Mobile Phones Reviews

Posts Tagged ‘Samsung Omnia’

The manufacturer sells Samsung in 2009 a new kind of highly advanced mobile phone. Just think that the model incorporates HSDPA, an 8 Megapixel digital camera, a touchscreen 3.7-inch diagonal, and gives the ability to record video in HD quality (720p), the world’s first device with this feature .

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD Main features: network, display and power

High-speed connections form the basis of the technical offer of the new Samsung Omnia i8910 HD, leading in virtually all respects. Therefore include the HSDPA connectivity, with possible operating speed of 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA, which comes to 5.76 Mbps There are also supports EDGE, GPRS and classical operations on four GSM frequencies. Definitely is the advanced liquid crystal display built. This is an AMOLED display with touch screen control, can display up to 16 million colors. Presents the so-called QHD resolution, with 360×640 pixel display, and a diagonal well above the standard phones, well 3.7 inches wide. The latest figure to remember is that relating to food, that is through a rechargeable lithium ion battery with a capacity of 1200 mAh.

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD design

Maximum grant of space to the display, limiting any other non-essential, subtlety and a very strong form of design that, while not strictly classical, however, is reduced to the standard type, or monocoque, if you prefer. These are the aesthetic properties of the new Samsung Omnia i8910 HD, which has a height of 121 mm, a width of 59.5 mm and then a thickness of only 13.2 mm. The apparatus is characterized by the predominance of black, although the frontal area almost all the available space is occupied by the LCD. The menu functions and phone numbers are in fact selected via touchscreen control of the screen. In the high area on the right watching the phone before, this is the objective of powerful digital camera.

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD Multimedia messaging and main functions

The Samsung Omnia i8910 HD allows browsing through the Safari browser, and uses a Symbian S60 version 5.0. In terms of the musical entertainment, there is the presence of a media player that can encode songs in MP3, AAC, AAC +, WMA and RA. Ringtones, polyphonic type are also available in MP3 format. Games pre-installed with Java support, predefined backgrounds and the presence of an FM radio with RDS functionality complete the entertainment. There are also GPS satellite receiver, Quick Office document viewer, Off Line mode for use such as during air travel. Remember the connections between USB 2.0, Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi. The model supports the management of SMS, MMS and send and receive e-mail.

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD The integrated camera

One of the most technically advanced resources submitted by Omnia Samsung i8910 is undoubtedly the HD camera. This fact reached the 8-megapixel resolution, this is the lowest value recorded by an image sensor of a camera that is installed on a phone. The tool also features photographic Power LED Flash, autofocus and digital zoom can reach 14 magnification of the image. Face Detection, Smile Shot and Panorama Shot Blik between the technologies most common trigger. Moreover, the device also acts as a camera, and Samsung Omnia i8910 HD appears to be the first mobile phone that records video in HD quality (720p). The player is also DivX and XviD encoding correlates between the formats. Thanks to advanced connections are also supported video calling, video streaming and video messaging.

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD final verdict

The first phone that can record video through an integrated camera with HD resolution (720p). So you define HD i8910 Samsung Omnia, also evolved in many other respects. To keep the scope camera integrates such a good 8-megapixel camera, with Power LED flash and 14x digital zoom and face detection technology. Connectivity are also cutting edge: there supports HSDPA and HSUPA for surfing at speeds up to 7.2 Mbps (with the Safari browser). Then there are the more traditional forms of entertainment: media player, FM radio with RDS, document viewer. Detail is the AMOLED display, by far 3.7 inches diagonally, with touchscreen control. Design standard, but without keypad, Samsung Omnia i8910 HD has a thickness of only 13.9 mm and a height of 121 mm.

