Samsung's latest smartphone meets all your multimedia needs without breaking the bank

Samsung celebrates the end of 2008 with the launch of the Pixon or M8800, a touch-screen camera phone with a sleek and beautiful body and a resolution of 8 megapixels.

The Pixon, which runs on Samsung's own software, also features a large, bright 3.2-inch- wide screen for enjoying movies on the go.

The camera functioned well in our test, capturing good-quality pictures in a well-lit environment. Scenery, portrait and macro shots came out beautifully clean.

The touch-screen interface makes it easy and fun to browse through your collections of photos, with the interface allowing you to zoom out and view your images just as if they were spread out on the table. Just use your finger to move each photo to the side so you can see the next one.

The Pixon supports both DivX and Xvid video formats and records video at the very fluid rate of 120 frames per second for small resolution or QVGA and 30fps for the larger resolution of 720 x 480 pixels.

You can make shortcuts for quickly accessing your most-used applications by dragging and dropping them onto the shortcut bar on the left side of the home screen and positioning your favourites at the top.

Another fun feature is that you can position the phone horizontally and then use the QWERTY virtual keyboard on the screen to type SMS messages easily.

Pixon runs on quad-band GSM and HSDPA or 3G. Unfortunately, it lacks Wi-Fi.

And it's not ridiculously expensive either. The Samsung Pixon can be yours for just Bt18,500.

Key specs:

Operation System: Proprietary

Band: GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 / HSDPA2100 (3G)

Camera Resolution: 8 Megapixel

Display: 3.2" 262K Colour 400x240 TFT Screen

Video recording: 30fps @720 x 480, 120fps @ 320  240

Music Player: MP3, AAC, AAC+, Enhaced AAC+, WMA

Memory: 80 MB internal, expandable with microSD

Dimension: 107.9 x 54.6 x 13.8mm

Weight: 122g