Techno Today

Samsung is no stranger to Windows Mobile, having produced half a dozen smartphones running the Standard and Professional versions of the operating system. Yet the Omnia is different to what the company has released in the past. By shrugging off the shackles of a physical keyboard - one of the defining characteristics of past Samsung Windows Mobile devices - the Korean company has developed a touchscreen-operated smartphone with more of a consumer bent, consistent with the smartphones we’re seeing from other vendors.
Samsung Omnia SGH-i900

Yes, the Omnia bears a striking resemblance to the Apple iPhone, so we'll go ahead and get all those comparisons out of the way. Measuring 112 x 56.9 x 12.5mm, it's a little shorter and narrower - and just a hair thicker - than the iPhone 3G, and weighs eight grams lighter at 125g. The touchscreen is also half an inch smaller at 3.2 inches. Internationally, the Omnia is available in 8GB and 16GB denominations, and with both black and white backplates, but in Australia it's only been launched in an 8GB black model so far.

Design

Similarity to the iPhone notwithstanding, keen-eyed observers will notice some of the subtle differences in the Omnia’s hardware design, not the least of which is the prominently placed 'Samsung' branding below the screen. It’s got more buttons, for starters, including answer and end call keys below the screen, the unfortunately-named 'finger mouse' nestled in between them (which we'll come back to shortly), and various other buttons along the edges of the device.

Its build quality isn’t quite as luxurious or distinctive as that of the iPhone 3G, but it’s still an attractive and sleek little package, with nicely rounded corners and a reassuringly solid feel to it. But there are a couple of let-downs in the Omnia’s design: first, the microSD card slot – located behind the battery cover – is designed such that you have to remove the battery to insert a memory card; and second, Samsung has stuck to the same multi-port connector used on all its other phones, so the headphones, sync cable and charger all attach to the same port. This saves on space, but on a phone as long as the Omnia, it’s not so much of a concern, and it means you can’t have headphones connected while you’re syncing or charging the device.

User interface

Some of the best Windows Mobile phones we’ve seen lately are the ones that add a customised front-end to make the operating system easier to navigate and use one-handed, and Samsung has thrown its hat into the ring with a few enhancements and applets of its own.

The most prominent of these is the widget system on the Today screen, letting you drag and drop mini-apps like a monthly calendar, world clock and photo speed dials from a sliding ticker-style panel onto the main desktop area. It’s a novel idea that mimics Dashboard on the Mac and Windows Sidebar in Vista, but given the limited wiggle room on the screen and the fact that you can’t add new widgets (at least, not yet), the novelty wears off quickly.

We ended up turning the widgets off and alternating between the two beautifully-designed Samsung Today layouts, both of which use Samsung’s TouchWiz UI. Samsung has also thrown in a ‘Main Menu’ launcher with custom TouchWiz icons (much nicer than the default Windows Mobile graphics) for all the Omnia’s main programs and functions. Hitting the close button within any application only minimises it rather than shuts it down, but pressing and holding the menu button brings up a running tasks window for jumping between programs and properly closing applications.

For the most part, you won’t need to resort to using a stylus –a good thing, as Samsung has clumsily neglected to put a stylus holder on the Omnia itself. Instead, the included stylus dangles awkwardly from the lanyard loop. Most of the text throughout the system is larger than average, and you can scroll through most windows by dragging your finger down the screen. But the Start menu and OK/Close button are still the same size, tapping on the tiny system icons in the taskbar like volume and wireless requires a long fingernail if not a stylus, and tapping on links in the web browser with your finger can prove beyond the capabilities of those with average-sized hands.

We can only assume the ‘finger mouse’ – essentially a track pointer for maneuvering a cursor around the screen – is meant to be a stylus substitute, but you can just as easily tap on the screen directly instead of taking twice as long trying to coax the cursor to the right location. Thankfully, you can configure the finger mouse to work as a four-way controller instead.

Screen and input

The Omnia is well-equipped with it comes to screen size, offering a decent 3.2in horizontal, with excellent viewing angles, brightness and visibility. A built-in motion sensor automatically adjusts the screen orientation to match whichever way you’re holding it, complete with funky rotation animations to keep things interesting. The motion sensor can also be set to mute incoming phone calls when you turn the phone on its face.

