Samsung Omnia i900 Review

Samsung Omnia has received much attention than all other phones from Samsung put together. And since then their phones are becoming more popular than even Nokia’s as they continue to produce sleek good looking phones that has mass appeal. Following the iPhone genre of mobile phones, Samsung Omnia is a touchscreen smartphone with impressive specs and is based on Windows Mobile 6.1 with a new interface of its own. Let’s take a closer look at the mobile phone and decide if the phone is worth the hype or not.

Design

These iPhone clone phones like LG Renoir,Samsung Tocco Lite or even Nokia N97 has nothing new in their outer design perspectives. The phone is slim, at 12.5mm and the whole 112 X 57 mm face is dominated by the large touchscreen and minimalist controls. It feels very good in hand and weighs a minimal 122grams.

Touchscreen

While we are accustomed to see the 320 X 480 iPhone-ish resolution in other smartphones, the screen resolution of Omnia is inferior to them at 400 X 240. So the screen looks less spacious than its competitors. We didn’t expect the resistive touchscreen to be as responsive as the iPhone and it met our expectation. Sometimes, a very good pressure is needed to register the touches. However, every touch on the screen is verified by a decent feedback buzz which makes it a bit more comfortable. The keyboard of the touchscreen is fiddly to use and at times very inaccurate. It is quite impossible to type correctly at even moderate speeds.

Interface

The standard WinMo interface is modified by Samsung to offer better usability with the touchscreen. In the homescreen there are some graphical widgets which you can drag into the blank space to display more information like recent e-mails, time, phone profile, currently playing music tracks, calender, clocks etc. You can completely customize the front end to meet your needs. There is also the more standard method of launching the application from the grid menu view. The music player, phonebook, even the alarm clock has been modified with the finger friendly touchscreen makeover.

Camera

There is a 5 MP camera with LED Flash in the rear and a VGA video call camera on the front. The resolution is quite impressive but the LED flash is incapable to light the subjects in complete darkness – a Xenon flash could have done better. Except that the low light shots had a fair amount of noise and the focus is a little softer than a true digital camera, the overall image quality is more than impressive

Speed

With the help of a fast Marvell PXA312 624 MHz processor, it boasts an iPhone 3GS  like speed and responsiveness. Application launch or webpage rendering is fast and smooth. Web Browsing is a nice experience on its Opera Mobile 9.5 Web Browser. There is also an accelerometer that rotates the screen as you would expect and it does so with a nice little animation! The GPS is also fast and has A-GPS capability.

Connectivity

It is a quad band GSM phone that can be used all over the world in all standard frequency bands. It also connects to HSDPA 2100 bands and supports speeds upto 7.2 MBps. It also has 802.11b/g WiFi connectivity other than having GPRS and EDGE Connectivity. There is standard Bluetooth with A2DP connectivity to attach stereo headsets. There is also a 3.5 mm headphone jack to let you attach your favorite headphone to it to listen to best quality music.

Pros

• High Quality Camera


• Good Response and Speed


• Nice Web Browsing Experience

Cons

• Touchscreen Keyboard doesn’t work very well


• Advanced Settings screens aren’t well designed for finger touch


• TouchScreen response is not good


• No stylus slot though it always feels to be used


• Low display resolution


• No Flash support in Web Browser

Conclusion

This phone is targeted towards general consumers who are looking for a better phone that can take nice shots, has better internet browsing experience besides looking sleek and stylish. But general consumers would not trade off for its inferior display and average sound quality. So, consumers would still opt for an iPhone instead of Omnia. It is clearly not meant for businessmen but it has features that are appropriate for them. But, a businessman would not want not want a phone with poor texting quality. This is why the phone fails to find its specific niche of consumers. If you are a general consumer and hate iPhone for your own reason, you can buy Omnia and if you are a businessman and hate BlackBerry phones, you can also buy it.