NOTEBOOK, CELL PHONE AND UMPC REVIEW

Samsung i900 Omnia is a fantastic looking Windows Mobile Professional

 

 

Samsung i900 Omnia

 

The Samsung i900 Omnia is a fantastic looking Windows Mobile Professional device but does it live up to all the hype and the tag of potential iPhone killer. Well first off it looks like the iPhone, it has a very similar form factor but is slightly smaller.

The Samsung i900 8 Gig, a standard Samsung battery as used on other Samsung Windows Mobile phones, mains charger, headset, data link cable, funky stylus and documentation. As we already know from previous Samsung reviews, they insist on using a proprietary connection for charging and headsets \ headphones. This one is no different but at least it comes with an adaptor that does give you a 3.5mm connector for your own headphones.

The phone looks as we have previously said like the iPhone, it is the same form factor with a large 3.2 inch screen, it is a very glossy looking phone and feels great in the hand, it really is a nice size and weight. Looking at it face on, there are three visible buttons, the phone send and end keys along with the now infamous Samsung mouse. For those that haven’t seen this before it is very similar to a laptop track pad, it is not a D-Pad, you stroke it with your thumb and an on screen cursor moves just like a mouse. It is the equivalent of Windows Mobile Marmite, you either love it or you hate it. I personally find it very effective and easy to use but if you do not, you can change the settings to a virtual D-Pad.

On top of the device has the usual on / off push button along with a reset button which can be handy when you have installed some bad applications and have hit a system freeze. The bottom of the device is clear with the exception of the microphone hole.
The left hand side has access to a lanyard attachment while the right hand side has a quick access button for the camera application which also operates as the picture shoot button, volume up and down keys and a quick access to the shortcuts which you can see later in the software write up.

Removal of the rear cover which comes off very easily for a Samsung phone you can access the Micro SD card slot, the Sim Card slot and the battery compartment.
The stylus, a bit different here as there is no place to store this actually inside the device like we are used too, instead it comes with a lanyard and you just let it dangle from the phone like a bit of phone bling. Not sure I like that idea. The stylus itself is pretty nice, its roughly 2 inches long in it’s closed state, pull the top part off and the stylus extends to about 3 inches but it is solid not like the cheap telescopic stylus’s we have seen on other devices.

Samsung have worked hard at making Windows Mobile more user friendly and have succeeded to a great extent. The touch screen is finger friendly, the icons are big allowing finger prodding with surprising accuracy. The phone comes with three home screens to choose from, The top two screen captures show the most functional screen complete with what Samsung call the Samsung Widgets. These are pre-chosen widgets that can only be used on this screen, they can be dragged off the vertical tool bar onto the main screen for easy access. It is a very nice addition but would have been great if you could just drag shortcuts to any application you wanted onto the home screen just like the full blown Windows OS.

The i900 comes with every imaginable connectivity option, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, USB, HSDPA up to 7.2mb/s all easily configurable from the settings screen, if your in need of prolonged battery life you can turn off HSDPA and just run the phone on an Edge or GPRS connection which can make quite a difference. Data connectivity has never been so fast and the ability to share the connection with your laptop is another great feature of Windows Mobile.

Text input has a few options and one major disappointment, the options first, the Samsung QWERTY keyboard, this works reasonable well but not as good as the iPhone as you do need to apply more pressure for it to respond and this stops it being as fluid. Once you have used it for a day or so you get used to it and become far more accurate. You can also use predictive text with it but to be honest I hate it so I switched it off. Other keyboard options are the Samsung keypad and the Samsung phone pad as well as the standard block recognizers, keyboard, letter recognizer and transcriber. Now here’s the disappointment, this phone was supposed to have haptic feedback and it does to a small extent however where would you most want to have this great feature, yes on the keyboard, and is it there, no!!!! Come on Samsung what is the point of giving us haptic feedback on big icons that we press when we really need it to type with. Modaco are reporting that a new Rom update will be released soon to enable the haptics on at least the Samsung Keyboard but it should be on it now.

The i900 comes pre-installed with the ever popular Opera 9.5 and it works beautifully on this phone, the tall screen with 400 x 240 resolution makes viewing websites a breeze, matched in with the tap to zoom in and the reflow of the text to fit the screen all in all a great web surfing experience. I didn’t bother testing out Pocket IE as it is poor in comparison.