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD USER REVIEW

I bought the HD Omnia a month ago by paying 499 euros.
The choice lies between this and the N97, but the number of video reviews and tests, and the price made me favor the purchase of Samsung. We come to the review!
Just turned the thing that struck me most was the brightness, definition and color AMOLED display 3.7 “. I can say without fear that it is the best display I’ve ever seen (compared with previous Samsung, and the N97 -phone).
The second thing, very positive, I checked is the fluidity and response of the capacitive touch (no more resistive as the previous i900) or the same technology implemented on the i-phone. The icons are large and easily clickabili, widgets are manageable with the ball and we can actually use the phone with one hand.
What if we join this fluidity, and ease of touch screen 3.7 “? Simple: write a sms that touches the speed of my old Nokia 6630! Regardless of whether you use the QWERTY keyboard or classical alphanumeric (personally I love the fact to change the T9 words using the asterisk – Symbian prerogative -).
Precisely because the HD mounts Omnia software Symbian 5th, we realize how easy and intuitive menu navigation.

Consideration usability of the theme with Widgets:
The default theme has the widget on the toolbar to disappear on the left (the most useful, in my opinion, bluetooth, notes, Reg. Voice, calendar, facebook and youtube) and down, always present, messaging, contacts, menu and the phone keypad.
In this way we get ALL available with a click!
Not only do right by scrolling up the page “contact photo”, whereby we can put photos of our favorite contacts easy to send messages or make calls.

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD Multimedia and Camera:
Here the strength Omni HD! The camera with LED flash takes pictures at a resolution of 8megapixel you already knew this .. .. how about?
By day: absolutely no problem. Just train yourself to keep a steady hand and not be fooled by the sound of shooting took place (which is a bit ‘ahead of the actual image capture) and the photos are fine. The colors are more realistic than all’N97.
At night: no problem for close-ups: the flash behaves well (unlike that of the i-900), a problem for pictures in night mode without flash, which are easily moved.
The videos are great: the HD (1280×720p) has a few macroblock (I think due to the firmware), so I always use the resolution lower: 720×480. In this mode, the videos are fluid and defined as ever in any cell. And big is beautiful to be seen on the PC.
The new firmware (currently at the G2) introduced the audio in AAC format quality far superior to ‘Amr.
I uploaded some short video in high quality DivX, and I found a great pleasure to see them on the phone. Recommended for those who make long journeys by train!
Yes, by train, because despite the noisy environment, we can hear almost everything thanks to Samsung in-ear headphones that isolate us from the outside.
The media player is good and graphics are attractive, reminiscent of the i-phone, smartphone reference now: D

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD Internet and Navigation:
For now I tested only in the Omnia HD WIFI and I found a fairly smooth sailing, with the default browser. By now everyone knows the bug STOP button, which exits the browser. Better browsing with third party browser.
Very nice and useful function “charge on the web”, whereby we can with a few clicks to upload photos and videos on social networks supported (among others there are Facebook, YouTube, fickr, Picasa).
GPS:
Reception of internal GPS: amazing! Take indoors 4 to 5 notches. Above processors sirfstar3! Combined with good software like Sygic or Garmin is the top (for now there are compatible versions of TomTom, but it will be a matter of time)

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD Battery:
With normal usage (sms, calls, a bit ‘of navigation, a bit’ picture) you come to three days on average. With an unbridled use (often in conesso wifi, video and many photos and GPS) I pulled up to 1 day and a half. I would say great!

Last but not least: Quality of reception.
If the omnia i-900 I had disappointed sector as radio reception, the HD I was pleasantly surprised. The signal is stable with Vodafone and the voice is clean and clear.

Final verdict:

It ’s the first time I buy a smartphone and started using it in all its functions without problems. Really well done and complete. The minor bugs will no doubt be resolved in a couple of updates.
It should be said that Samsung is the first house that has established a communication with Web2.0 consumartori to collect complaints on the phone.
And ‘this on facebook, in fact, an official page, which warns of the outputs of the firmware and future improvements.
Many are frightened of the scale: in your pocket and hardly feels in your hand is solid and beautiful ‘visual effect. Remember that it is almost full screen !!!;)
Today, August 21, 2009, plans to release a new firmware, whose best interests the contacts picture, the browser, widgets, and implementing the task manager 3D.

