The CommunicAsia event in Singapore last month turned out to be a pretty normal-looking trade show for mobile phone companies and their related services, not the futuristic geek con I expected (and hoped) it would be, with holographic flying machines and such. There was, however, a dizzying slew of new phone launches, including super cool solar-powered ones we won’t see in this market. This year Samsung introduced its new flagship phone the Jet at a conference called Unpacked, which took place semi-simultaneously in Singapore, Dubai and London. The head honcho from Korea “beamed in” to welcome us as they made mobile history (so I did get my holographic wishes, sort of) and we were led through all the features of the Jet through a dynamic interactive presentation which had screenshots flying across the stage and three dimensional cubes spinning around when the host swished his hands through the air.
Even the advertorial for the Jet was vertigo-inducing — it begins with no less than an atomic drop from outer space. Close up on the phone, which whizzes past a hummingbird and races ahead of a sports car into the waiting hands of a young, hiply dressed man-about-town. “Smarter than smartphone,” someone intones. The dramatic CGI-intensive spot references asteroidal hero movies and takes place mostly upside down, but the point is that the Jet is really a rocket ship. It’s fast. Peeking over at the LG booth, the commercial they project on their movie wall also featured a lot of zoom zoom, a stark contrast to the folksy, almost DIY aesthetic of the typical iPhone ad.
So yes, the Jet is somewhat styled like an iPhone and others of that ilk — but guess what, it’s not exactly a smartphone, hence the (grammatically incomplete) tagline. It just acts like one, being a full-touch phone with a multi-task manager and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, bringing user-friendly menu navigations in a sleek and compact design.
Younghee Lee, vice president of Overseas Marketing, Mobile Communications Division, listed the top five features of the Jet: The AMOLED display, its speed, the user interface, the Dolfin browser, and its multimedia capabilities.
The display, a 3.1-inch Samsung WVGA AMOLED, is four times sharper than a WQVGA screen. The image quality transforms mobile content into amazing visuals, which can be viewed from a 180-degree angle. The screen responds quickly to your touch and is very efficient in its power consumption. The revolutionary speed is due to the 800MHz Accelerated Application Processor, which lets you use multiple applications without any lag time or blurred visuals. The Dolfin Internet browser has a built-in ad blocker, multiple downloading and background downloading feature, and a multiple-purpose address field.
An online widget function lets you access useful applications, 30 of which are already on the phone and more available on the website. The unique one-finger zoom makes it easy to zoom in and out of web pages using only one hand. For video, the DVD-like video playback recording enables seamless playback without residuals and the ability to instantly download and play practically every kind of media format without converting, resizing and lateration.
Whew, that’s a lot of features. We asked Lee, who used to work for a cosmetics giant, to break it down for us in a way that a non-techie can understand. “The Jet falls between the full-featured smartphone (Samsung’s Windows-operating Omnia range) and your basic mobile phone,” she says. “It democratizes smartphone features.” To use fashion analogy, it’s kind of like Alexander McQueen designing for Target, or Stella McCartney for H&M — the most noticeable difference is the price. The other difference is the operating system; since it’s proprietary, the Jet won’t be supportive of apps Samsung doesn’t build itself. Meaning, possibly, no social networking clients. But we’ll let Samsung work that one out — even pseudo-smartphone users would want something to Tweet about.