Cool Gadget | PDA Phone

Design

If you have seen the Samsung Jet, you’ll know exactly how the Omnia II looks. Aside from being larger and heavier, this smartphone is almost identical to the Jet. The front is taken up mainly by a large touchscreen display, while the rest of it has a glossy black plastic finish. In general, we did not like how the device felt in the hands. Though it is well-built, the plasticky exterior and smudge-prone surface didn’t sit well with us. 

The chunkier 118 x 60 x 11.9mm dimensions also mean there’s more space for the screen. The large 3.7-inch WVGA (800 x 480) AMOLED display on the Omnia II makes it among the largest in this class of Windows Mobile products without keypads. For comparison, the HTC Touch HD comes with a marginally larger 3.8-inch TFT LCD of the same resolution. Like many other Samsung phones, this screen is top-notch and displays details and colors vividly. 

The Omnia II’s touchscreen is of the resistive variety, not the more fingertip-friendly capacitive kind. This means it requires a pinpoint touch using a stylus, which is provided in the package as a separate lanyard. While we understand that the lack of a stylus slot on the device makes the design cleaner, the alternative of having a mascara-like pointer hanging from the phone can be annoying for many. 

Below the screen, you’ll find a hexagonal button which resembles a 3D cube from certain angles. Other keys on the sides include volume controls on the left and keylock, back and camera shortcuts on the right. The top is where you’ll see a 3.5mm audio jack and a micro-USB port.

Features

Samsung doesn’t hold anything back when it comes to hardware features, so you can expect the kitchen sink thrown in with the I8000. Wireless features include HSPA connectivity with theoretical maximum download and upload speeds of 7.2Mbps and 5.76Mbps respectively. It also comes with Wi-Fi for use at hotspots, Bluetooth and A-GPS for navigation. 

For storage, 8GB of memory reside on the device with the option to expand that using a microSDHC slot which supports up to 32GB cards. This is good news for those who use their mobile phones as media players, even better when you consider the standard audio jack which lets you plug in your favorite third-party headphones. 

To hide the dated Windows Mobile interface, Samsung employed its TouchWiz 2.0 UI. The Home screen is a blank slate on which you can customize by adding widgets. These include items such as a clock, calendar and onscreen shortcuts to items like Wi-Fi toggle. Many of these widgets are shortcuts to social-networking sites and perform the task of only launching the browser and pointing it to the intended page. As mentioned in other Samsung mobile phone reviews, the selection of widgets is limited to what’s released by the company. There is limited third-party support for this, so don’t expect to see a flood of useful widgets from developers anytime soon. 

The TouchWiz UI has also been applied throughout the interface including the main menu and settings. Instead of the standard Programs page, you get a four-page menu, each of which can display 12 icons. Each page has its own title such as Productivity and Multimedia. These pages and their corresponding titles can be customized to your liking. New applications installed are filed under Others, which will be where your icons sit if you fill up the 48 spaces in the main menu. The settings pages have also been completely re-skinned to resemble a standard Samsung mobile phone. Most of the common settings can be configured without defaulting to the standard Windows Mobile interface, but there are still a few advanced settings such as the Connections page which bring you back to the Windows Mobile 6.1 UI. 

One function we found particularly useful was the Task Switcher. This page can be brought up from anywhere by pressing and holding the Cube button. It lists the applications that are active and lets you move between them or close them completely. This is displayed in either a fancy rotating interface or a simple grid format. We preferred the latter as it was more responsive. 

The TouchWiz interface doesn’t feel overdone, but it can slow down in certain areas. Turning on the screen, for example, brings up a large clock and vital information such as time, network quality, notifications and instructions on how to unlock the device. This takes about 2 seconds to appear upon pressing the keylock button. It may seem like a short time, but can be annoying when the phone is used as your main time-telling device.

One thing we didn’t like was the loss of threaded SMS. Yes, Samsung actually stripped out a useful, standard Windows Mobile 6.1 feature in trying to make things consistent with its TouchWiz UI. So, even though the messaging app has large icons and things are laid out clearly, you don’t get to see your interactions with specific users in a conversation format. This is a big oversight on the chaebol’s part and hopefully it can be fixed in a future firmware update.

The HTC Touch HD is a device with very similar features, though that model makes use of the TouchFlo 3D interface. Overall, HTC’s UI feels more polished and responsive. That’s not to say Samsung’s is poor. It’s, in fact, quite usable, but the Taiwan company has the advantage of experience given that the TouchFlo interface has undergone a few generations of tweaking.

A 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and LED is found on the back of the Omnia II. Its accompanying application is responsive and comes with many settings that will appeal to those who depend on their phones as main cameras. There is very little shutter lag and photo quality is reasonable, though images turned out a little soft.

Performance

Even with its large and bright screen, battery life was surprisingly good for the I8000. It lasted about two days on a single charge of its 1,440mAh battery. One battery-saving feature it possesses is auto brightness which conserves the charge by lowering the backlight in darker locations. This is a common smartphone feature, but we found the Omnia II’s sensor a little too sensitive and a slight tilt of the device in the hands would cause the backlight to adjust. This can be annoying when reading text onscreen. 

Voice quality was good for regular calls and we had no issues with reception. The front camera provided a good image to the other party during video calls but the person receiving the call pointed out that our voice sounded muffled during the conference. 

The Omnia II contains an 800MHz Samsung processor and 256MB of RAM. It was responsive for the most part, though as mentioned earlier, certain parts of the interface slowed down at times. The device currently ships with Windows Mobile 6.1, but that can be upgraded to 6.5 when Microsoft releases the update.

Conclusion

Samsung has made a decent successor to the original Omnia with this second version. Its features are up to speed with all the current high-end Windows Mobile devices and the price is an attractive S$898 without operator discounts. A quick check with Singapore telcos revealed that the Omnia II is going for as low as S$398 on some mid-tier price plans. Similar products from competitor HTC are at least S$200 more. 

Even though its interface may not be as slick and the hardware not as desirable as the iPhone or Touch HD, the Omnia II’s price is undeniably attractive. If you are looking for a new, fully featured Windows Mobile device without a physical keypad, you can’t go too far wrong with Samsung’s latest offering.

[by John Chan]