Samsung Omnia i8910 HD VIDEO REVIEW

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HTC set a standard for Windows Mobile customization with TouchFLO, and last year Samsung made their entry into the market with the TouchWiz UI touting Omnia. The Samsung Omnia II I8000 is now here, and a 2 has been added to the end of TouchWiz as well. This new Omnia is bigger and badder, with just about everything getting a refresh. The screen has gained half an inch- now up to 3.7” and the resolution has quadrupled to 480×800. AMOLED technology has replaced TFT for improved battery life and more vibrant images. Video capture is now DVD quality, and connection standards such as 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS are all on board, along with 8GB of internal storage. The 800MHz processor is one of the fastest currently on the market, and it has a healthy 256MB of RAM and 512MB ROM. TouchWiz now penetrates into the deepest caverns of Windows Mobile, but will it be enough to make up for the clunky UI’s shortcomings?

Design

The design of the Samsung Omnia II I8000 is simple and straightforward. It closely resembles the Jet, but is bigger and loses the touch of red on the back. The phone exists to show off the giant 3.7” display, and everything else is kept to a bare minimum. The front of the phone has a tiny front-facing camera at the top next to the speaker. On the bottom are the Send and End keys, as well as the Cube key. The left side has a volume rocker, the right a lock, OK and camera key. All of the keys have a good amount of travel and it’s clear when they have been activated. The microUSB port and 3.5mm headset jack are on the top of the device. The back simply houses the 5-megapixel camera and the Omnia II’s single speaker.

Really though, it’s all about the display. It dominates the phone in every way, which is a good thing. The AMOLED screen is brilliant, producing crisp and vibrant images. The haptic feedback is appreciated, though the phone does have the weird spring feeling when jostled, like the Instinct. It is plenty bright, but the plastic covering gets fairly washed out in direct light. The use of plastic is a shame; it is noticeable, produces unnecessary drag and gives the phone a cheaper feel than it deserves. Another thing holding it back from being the best display we’ve ever used is the use of 65k colors, instead of the 16m found on the Pre, iPhone and N97. We realize that as a Windows Mobile device it has to do this, but the possibility of an Android device with this screen at 16m colors is downright delicious. We have to mention that it fingerprints easily, but what doesn’t these days?

The Samsung Omnia II I8000 is a big phone, but it manages to pull it off well. It is very tall, 6mm more so than its predecessor, but it is narrow enough to fit comfortably into the hand and skinny enough (0.6mm less than the Omnia) to slide into your pocket mostly unnoticed.

The design is so simple there isn’t much to say about it. It is an elegantly crafted device, with gentle curves and top-notch build. Our only gripe is the plastic housing on the display, higher-quality materials or even glass would have been a much better choice. It’s still hard to find fault with this latest Omnia, it is a device we would definitely be comfortable carrying.

Keyboard and user interface

While the physical aspects of the Samsung Omnia II aren’t radically different from the competition, the smartphone does have some unique “design” features beneath the surface. For one thing, it offers an onscreen portrait and landscape QWERTY keyboard with Swype technology, which Webware previewed a while back. Instead of pecking at individual keys, Swype lets you spell out a word by dragging your finger on the keyboard from letter to letter. Swype’s algorithm then does its best to figure out what word you’re trying to input; it also automatically enters a space after you complete a word and includes certain tricks, such as circling a key to input a letter twice. Admittedly, we were very skeptical of Swype. However, to our surprise, it worked and was mostly accurate. We ran into some problems when entering terms that weren’t true words, such as an instant-messaging handle, though Swype will try to come up with a list of possible results. It also takes some adjustment to enter long words since you have to keep your finger on the screen the whole time. Still, we were always amazed when it came up with the correct word.

The Omnia II’s Swype keyboard takes a little acclimation but impressed us with its accuracy.