Where the Omnia falls behind is on screen resolution, offering an underwhelming 240 x 400 pixels on the display – essentially identical to the standard 240 x 320 resolution, but slightly longer to allow for the wider aspect screen. It’s a poor effort compared to competing smartphones like the iPhone 3G (480 x 320) and HTC Touch Pro (480 x 640), and as a result text and graphics aren’t as sharp as we’ve become accustomed to. That said, it’s mainly an aesthetic thing, and the only time a higher resolution would have practical benefit is when zoomed out of a webp age in Opera Mobile – on the Omnia, you can’t make out the text when the page is displaying in full desktop layout.

The multi-touch and capacitative scrolling features found in Apple and HTC smartphones respectively have been left off the menu, but the Omnia does offer haptic feedback –a small vibration on the screen when you tap it – to compensate for the lack of tactile buttons. It isn’t enabled universally, and mainly comes into play when using the software keyboard.

The Samsung-specific software keyboards on the Omnia (including a standard QWERTY and roomier two-letter-per-key arrangement) are excellent, albeit slightly cramped when using them in portrait orientation due to the narrow dimensions of the screen. These offer an auto-correct feature like the iPhone, but go one better by showing other suggested words (including the word you actually typed) above the keyboard so you can insert less-common words without too much fuss.

Internet features

The Omnia doesn’t lack for anything when it comes to network connectivity and wireless, with 7.2Mbit/s HSDPA (although the two carriers currently offering the Omnia, Vodafone and 3, don’t actually support it yet), 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS all on board.

All of these functions are put to good use with a respectable selection of applications, including Google Launcher, Google Maps, Podcasts, RSS Reader, ShoZu (for uploading pictures and videos to online destinations like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and WordPress), Messaging and Opera Mobile 9.5. The lack of physical keyboard means the Omnia isn’t the best smartphone for processing lots of email, but the Messaging application itself doesn’t lack for any features.

Conversely, the absence of a keyboard has allowed more space for the screen, giving Opera Mobile 9.5 lots of room to shine. After Safari on the iPhone, it’s the best mobile browser on the market, and most desktop-formatted web pages fall into line with minimal struggle. Zooming in and out of a web page is as effortless as double-tapping on the relevant area, and features like full-screen view, multiple tabs, a download manager, a password manager, and a thumbnail overview of the page when you’re scrolling through it makes the Omnia a delight to use for web browsing.

Multimedia

Samsung hasn’t taken the challenge of coming up against the iPhone lightly, and the multimedia functions on the Omnia are best in class. On the hardware side, it comes with a spacious 8GB of internal memory, from which you can add up to 16GB more with a microSD card (currently available for less than $150). TV Out functionality is included for showing the Omnia’s display on a television, and while our review unit didn’t come with a cord in the box, Samsung assured us that all shipping units would come with one. While it uses a multi-connector for hooking up a set of headphones, Samsung has bundled an adapter for using standard headphones, with a microphone and call button on the adapter itself so you’re not missing out on headset functionality when your own earbuds are attached.

As to software, the Omnia is loaded with no less than eight separate media-centric applications. Our favourite is Touch Player, which operates as a front-end to Windows Media Player and adds extra features like large finger-friendly buttons, a full-screen view with large album art, and compatibility with a greater number of audio and video codecs like DivX, XviD, MPEG-4, AAC, MP3 and OGG.

The Omnia is one of the few phones on the market that’s DivX-certified, and compared to the usual experience of playing a desktop-formatted video on a smartphone, the difference is obvious right off the bat. We played a few of our downloaded TV shows and movies on the Omnia without any conversion, and all of them played flawlessly, with no skipped frames or audio sync issues. The same can’t be said for the iPhone, which requires that you convert videos to a certain resolution in either MPEG-4 or H.264 – neither of which are formats commonly used for distributing movies and TV shows on the internet.

The Omnia also offers a USB mass storage setting, so transferring content from a computer to the Omnia is simply a case of connecting it, dragging and dropping the files and playing them on the Omnia.