GPS comes as standard with an assisted option which downloads data from the network to get a faster satellite fix, this can be enabled and disabled from the settings to avoid data costs but on an unlimited plan it can save a lot of time. Google maps comes pre-installed also and worked well with the GPS and triangulation with cell towers to get a fix. No other GPS software comes with the phone but it should work fine with TomTom and others although it would be wise to check because of the non standard screen resolution.

The i900 comes with the now standard FM radio that utilizes the headphones as an antennae to pick up the FM bands, there is also a widget that can be used on the home screen which allows channel hopping and pause and play, a nice added feature.

The accelerometer is the best on any device I have used, it works in every screen and works over 360 degrees so the phone can be turned right round and the screen rotates with it. It is smooth, fast and works faultlessly. HTC could learn something here and not restrict the rotation to only certain screens like on the Diamond and Touch Pro.

This is where this phone stands out form the rest, a 5 mega pixel camera, no longer do we have to look up to the Nokia N95, this camera is fantastic.
It can produce images with a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. It is equipped with autofocus, digital image stabilizer, face recognition, smile detection, and geotagging. There is an LED flash for night time shots too.
A video shooting option is also available at a resolution VGA video (640 x 480 pixels) at 15fps or QVGA video (320 x 240 pixels) at 30fps. All in all a nice camera and great to see Windows Mobile catching up with other “Camera Phones”.

Another nice feature is the pre-installed Podcast and RSS readers, load them up and you can subscribe to your news feeds easily and also you can import your desktop subscriptions via an opml file. The Podcast software works very well but you do have to download the full podcast before you can listen to it, no streaming.

Another nice add on, is the addition of a touch media player, the built in Windows Media player was designed originally for stylus use so this is a good alternative for touch use and makes interacting with your media a much easier experience. The i900 is also one of the only devices certified as DIVX compliant.

Nothing too unusual about the phone application, nice big touch buttons for dialing and video calling is available depending if the network your using it on supports it. Phone quality was as good as any phone I have used although the signal strength was a bit erratic at times compared with even the iPhone on the same network. The iPhone seemed to hold the signal much better in a GPRS or Edge area but the Omnia was much better in HSDPA areas, very strange.

Another major thumbs up, the model we have has 8 Gig’s of storage available and you can also get this phone in a 16 Gig version too, this is another first for a pocketable Windows Mobile phone, you can also add extra storage via a Micro SD card slot so the possibilities are endless really.

Conclusion
The Samsung i900 is a fantastic feature phone, it has a lovely design and feels great in the hand. It has a quality build and a nice screen although the resolution of 400 x 240 is a bit strange.The camera is fantastic and connectivity options are all covered with super fast data at all levels. It is very responsive and can be used exclusively with touch or with a stylus or with both so the options are all there. If you like the iPhone but do not like the straight jacketed approach of Apple then this phone could be the one your looking for, plenty of storage for media and expandable too, shame about the lack of a haptic keyboard although this should be corrected with a Rom upgrade but there is no guarantee that this will happen.

Samung SGH-i900 Omnia -Specification

2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100
112 x 56.9 x 12.5 mm
127 g
TFT touchscreen, 65K colors
240 x 400 pixels, 3.2 inches
Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
Handwriting recognition
Polyphonic, MP3
Vibration
Memory Phonebook Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records Practically unlimited
Card slot microSD (TransFlash), up to 16GB
128 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM
624MHz Marvell PXA312 processor
8 GB internal memory
Data GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
EDGE Class 10, 236.8 kbps
3G HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
Bluetooth, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port
USB v2.0
OS Microsoft Window Mobile 6.1 Professional
Messaging SMS, EMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML, RSS feeds
Games Yes + Java downloadable
Colors Silver
Camera 5 MP, 2592х1944 pixels, autofocus, image stabiliser, video, flash; secondary videocall camera
Built-in GPS receiver
Java MIDP 2.0
FM Radio with RDS
MSOffice document viewer
MP3/AAC/AAC+/WMA/OGG/AMR player
DivX/XviD/WMV/MP4 player
TV Out
Voice memo
Built-in handsfree
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 1440 mAh