Life of A Phone Lover

Samsung i900 OMNIA

Written by ImagesLab.net on Tuesday, August 26, 2008

I've blog about the Samsung Omnia previously somewhere back in June. That was just a preview of the specification and function review. Lately I've got a chance to actually try out this phone as a friend of mine recently purchased it.

First contact with the phone felt like I'm holding an iPhone. At the top of the front panel of the Samsung i900 Omnia is the earpiece, the ambient light sensor and the video-call camera. The screen is a 3.2" touchscreen and situated at the bottom of the front are the Call and End keys as well as the optical joystick. At the left side of the panel is the USB port while the volume key and the camera key are located at the right side of the panel.

Let's take a look at the user interface. To launch the main menu, there is a button located at the top right side. It has a unique small touchpad that operates in two modes - either a normal touchpad or you can use it to navigate as on-screen mouse pointer. In short, it works something like the touchpad from our laptop.

Samsung uses their latest technology called TouchWiz in this phone. The user interface looks more simple and easy to use. Users can customize and personalize their phone depending on their needs. The high resolution touch-sensitive screen uses intuitive tap, sweep, drag and drop operations as well as an on-screen qwerty keyboard.

The Samsung Omnia runs on the Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional operating system, which means user can download additional programs/software according to their daily need. On top of that, user can access to MS Office documents such as PowerPoint, Excel and Word. With Outlook, you can also send and receive email wherever you are.

The Samsung Omnia pack comes attached with a 5 megapixel camera that has maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. The features include autofocus, digital image stabilizer, face recognition, smile detection, and geotagging courtesy of the built-in GPS receiver. Too bad it only comes with LED flash. I actually took a few photos with this phone. The photos are quite sharp and have good color composition. You may records VGA video (640 x 480 pixels) at 15fps or QVGA video (320 x 240 pixels) at 30fps. Nothing too special about the video recording function though.

Never got the chance to test out web browsing as my friend doesn't subscribe to any internet service provider. It has built-in GPS function but it doesn't come with license, so you will need to purchase it.

Overall, I personally think that Samsung Omnia is a better phone compared to the iPhone. There are two versions; Samsung Omnia 8GB & Samsung Omnia 16GB version. This phone is retailing at RM3,199.