The Samsung Omnia A Review

Over the last two years the features expected by consumers in a smart phone have increased in number and complexity. To be considered a decent phone by today's standards these tiny devices must have more features and power than most computers contained less than a decade ago. 

For a while now HTC has been producing some of the most customizable, advanced and feature rich mobile smart devices. If you don't like the HTC designs or the i-Phone seems too limited for your requirements then this release by Samsung may be just what you are looking for.

This smart-phone is loaded with productivity and multimedia features that make it a great all-in-one device that is only let down by a few design flaws, but I will get to that later.

Omnia Features

This is what you get for your money:

• Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
• 240 x 400 pixels, 3.2 inch TFT resistive touchscreen, 256K colors (65K effective)
• Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
• Optical trackpad
• 8 GB/16 GB storage, 128 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM
• microSD (TransFlash), up to 16GB (verified),
• HSDPA, up to 7.2 Mbps if supported by your carrier
• Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
• Blue-tooth v2.0 with A2DP (stereo)
• A 5 MP camera 2592х1944 pixels, auto focus, LED flash
• Video call camera
• Marvell PXA312 624 MHz processor
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• GPS with A-GPS support
• TV-out

So looking at the specs you can see you get a GPS device, radio, camera, w-fi / 3G mobile browsing as well as a fair amount of storage to hold your music, moves and other documents.

It's running Windows mobile so if the required codecs are downloaded and installed it can play just about any movie or audio format. Out of the box it is equipped to handle MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, OGG, AMR DivX, XviD, WMV, MP4. It generally comes with Pocket Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, PDF viewer) mine did , but if you are buying from e-Bay or without a contract you should check this. The browsing interface handles WAP 2.0, xHTML, HTML, RSS feeds, Java (downloadable), Email and Instant Messaging.

Almost forgot, you also get a phone.

About the Omnia and its use,

It's a slim candy bar design that measures 112mm tall by 56.9mm wide by 12.5mm deep and is surprisingly light. It has a nice solid construction that feels comfortable to hold and use as a phone.

The touchscreen isn't as large as the i-Phone's, and in my opinion the image display isn't as clear, but it is still quite good. The touch screen is one of the design flaws I mentioned earlier. It is smaller than some of the newer phones and is not really finger friendly - even with Samsungs customized user interface.

That leads me to the second concern I have with this design. The stylus, it hangs off the phone, it doesn't dock or slide in. If you lose the stylus and you use the handwriting recognition or have large fingers you might be in trouble. It is not designed for texting with just your fingers.The full QWERTY  on-screen keyboard in portrait mode is pretty cramped and more suited  to a stylus.... or really pointy nails. When you open the keyboard it takes up half the screen, so any text boxes below the top half of the screen need to be scrolled to, which is annoying.

The Omnia has a built-in accelerometer so the screen will rotate from portrait to landscape mode when you turn the phone. There is also feedback (vibration) when you touch the phone , a feature that is becoming standard with other smart phones in the same price range. The sensitivity of these features can be modified, or disabled.

The user interface, TouchWiz, consists of a tray located to the left side. It holds widgets such as the clock, notepad, a music player, the photo gallery and games. You can drag and drop these to the main screen so they are always displayed, but you can't add other applications to the TouchWiz tray. The tray can be hidden by tapping an arrow button.

It's nice and it works , though it can feel sluggish. Sometimes scrolling a page may not respond well and you have to use the the directional pad.

It is also not implemented with consistency, I had a chance to use a Touch HD and the finger scrolling etc were used throughout most of the devices windows. The Omina's customization of WM6 doesn't achieve this depth. It is active in some screens and absent in others.

Another annoyance is the SD card slot , its under the battery. I keep music on my SD card, it's an annoyance to remove the battery just to swap out a card that is designed for data portability.

The camera is good, not great. It requires a steady hand to achieve a decent image but it does have good auto focus and a decent flash.

Power use is not great. The battery with average daily use has only ever lasted about 24 hours before needing a recharge.

Conlusions and personal opinion about the Omnia

I actually like this phone, it's stylish and has a lot of features. It is also easy to use but it has a few drawbacks that will be troublesome for some people. I think the issues with the battery life and the stylus were the result of poor design choices made to achieve a smaller form factor for the phone -- sacrificing battery size for appearance. This is a good offering from Samsung but they are still trying to catch up wth other smart phone manufacturers.

At the moment this phone does offer a good feature set and it trys to balance appearance, price and performance. A difficult task.

If  performance is what you are looking for this may not be the best phone for you.

If you want a compitent stylish phone with all the features this may be an alternative to some of the more costly HTC offerings.

Pros

• Stylish
• Lots of features
• Easy to use
• Decent user interface
• A complete multifunction media capable device
• Wide range of connectivity options

Cons

• Nowhere to put the stylus
• Cramped keyboard
• SD card placement
• Average to poor battery life depending on use.

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