rather well to touch.

There are three home screens, much like the Android operating system, and you can drag widgets (mini-programs) onto these pages. Widgets on the Jet are of two types — the offline ones and those that require an Internet connection, such as the news, weather and search apps.

TouchWiz 2.0 also includes some novelties, such as the Media Gate 3D user interface and Motion Gate. While the former reminds me of LG’s 3D S-Class Cube or HTC’s TouchFlo 3D, and provides quick access to some applications, the motion recognition engine Motion Gate is a little more interactive and useful. For example, you can end applications and double-tap to play music and take pictures, or for that matter mute the phone when you put it face down. The Speaker call function is unique — move the phone away from the face during a call and placing it on a flat surface automatically activates the speakerphone. Nice!

Unfortunately, while the UI shines in some departments, and the widget platform is interesting, other smartphone operating systems have been around for a long time and third-party programs are readily available on the Web. Until Samsung decides to release a software development kit (SDK) for the platform, this is going to seriously limit the expandability of this phone.

All in all, there are several likable things about the Jet, and one I could recommend if you’re not looking to expand the phone with more apps than it comes bundled with. The platform won’t give the iPhone sleepless nights yet, but is certainly enough to take on similarly priced ‘feature’ phones from the competition, and come out flying.

Quick Specs

• Networks: 850/900/1800/1900 2.5G/3G with Class 12 EDGE/GPRS and 3.6Mbps HSDPA
• Processor: 800MHz Application Processor
• Display: 3.1-in WVGA (480x800) 16million colour AMOLED
• Camera: 5.0 megapixel with Dual Power LED flash
• Memory: 2GB Internal, expands via microSD (upto 16GB)
• Connectivity: Bluetooth V2.1 + EDR, USB 2.0, TV-Out, A-GPS, Wi-Fi
• Software: Samsung Proprietary OS using TouchWiz 2.0 with Samsung Web Dolphin browser, Document viewer, Mobile printing, Photo/Video editor, Music/Video player, FM radio
• Battery: 1100mAh with upto nine hours talk time and 500 hours standby time
• Dimensions: 108.8mmx53.5mmx11.9 mm
• Weight: 110gm
• Rating: 8/10
• Price: Rs 24,150
• URL: http://jet.samsungmobile.com/

Photo finish

Photoshop? Who needs a bulky, slow program to edit your images when all you need to do is fire up your Internet browser! If simple photo editing is your need, head over to http://pixlr.com. Pixlr combines image design and paint tools with photo editing and adjustment features in a rather seamless and convincing fashion, certainly better than most basic editing programs on your PC. Use it to create an image from scratch, or layer one image over another or using a variety of filters and effects to transform photographs. It’s quick to load too, and works with any browser that supports the Flash platform. My only complaint about this tool is that it fails to include many of the commonplace integrations used by other online image editing programs to make imports and exports to Flickr and Facebook.

• URL: http://www.pixlr.com/
• Price: Free

Game plan

Recessionary tactic or master stroke? The PlayStation 3 just got slimmer with the oh-so-tiny PS3 Slim. Thirty three per cent smaller, 36 percent lighter and 34 percent less power consumption — the PS3 Slim sports a 120GB hard drive, a very yummy price tag of $299 and the same features as the current PS3. What it doesn’t have is infra-red or backwards compatibility for PS2 games, but hey, you can upgrade/replace the hard drive without voiding the warranty!

• URL: http://www.playstation.com
• Price: $299

Sound of music

I ’ve almost given up on Apple launching an India iTunes Store, and maybe instead, Nokia’s listening? With the launch of its India Music Store, Nokia’s tied up with Universal Music Group and Sony Music, among others to offer over three million international and Hindi film and regional soundtracks across all genres. Strangely enough, Nokia’s giving the omni-present plastic card a pass and will instead allow track purchases only via vouchers, which are present in the sales box of selected handsets (Nseries, Eseries and XpressMusic).

• URL: http://music.nokia.co.in