We were still trying to get used to Swype after a couple of days and when writing e-mails, we preferred to switch to the landscape keyboard and tap away at the keys the old-fashioned way for faster results. However, with more practice, we could certainly see using it as an option for text messaging, especially since the portrait keyboard is a bit too cramped to use the traditional way. (According to Swype, users can type up to 30 words per minute using its keyboard.)

Another distinctive characteristic of the Omnia II is the Samsung TouchWiz user interface. Revamped and now with more features, TouchWiz 2.0 makes it easier for people to access their apps and multitask. The general idea is the same as the previous version. On the left side of the screen, you’ll find an expandable widget tray where you can drag and drop numerous widgets to one of three home screen panes. However, the Omnia II is far more customizable than its predecessor since Samsung has added more widgets, such as ones for Facebook and Bing. In addition, Samsung has officially opened its Widget Store. From here, you can download from a catalog of around 200 widgets created by third-party developers, which includes widgets for Digg, LOL Cats, E Online, a tip calculator, and much more.

The smartphone features TouchWiz 2.0, which now includes access to more home screen widgets, among other things.

Also, along the bottom of the home screen, there is a notification bar along (as well as on the lock screen) to alert you to any missed calls, new messages, and voice mail, and in a nice touch Samsung added a feature where if you tap the top of the screen, it will magnify the status bar the help you better see and manage your wireless options, sound profile, and battery life.

Samsung also completely redid the main menu page. Pressing the menu key below the display will bring up a grid view of all your phone’s apps. There are 12 icons per page and each page is customizable so you can rearrange the apps in the order you want. All you have to do is press the Edit button on the bottom of the screen and at that point you can move the icons to any position on any menu page. Pages will be added as you add more applications to your phone, and you can move among pages by swiping your finger left to right, or vice versa. Right next to the Edit button is one of our favorite additions: the new Task Switcher function. This feature shows you all your running applications in thumbnail visuals and lets you easily switch between tasks, exit out of an app, or end all running programs. It alleviates one of the biggest problems of Windows Mobile, which was multitasking. In fact, TouchWiz 2.0 in general does a good job making the operating system easier to use, so much so you can hardly tell it’s a Windows Mobile smartphone.

Finally, like the Samsung Behold II, the Omnia II offers the 3D cube interface for the phone’s various multimedia capabilities. However, unlike the Behold II, there is also a toolbar on the where you can launch the same entertainment apps with a simple tap, which is much more functional than the gimmicky cube. Overall, TouchWiz 2.0 makes much more sense and is more useful on the Omnia II than the Behold II, as it provides the customization capabilities that Windows Mobile lacks and offers a much more intuitive user interface.

Accessories

Verizon packages the Samsung Omnia II with an AC adapter, a USB cable, a mic adapter/FM radio antenna, a stylus, a software CD, and reference material. For more add-ons, please check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and help page.

Features

As mentioned, the Samsung Omnia II is a Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional Edition device, which includes new features such as Microsoft’s My Phone backup service and an improved Internet Explorer Mobile. Aside from the Microsoft Office Mobile Suite and preloaded apps, you can also access the Windows Marketplace for Mobile to find and download apps for your device in all categories, including entertainment, productivity, travel, and so forth. Out of the box, the Omnia II ships with such standard personal information management tools as an alarm clock, calculator, memo pad, voice recorder, and a Smart Reader business card scanner.
Messaging and e-mail on the Omnia II remains largely unchanged from the original Omnia. The smartphone continues to offer support for Microsoft’s Direct Push Technology for real-time e-mail delivery and automatic synchronization with your Outlook calendar, tasks, and contacts via Exchange Server. Once Exchange 2010 arrives, Windows Mobile 6.5 will support conversation view for e-mails, unified messaging, free/busy calendar lookup, and more. However, you’ll notice that the Outlook in-box looks different than the standard Windows Mobile one, as Samsung has added its own skin to give the phone a uniform feel throughout.

In addition to corporate e-mail, you can configure the smartphone to get your POP3 and IMAP accounts as well, and Verizon offers its own Mobile Email solution to access such accounts. The smartphone also provides instant messaging clients for Windows Live, Yahoo, and AIM.

