Samsung Omnia

23 Aug 2008
Measuring a slim 112 x 56.9 x 12.5 millimetres and weighing 127 grams, the Samsung Omnia is a sleek touchphone with an attractive platinum finish, accented by detailed pattern designs.

The Samsung Omnia is dominated by its 81.28-millimetre TFT display screen that runs on a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels and supports 65,000 colours. Its wide user interface display operates on TouchWiz system, and is supported by haptical technology. The responsiveness of the mobile phone's TouchWiz technology is boosted by its Marvell PXA312 processor.

Being TouchWiz-enabled, the Samsung Omnia's display screen does not have a slot for a stylus. Also, it houses a number of keys, such as the optical joystick, and has a few buttons for camera, End, Call and Menu functions. The Samsung Omnia's optical joystick has the ability to function either as an ordinary touchpad or as a mouse pointer to allow users to virtually navigate. Additionally, the Omnia's display screen is powered by the Accelerometer; hence, when the mobile phone is tilted sideways, the display automatically rotates. The display screen also comes with animated transitions.

Interestingly, the Samsung Omnia has business features that essentially operate on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1. Accordingly, users of the Samsung Omnia will be able to access and use Windows-based applications such as PowerPoint, Excel or Word right on the mobile phone.

As part of its advanced multimedia features, the Samsung Omnia sports a built-in 5-megapixel digital camera, which is said to be the first of its kind for Windows-based mobile smartphones. It comes with advanced settings such as white balance, self-timer, ISO settings, colour effect and a variety of modes including such as face detection, an LED flash, auto focus, smile detection and image stabiliser for near-flawless photo outputs. The Omnia's camera supports a resolution of up to 2592 x 1944 pixels.

The Samsung Omnia's camera creates fairly natural and crisp images because of its colour reproduction which is quite accurate. The built-in camera also allows recording of VGA videos, on a 640 x 480 resolution at 15fps, as well as QVGA videos with a resolution of 320 x 240, and at 30fps. Besides video recording, the Samsung Omnia camera allows video playback and streaming, which support customary video file formats such as AAC, DivX, Xvid and MP4.

For users who dig their favourite music, the Samsung Omnia houses its own FM radio that comes with RDS. Listening to the radio is easy and convenient with the mobile phone's 3.5-millimetre audio jack.

The Samsung Omnia also offers high-speed Internet access with its Wi-Fi feature, allowing speedier online data transfers at the maximum rate of 7.2 Mbps. Being a smartphone that runs on HSDPA, the Samsung Omnia also allows on-device advanced online browsing.

As a quadband mobile phone, the Samsung Omnia supports varied connectivity options such as EDGE Class 12, GPRS Class 12, USB version 2.0, WLAN 802.11 and 3G HSDPA at 7.2 Mbps. As added features, the Samsung Omnia comes with a GPS Receiver with the A-GPS system, handwriting recognition and supports Bluetooth A2DP version 2.0.

The Samsung Omnia allows its users to store massive 8 or 16 Gigabytes of data files, photos, videos or mobile, depending upon the version of the mobile phone. As a Windows-based handset, the Samsung Omnia is of 128-Megabyte RAM and 256-Megabyte ROM.

The Samsung Omnia runs on Li-ion battery of 1440 mAh. At most, it is able to provide approximately 6 hours of talk time, and can last for 3 days when moderately used.

Despite the full functionalities that the Samsung Omnia offers, some observers point out that the mobile phone may be too clunky. As a flagship mobile phone, the Samsung Omnia may be less graphically attractive as compared with its direct competitor, the Apple iPhone, they say.

While the Samsung Omnia is powerful with its wide touchscreen display, some users say they would have preferred the mobile phone on the traditional QWERTY type of keyboard. Some users have also complained that the Samsung Omnia offers poor readability when under direct sunlight.

Nevertheless, with advanced features and capabilities, satisfied users believe that the Samsung Omnia can compete with top-of-the-line smartphones and the Apple iPhone that are selling like hotcakes among modernist users.

Editor Comments

Editor: Andrew on 28th October, 2008
I have the great pleasure of riding the London Underground most days, and the trains are just covered with ads for the Samsung Omnia. There are also quite a few ads around the central London stations. Samsung have gone all out on this, and it's a bit hard to understand why you don't see more people using the Omnia. What's even harder to understand is why the Samsung Tocco is still more popular - but cost is likely to have something to do with that.

Reviewer: gennytan - China
Reviewed on: 10th November, 2008
Rating: 10/10
The i9000 is rather good

Reviewer: Tony - London
Reviewed on: 17th September, 2008
Rating: 9/10
Wicked - the phone is wicked - but unfortunately there is a better phone out there the HTC Diamond is one piece of sexy kit

Reviewer: I.Adam - GI
Reviewed on: 6th September, 2008
Rating: 8/10
Very helpful review James. I like this phone too.