Camera

Another point of distinction is the Omnia’s five-megapixel camera – a feature that isn’t so common on smartphones save for those in the Nokia N-Series range. The megapixel count is a little misleading, though, as it only speaks to the maximum size of the photo rather than the actual image quality. Theoretically, more megapixels mean you can capture more information with each image, leading to better overall photos, but when the image sensor is the same size as it is on a 3.2-megapixel or two-megapixel camera phone, there isn’t much benefit in upping the megapixel count.

Such is the case with the Omnia’s camera. It’s stacked with cool features like an auto-focus, multiple scene and shooting modes, and face detection, but we found these made minimal difference to the photos we took. An LED flash can be used for taking photos in low lighting, but it’s only good for illuminating objects a couple of feet away. The Auto Flash setting didn’t appear to work either – sitting in a dim room, the camera wouldn’t fire the flash off, and we had to resort to manually switching it on to use it.

We tested the camera using different subjects and lighting conditions, and while the photos are decent, they’re not going to blow you away or have you throwing your compact camera in the bin any time soon. Photos still look very much like they were taken with a camera phone, with the tell-tale fuzzy outlines around objects, soft focus and muted colours. Even in full daylight, we were seeing a lot of noise around the edges, and found the camera had trouble keeping everything in the frame properly focused.

We were more impressed with the Omnia’s video recording capabilities. It can’t record in slow motion like some of the latest LG five-meg camera phones, but it handles motion well and automatically adjusts to different lighting conditions – better than it did for still photos, in fact. Videos can be recorded at up to 640 x 480 (at 15fps – reducing it to 320 x 240 lets you record at 30fps) in the MPEG-4 format, and it uses up roughly 300KB per second. You’ll probably need to convert the videos before you can play them on a desktop – QuickTime refused to play them altogether, while VLC Player played back the video without the audio.

Performance and battery

Windows Mobile is notorious for being a sluggish operating system, but you wouldn’t know it after using the Omnia. It runs the fastest mobile processor currently available – a 624MHz Marvell Xscale PDA312 chip – along with a 128MB helping of RAM, and for the most part it’s responsive and doesn’t slow down excessively with multiple programs open. A one-tap close button for shutting down programs would’ve boosted performance further, but you can shut down applications manually in two steps using the dedicated menu button on the right.

Between the large screen, fast processor, multiple wireless options and hi-res camera, there are a lot of demands on the Omnia’s battery. The good news is that the back cover pops off and you can replace it for a fully-charged cell once the first one is run down (unlike a certain popular smartphone beginning with ‘i'), and it’s a good-sized 1,440 lithium-ion battery.

Our testing procedure consisted of watching an XviD movie full-screen for an hour, web browsing over Wi-Fi and 3G for an hour, playing music for 20 minutes, taking 15 photos and five minutes of video, half an hour worth of calls - with push email active the whole time - and it lasted one and a half days before dying. Compared to other smartphones in the same class, this is an excellent result. Advertised talk and standby times over 3G are four hours and 400 hours respectively.

Conclusion

The market for touchscreen-operated and media-centric smartphones has gotten extremely crowded since the iPhone 3G was first released, but the Samsung Omnia is far from a me-too device. It’s the only touchscreen smartphone we’ve seen with a five-megapixel camera, and it’s also the only smartphone with DivX certification.

Other things that cause the Omnia to stand out are the expandable memory (8GB on-board plus up to 16GB with a microSD card), replaceable battery with a relatively good run-time, well-designed software input options, and loads of great software pre-loaded.

We would’ve loved to see a higher resolution screen and we’d trade the finger mouse for a built-in stylus holder any day, but the make or break aspect of the Samsung Omnia is the fact that it runs Windows Mobile. Microsoft’s smartphone operating system has come a long way since the original Pocket PC days, but even at version 6.1, it’s not the most intuitive system to use. Once you get around its various quirks and shortcomings, there’s a lot to like – and even love – about the operating system, but those coming from a standard feature phone will face a steep learning curve before they master the Omnia’s rich feature set.











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