Samsung Pixon 12 deals & review

With a spectacular 12 megapixel camera, one wonders if there’s ever going to be an end to pushing the envelope in camera phones. The Samsung Pixon 12 has few peers in the industry that seems to see no end to the megapixel wars. What’s next 18 megapixels?

One might be forgiven to take the Pixon as a point-and-shoot camera if not for the fact that it’s a mobile phone form the world’s number two guy among the Big Five in handsets. About the only other camera phone on the market that has one is the Sony Ericsson Satio.

It’s no smartphone but reading its technical data sheet makes it look like one until your realize it has no OS. But it still comes preloaded with all the phone apps, organizer, document viewer, email client support and HTML browser that one can expect from a high end smartphone. 

Top Notch Phone Features

Sporting a full touchscreen form factor on a stylish body measuring 108 x 53 x 13.8mm and weighing a pocketable 120g, the Pixon is also your quad band GSM with class 10 GPRS/EDGE on the 2G network. 

It’s a also a 3G phone on the dual band UMTS radio with HSDPA at 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA at 2 Mbps for high speed internet surfing and downloading. There’s WiFi 802.11b/g for hotspot support and carries local data connectivity options for Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for wireless and wired data transfers, respectively. It has SatNav features with an integrated GPS.

But its real stand out feature is in the imaging department. 12 megapixels of resolution won’t mean unless it has wide CMOS sensor with a 28mm lens, autofocus and xenon flash. It would be nice if it had variable aperture as well, with touch autofocus, face/smile/blink detection, wide dynamic range, smart auto mode and image stabilization that are pretty much standard in mid-priced idiot cameras. 

The Pixon 12 has all of them. It even comes with high definition D1 (720 c 80) video recording at 30fps and QVGA video recording at an ultra smooth 120fps. There’s also a secondary front facing camera from 3g video calls. Your high resolution images and video gets displayed on its 3.1-inch AMOLED resistive touchscreen display with wide-VGA resolution and 16 million colors.

There’s a gravity accelerometer for auto rotate viewing and turn-to-mute features. Entertainment on the road is not left behind as it has a stereo FM receiver with RDS and comes with the usual multimedia players that support the most popular audio and video file formats including DivX and Xvid video codecs. 

There’s TV-Out but no 3.5mm audio jack. But there’s a speakerphone and its A2DP profile support on Bluetooth allows wireless stereo listening.

You also get a decent 120 MB onboard memory with up to 1000 contacts on its Phonebook and can be expanded up to 16GB using its microSD external memory expansion slot. Its standards 1000 mAh li-ion battery provides decent talk times when fully charged. SAR EU is rated at 0.27 watts per kilogram.