Reviewer: james - lancashire
Reviewed on: 28th August, 2008
Rating: 9/10
Ok so I have had my i900 for over a week now and thought it's time to give some kind of feedback seeing as I could not get an idea what this phone was like from the other reviews I found.

. First off, why did I choose this phone. Quite simply I wanted a mobile business device, not a mobile media device. I wanted the device to be SIM free and thus enable it's use anywhere in the world on any SIM. For this reason I ruled out the i-phone but I still feel compelled to compare this phone to the 3g i-phone because everyone admits that's what it is up against.

OK, so in terms of physical appearance I prefer this to the apple. Maybe this is because in every coffee shop, on every tube train I see an i-phone, many i-phones. For this reason I never had an i pop. Apple is cool, but once a product saturates I don't wanna have the product !! Furthermore this device looks smarter and is smaller, not much smaller, but enough to make a big difference in the pocket. I really do find this phone easy to carry in jeans, shirt pockets or trousers.

So on to the phone. The User Interface can not be compared to Apples. The Apples is pure perfection. It's unique and lovely, and when I use the i-phone it makes me smile. It truly is wonderful. My samsung is way off the mark in terms of instant user experiences. It's not the easiest device to use.

However in the week I have had the phone I have found everything not only works, but within the phone the more I look the more I find features that I can and do use every day. With each day I use this phone I find it more and more usefull and I am slowly speeding up my text input and control of this device. Yes if I had an apple I would not have had a learning curve, but I'm not convinced that after two weeks ( once the initial fun is over ) i would still be finding new features and liking the phone more with every day.

Compared to the i-phones I've tried the google maps on the smasung seems a lot quicker and smoother. The GPS seems pretty much the same. E-mail support on the samsung is perfect, I'm sending and receiving e-mail to two accounts and have set up outlook folders and the like. No idea how easy this is on the apple.

I'm also using the phone as a modem on my laptop as I'm working away. The internal HSPDA modem is working jsut fine over bluetooth to my PC and over USB to my laptop. I'm getting speeps of around 400kbps on T-mobile, which at about 0.5Mb is fast enough but not home broadband speeds. I'm convinced something is limitting my speed as I'm currently in london and would expect much higher speeds. So far I don't know if this is my network, phone, pc or usb connection but am sure the HSPDA modem is functioning and capable of much more.

I actually like the samsung widget and find the phonebook widget particularly good.. My four main numbers are represented as little pictures which I can just click on from the main desktop. At first I found the full phonebook on this phone impossible as at first I was having major problems scrolling with this device. Whatever I did in any application seemed to end with me zooming in on things I did not want to do ( this never happens to me on an i-phone). However after a week I now have no problem whizzing around screens and zooming only when I want to.

The camera is not great to be frank. It's a good camera for a phone but not comparable to a 5MP dedicated camera. I do get the not enough memory issue with the camera quite often however shutting down some apps fixes this. Once I had to soft restart the phone ( hold the power switch for 10 seconds or so to power down the device). It's a shame as this is absolutely the only technical issue I have with the phone. I've read it will be fixed in a later release of the firmware and also read that if you use an external memory card and tell the camera to always store pictures to this then the problem goes away. My guess is launching the camera causes it to reserve enough memory for a 5mp picture and that's a lot of memory. Samsung need to sort this soon as less savvy users will return the phone if they can't reliable use the camera.

I like having microsoft messenger too hand and it works a treat. I really find it just as easy to use on my phone as on my desktop. Opera Browser is good but not in my opinion Apple good ! I've opened a few word/excel and adobe documents on the phone for a quick read over. It's great to know I can but I'm not sure I will really edit documents on here.

Finally I'd like to talk a bit about user input to the device. I'm using a total mix to be honest. Obviously screen comes first, but there are times when I'm actually liking using the stick. Not becasue I can't use the screen, but because for certain activities it's nice to not hold or touch the phone direct and just point and click at things on the screen. The optical mouse is great in times of difficulty as it is so precise. I think this is a great feature, let down only by the fact I cant speed it up as much as I would like. I would like to be able to go from the top to bottom of the screen without lifting my finger i.e. in a single stroke. Maybe Samsung can update the mouse's response. I have to say though, this is a great feature on this phone.

I've not used the media features of the phone yet. I do plan to get my photos onto it and to put some music down there too once I get a stereo bluetooth headset..I guess if these where the important items to me then maybe my review would be different as I'm sure as always Apple excel at music and pictures.

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