As a phone, the Omnia II offers a speakerphone, conference calling, speed dial, voice dialing and commands, and text and multimedia messaging. The smartphone also supports Visual Voice Mail and VZ Navigator for real-time navigation using the phone’s built-in GPS. Be aware that both services require additional fees. The address book is limited only by the available memory, and each contact can hold multiple numbers, addresses, birthdays, notes, and more. For caller ID purposes, you can pair an entry with a picture, a group ID, or a custom ringtone. Bluetooth 2.0 is onboard for use with mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets as well as hands-free kits, object push for vCard, file transfer, basic printing, basic imaging, phonebook access profiles, and dial-up networking. The latter requires a Verizon Mobile Broadband Connect plan.

The Omnia II is 3G capable, running on Verizon’s EV-DO Rev. A network, and has integrated Wi-Fi. While you could use Internet Explorer Mobile for your browsing needs, we’d recommend going with the Opera Mobile 9.5 browser that’s also preloaded on the smartphone. Not only does Opera provide tabbed browsing and easier page navigation, Samsung has also added a handy zooming feature where you can do a long-press on a page and then slide up to zoom in or down to zoom out (you’ll see up and down arrows appear onscreen).

While browsing on the Omnia II is enjoyable (more on this in the Performance section), the Samsung Omnia II really shines in the multimedia department, more so than a lot of Verizon’s other smartphones. First off, the media player offers support for various formats including DivX video playback and includes the basic player functions as well as DNSe and SRS audio effects, playlist creation, and various shuffle/repeat modes. An attractive Cover Flow-like interface allows you to advance through your multimedia files by swiping through album art, video stills, and photos. In addition, to the built-in media players, the smartphone also has an FM radio (you must use the included headset for this feature), a streaming player, and support for V Cast Music and V Cast Videos.

The Omnia II also features a 5-megapixel camera with flash, digital zoom, and video recording capabilities. The camera’s interface is mirrored after those of Samsung’s digital cameras, so if you happen to own one, it should look familiar to you. There are plenty of camera options, including auto focus, shooting modes, white balance, ISO, antishake, and various image sizes. For video, you can record in normal mode or slow or MMS mode. There’s even an onboard video editor so you can add music, text, and so forth to your recorded clips right from the phone.
Once done, you can share your photos and videos with others via MMS or e-mail. Samsung also includes a Communities app in which you can access popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Photobucket, from one spot and upload your media to those sites. Also cool is the Digital Frame app that will rotate through your saved photos while displaying the date and time and phone status. In addition, the Omnia II has TV-out capabilities. Storage should be no problem as the Omnia II has 8GB internal user memory as well as a microSD expansion slot that can accept up to 16GB cards.

The Omnia II’s picture quality was decent. Even in darker environments, the Omnia II’s camera was able to capture fairly sharp photos with good color. However, even with the antishake feature on, we had some slight problems with blurry images. Recorded video was impressive with very little graininess.

PIM Functionality

As with everything else, Samsung has put their touch on the PIM applications. The calendar is large and finger friendly, with tabs for Month, Week, Day and Agenda views along the top. Smart Memo is a better version of Notes, where the user can draw notes and insert voice recordings, images or sounds. The phonebook is easy to navigate, again completely skinned. The Tasks application is…sadly the same old WinMo Tasks application. In fact, the standard Contacts, Notes, Calendar, Task Manager and a few others are available as well under that dirty little More option in the Start Menu. Why anyone would want to use it we don’t know, since the Samsung versions are superior in every way that we could tell.

The dialpad has been slightly reworked, but the functionality remains largely the same. It will match contacts as you enter in numbers (it matches names at the same time via T9) and along the bottom you have quick access to your phonebook, call history and messaging. Unfortunately there is no voice dialing out of the box, but software is of course available.

