Judging the Samsung Omnia based on looks alone, you are almost forced to compare it to the iPhone. It has taken its look and feel almost exactly from the iPhone model of cell phone design. The wide, glossy touch screen offers a lot of acreage for use, but much of that acreage is lost in the incessant popping-up of the “keyboard” interface and the odd Samsung menu strip on the home page.

In the interest of disclosure, I normally use an HTC Mogul with a slide out QWERTY keyboard as my main phone. When I was sent the Samsung i900 Omnia for review I was immediately excited about how lightweight the phone was in comparison with my usual model. I was also excited about how it looked overall. I’ve wanted to have an iPhone for ages, but won’t succumb to AT&T as my provider; this phone gave me that iPhone feeling without being an iPhone.

Learning Curve

The learning curve on this phone for someone as phone and tech savvy as myself is a bit too long. It has taken me two full weeks to become truly comfortable with the phone in its entirety. When I passed the phone along to my friends and colleagues to try out, they had incredibly long learning curves to do the simplest of tasks. The main issue for many was the Samsung menu slider, which is cool, but horribly inefficient and rarely works on the first try. Once I figured out how to get that to go away to be replaced with a simple clock instead, my personal over all experience got much better. By getting rid of the slider and just using the menu link to surf the phone menu for programs, multimedia and settings I solved the first irritation. That said, some of my friends who tried it were in love with the slider window. They adored the fact that they could drag and drop little widgets wherever they wanted on the home screen. I’d place the ability to have and enjoy the widgets in the slider or turn them off firmly in the ‘pros’ column.

Multimedia

The pictures this phone takes are amazing. The 5 mega pixel camera is hands down my favorite feature of the phone. Toss in the auto focus feature, and the way the camera zooms in on faces (and smiles) and you get near flawless pictures every time. For someone like me, who is photography challenged, this is huge news. In a side by side informal comparison, the Omnia’s photos were better quality than the iPhone 3Gs my friends have. The phone also works with a downloadable beta version of Qik’s video streaming software, which allows you to see how that 5 mega pixel image translates to the moving screen (the answer is ‘very well’).

The phone also accepts MP3 ring tones, and plays music and movies back using either files stored on its storage card or hard drive or the Verizon V-Cast network. The sound quality on music is above average. The video playback enjoyment was about as good as can be expected on such a small screen, but the quality of the videos was fine. The phone also has an FM tuner and a TV out feature, both of which worked flawlessly. The FM tuner works best with headphones on, as the wire for the headphones is an antennae.

Internet and Email

The phone offers a way to get your favorite podcasts, RSS feeds, emails and internet pages right in your pocket. The podcast feature was especially nice for me, as I spend a great deal of time while traveling and meeting clients killing time. It gave me a way to catch up on some of my favorite podcasts while I was on the go, and still take calls. The internet renders very slowly, but that has a lot more to do with the Edge network than anything else. You’d think a phone trying so hard to look like an iPhone and act like the Windows Mobile version of an iPhone would have gone with the 3G and Edge chip option, but Samsung didn’t, to their detriment.

Once you get on the internet, the page quality is near-perfect. It may take a while to render a page or send and receive data, but once it sorts itself out the pages look very much like they do online via laptop or desktop. Email was efficient to check once it was set up, but I found it hard to make the phone “see” my accounts. I was not able to determine if that was because of the phone itself, or a side effect of the way my email accounts are set up. Either way, since I do most of my email checking in the early morning and late night from my MacBook, this quirk didn’t bother me.

Games

The phone comes with Solitaire and BubbleBreaker. If they had just added in Tetris, they’d have had the boredom cure trifecta for passing the time in waiting rooms and on public transportation. Both games play well, though it is a bit easier to play them with the stylus, frankly.

Stylus

The fact that the unit does not have a dedicated spot inside the phone for a stylus drove me nuts. Instead of putting it in the phone chassis, like HTC does, Samsung gives you a dongle to hang it from and makes it incredibly difficult to open it up (it opens like a telescoping pen dislodging from its cap). The trouble with the dongle system is that it then bangs about and gets in your way. Countless times it smacked me in the cheek while I hurried to answer a call, or made a loud clunking sound when he phone was being turned one way or the other to activate the accelerometer and make the screen flip (something that periodically wouldn’t work right away).

I know that the Omnia is supposed to work without a stylus, and has large “keys” in the larger, lengthwise activated keyboard interface for people with larger fingers. That said, I also use Evernote, and the handwriting (ink note) feature works best for me with the stylus. There are a number of other things I use it for also, so not having it handy, or having it handy but in the way, was not a great solution for me.

Keyboard and Texting

When upright, the small keyboard is activated. Unlike its larger cousin, this one is almost too small to use without the stylus. It does offer enough haptic touch feedback to help find your way around, but this phone is definitely not one you should try to use to text while driving, walking or otherwise engaged in activities that require your full attention. (Not that I would ever condone texting while driving, mind you. That is dangerous.) The keyboard flips around to fit how you are holding the phone. Like the rest of the interface, it adjusts to all four possible viewing angles. When it is lengthwise, it is larger, with larger “buttons” for better typing. I had no trouble using the keyboard in lengthwise, full screen mode, though I did not like how it covered much of the text entry area. I had more trouble with the shorter version with the phone upright.

This phone lost the most marks with me in the texting arena. I am a power texter, sending and receiving thousands of text messages and tweets via SMS each month. One thing I love about my HTC Mogul as a daily driver is how it handles texts. I can go from message to message at will, with the flick of a finger on the HTC, and reply to an individual message also, even if they are from the same sender (this is especially key with Twitter). The Omnia threads messages. This is unbelievably annoying, and I never did figure out how to get it to stop doing it. I missed many individual messages during the evaluation of this phone because I couldn’t get it to scroll efficiently, whether in Optical Mouse mode, with the stylus or by touch, and couldn’t get it to stop threading message strings. I am still looking for the magic button to get it to stop threading messages – they must have one somewhere!

Overview

Overall, the Samsung i900 Omnia gets a thumbs up from me, in spite of its flaws. If they can get past a few minor hurdles in their next generation of this phone, like the texting issue and the clunky dangling stylus, they may have a real winner. Without 3G capabilities it isn’t going to take the place of the iPhone, but if you are looking for a haptic feedback touch screen phone that offers you a lightweight way to have full QWERTY and touch all at once, with improved call clarity and phenomenal pictures, this is your phone. It is so feature rich that in spite of having it for two weeks and really putting it through the paces of a power user, I’m sure I have overlooked (or flat out not found yet) many of the very cool features. If you know of one I missed (or if you can tell me how to un-thread messages) stop by the comments to share!

Specs: 7.2Mbps HSDPA 2100, quadband EDGE, 5 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.2-inch capacitive WQVGA touchscreen, GPS, Windows Mobile 6.1, WiFi, and 8 or 16GB of Flash with microSD expansion, TouchWhiz interface, no internal stylus storage.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 5:35 am under Cell phones, Reviews.

Read more entries by Leslie Poston.
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