Samsung Omnia II Review
The Samsung Omnia appears as the perfect Windows Mobile phone. It has a beautiful AMOLED touch display of 3.7 inches, amazing design and impressive specifications. The user interface, TouchWiz 2.0 reduces the speed of the phone considerably. The cell phone has the measurements, 47.*2.4*0.5 and has a weight of 4.8 ounces. The Omnia is quite sleek. It has its corners rounded with details of brushed metal and soft back cover coated in red and black.
The display is much more pleasing than the face which is surrounded by a piano black border. The hardware keys present on the face are very few. End/Power and Talk keys define the big ‘Main Menu’ key. The left portion features a microSD card slot, headphone jack of 3.5mm, the OK key (if you hit it once, the app will be closed and dragging it down will take you back to the home screen ) and volume rocker, which is convenient for pressing.
To the right, you have a lock key, the stylus, the camcorder/camera key and a USB port. The phone has an internal memory of 8GB which is built-in and an extendable memory of 16 GB along with a microSD card (you need to purchase it separately). The quality of call is quite good with very less distortion or background noise. The phone does not feature a physical QWERTY keyboard. Hence, you need to use the keyboard which is touch screen.
The touch screen keyboard is restrained in ‘Portrait’ mode but offers you enough space to type in ‘Landscape’ mode. You might face a few problems since the spacebar is tiny, located strangely to the right unlike its normal position at the bottom centre. There is a small delay in the appearance of letters in the screen as you type. The haptic touch that is the vibration feedback as soon as you hit a key, is not active in ‘keyboard’ mode.
The mobile features a new technology, ‘Swype’ that allows you to type quickly and easily with a single stylus motion or a finger beyond the keyboard. The Omnia utilizes a user interface, ‘TouchWiz 2.0’, which is touch friendly in Windows Mobile 6.5 version. You are provided with 3 home pages which can be customized with shortcuts and widgets to your favorite applications. For adding a widget, you need to hit on the ‘Widget Tray tab’ to your screen’s left and move one of them to your home screen from the list.
For removing a widget, you press it down and move it to the Widget tray. You also have the option of managing your widgets by using the ‘Widget Manager.’ Also, you can purchase more of them freely in the ‘Widget Store.’ Since the screen is not very responsive, organizing the widgets on your different home screens may become a difficult task. You have shortcuts to your dialer, text messages, contacts and email available at the home screen’s bottom portion.
At the top, you have the normal menu, ‘Windows Mobile Start.’ If you just hit on the Start button, it will lead you to the 4 menus which contain shortcuts to numerous settings and applications. The interface consists of a distinct menu for multimedia apps named the ‘Cube Navigation Menu.’ The 4 main menus are the Cube menu, the widget menu and the 3 home screens, where each of them contains overlapping content. The Cube can be accessed using a shortcut present in one of the home pages.
The Cube menu offers you access to videos, photos, the V Cast store, music, Games and the Web. The 3D visualization of Cube looks ultra cool but seems undesirable because the same apps can be accessed via other menus. You can shake the phone to browse through various menus or roll them using your finger. The Cube cannot be customized as in the case of your home screens.
The Mobile phone uses two browsers, the Opera Mobile 9.7 and the new Internet Explorer Mobile. If you wish to zoom a page on ‘Internet Explorer Mobile’, then you have to tap on the area twice for it to enlarge. Scrolling is not easy in this but browsing is quite efficient. The Opera 9.7 browser quickly loads pages when compared to IE.
You have two interfaces for music playback, the TouchWiz player which is extremely pleasing and the Windows Media Player which is standard. While using the TouchWiz player, your library is shown in the form of cards which are ‘touch friendly’. You can flick them to find the right one for you. If you wish to play the audio, then you have to open the Windows Media Player. Then, you can skip from the TouchWiz Player to WMP by hitting ‘Library’ in the left corner at the bottom.
Music sounds fantastic. The phone features an FM mic adapter/antenna which can be plugged to your headphones. You also have the option of purchasing music through Rhapsody on the V Cast music store. The quality of video is superb on the AMOLED display of the phone because of its viewing angle which is wide. Colors appear accurate and bright.
The quality of the camera is really good. Colors appear bright and perfect outdoors as well as indoors. The camera is capable of handling the close up shots pretty well. The location of the shutter button at the top right reflects the ‘OK’ button situated at the bottom right edge of the phone and hence it is a minor flaw in the design. The Omnia is a fantastic upgrade from its predecessors and is the best Windows Mobile phone available at present.
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