Messaging

With no physical keyboard there is a premium on an excellent onscreen keyboard, and Samsung has delivered. The onscreen QWERTY is quick and responsive, and when tapping out a message you can rotate the Samsung Omnia II I8000 and get a larger landscape keyboard. The haptic feedback again works well here, allowing you to know that you’ve pressed the desired key, and with the XT9 mode enabled the error correction was nearly as flawless as it was unobtrusive. As always, we would have liked to see an onscreen T9 keypad for easier portrait use, but Samsung only offers the full QWERTY with word prediction. As well as it worked it’s hard to complain.

All the standards are available, including email, SMS and MMS. Samsung has again skinned these, but the functionality remains the same. Windows Mobile is a very robust messaging platform, but it would be great to see popular IM applications integrated into the OS instead of being stand alone apps.

Connectivity

The Samsung Omnia II I8000 is a quad-band GSM device with 3G on the 900, 1900 and 2100MHz bands, making it a world phone, since it supports both European 3G bands, and AT&T’s 1900MHz one. It offers 7.2Mbps HSDPA and 5.78Mbps HSUPA, Wi-Fi b/g and GPS. Bluetooth can be used for short distance data transfer and supports too many profiles to list (see our spec page for full details.)

Rather than use their rather horrible “full HTML” browser found on the Memoir and Instinct, Samsung has wisely chosen to stick with Opera Mobile for all of your web needs. We’ve of course seen this browser employed on many WinMo devices such as HTC’s Touch phones and Sony’s Xperia X1. The build used here has limited support for Flash (adobe.com worked, espn.com gave us a Flash error,) one of the few drawbacks to the otherwise superior WebKit browsers found on the Pre and iPhone. Opera Mobile is still a very good browser, and will display webpages just as you’d see them on your desktop.

Software

The Omnia II is a Windows Mobile 6.1 device which will be upgradable to Windows Mobile 6.5 once it is released. It runs on a lightning-fast 800MHz processor with 256MB of RAM and 512MB ROM. One would think this should be plenty muscle to power the device, but as noted earlier we saw too many beach balls for our liking and there was noticeable lag at times.
Besides all the Samsung software found on the Omnia II there are a few other helpful programs. DNLA’s Connected Home allows the user to access music libraries from remote computers, and Midomi will listen to the song playing and return track information. The Streaming Player is similar to HTC’s Streaming Media player, neither of which are all that practical for playing internet videos. Qik allows you to share live video from your phone with friends and family. There is an RSS reader and Podcast feed reader for keeping up with the latest current events. There is a communities option that lets you link your Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Photobucket, Picasa and Friendster (people still use that?) accounts so you can upload photos or go to the website (where you’ll have to login again,) but that’s the extent of it.

The Samsung Omnia II I8000 comes with included NAVFone Plus software, but that did not do us any good here in the States. Fortunately any GPS program you can get your hands on will work since it is unlocked, and we had no issues downloading and using Google Maps. Samsung uses their XTRA software to give quicker GPS locks, much like HTC’s QuickGPS program.

Performance

We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1,900MHz; EV-DO Rev. A) Samsung Omnia II in New York using Verizon service and call quality was good. Audio was loud and mostly clear on our end but occasionally, voices could sound a bit garbled, making us ask our callers to repeat themselves. Still, we were able to carry on numerous conversations without major problems and didn’t experience any dropped calls during our test period. Meanwhile, friends were impressed with the clarity of the call and only one caller mentioned hearing a slight echo on their side.

Speakerphone quality was also decent with plenty of volume and minimal background noise and voice distortion. We had no problems pairing the smartphone with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset or the Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones. Our only complaint is during our call, we accidentally got to a main menu page and every time our cheek would brush against the display we would feel the haptic feedback of the screen. According to Samsung, the smartphone does have a proximity sensor that automatically locks the display during calls, so we are working with the company to determine what happened in our situation.

The Omnia II is powered by an 800MHz Samsung S3C6410 processor and, in general, the smartphone was responsive. The accelerometer was quick to change screen orientation, and for the most part, applications were quick to launch, though more processor-intensive apps took a few seconds to load and shut down. We had no major problems, such as system crashes, during our testing period.

Using the Opera browser, surfing the Web on the Omnia II was painless. Using Verizon’s 3G network, CNET’s full site loaded in an impressive 30 seconds, while CNN’s and ESPN’s mobile sites came up in 12 seconds and 7 seconds, respectively. Meanwhile, a 1.79MB song took 43 seconds to download over the network from V Cast Music. We listened to various types of music on the smartphone, from hip-hop to classical, and enjoyed rich-sounding songs through our Bose On-Ear Headphones each time. We also appreciate that the option to choose from various DNSe settings to match the genre of music (e.g., rock, jazz, concert hall, and so on.).

We downloaded a DivX movie trailer and transferred it to the Omnia II using ActiveSync. We were blown away at the clarity of the picture and smooth playback. YouTube launches in the Opera mobile browser, while videos play on the streaming player. Connection time varied as did video quality and there were a couple of times when the clips had to rebuffer.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t test out full navigation capabilities of the Omnia II here in New York, more specifically how it does as automotive navigator. However, the smartphone was able to find our location on the map in less than a minute and was able to provide us with an accurate walking route from the Upper West Side to CNET’s Midtown offices.

The Samsung Omnia II features a 1500mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 10 hours and up to 17.9 days of standby time. In our battery drain tests, the smartphone provided 6 hours of continuous talk time on a single charge. According to FCC radiation tests, the Omnia II has a digital SAR rating of 1.06 watts per kilogram and has a Hearing Aid Compatibility rating of M3.

Key features:

• 3.7-inch 65K-color resistive AMOLED touchscreen,
• 480 x 800 pixelsWindows Mobile 6.5 with TouchWiz UI 2.0 and Media Gate 3D
• Samsung S3C6410 800MHz processor; HW Graphic Accelerator
• 256MB RAM
• 5 megapixel auto focus camera with LED flash, geotagging, face detection, smile shot, image stabilizer, Wide Dynamic Range (WDR)
• Records video in D1@30fps, QVGA slow-mo video recording
• Tri-band 3G with HSDPA (7.2Mbps) and HSUPA (5.76 Mbps) support
• Quad-band GSM support
• Smart dialing
• Wi-Fi with DLNA technology
• Built-in GPS with A-GPS functionality
• 2/8/16GB internal memory
• microSD card slot (up to 32GB)
• FM radio with RDS
• Bluetooth and USB v2.0
• 3.5mm standard audio jack
• TV-out functionality
• DNSe audio technology and SRS sound effect
• DivX/XviD video playback
• Proximity sensor for screen auto turn-off and ambient light sensor
• Accelerometer sensor for automatic UI rotation, turn-to-mute and motion-based gaming
• Office document editor
• Full Flash support in the web browser

Main disadvantages

• No xenon flash
• No camera lens cover
• 65K color limitation of display results in banding in color gradients
• microSD slot is under the back cover
• Browser has issues with Flash support

Good: The Samsung Omnia II boasts a spacious and sharp AMOLED touch screen. Samsung’s TouchWiz 2.0 user interface gives the Omnia II great customization options and is easy to use. The Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone also has advanced multimedia features, Wi-Fi, 3G support, Bluetooth, and GPS.

Bad: Omnia II is a bit bulky; Swype keyboard takes some acclimation; can occasionally be sluggish.

Conclusion

The Samsung Omnia II I8000 comes very close to nailing it, but there are a few things that really hold it back. First and foremost is the lag, especially on the homescreen. It is bad enough at times to ruin the entire user experience. Still, Samsung has done a great job of penetrating the Windows Mobile interface. The menus are a joy to use, and they go much deeper than any Windows Mobile overhaul we’ve seen. If they could take care of the front end as well as HTC has with TouchFLO 3D they might just have a true winner on their hands. As of now however, they have a great phone that needs some software optimization badly.

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