Camera Phones Plaza

Samsung i900 Omnia is one of the best smartphones currently available on the market. Samsung has come up with new features for a smartphone, such as cursor movement using the touchpad, a high-resolution camera and a fast processor. The phone can be used both for multimedia lovers, but also for business people.

Samsung i900 Omnia's main competitor is HTC Touch Diamond. Even if it is slightly wider and taller than other smartphones, it is simultaneously very thin. It weighs 122 grams.

At a first look, the cover appears metallic, but it is actually plastic, a quality plastic. The phone has keys for answering and rejecting calls, an optical mouse cursor sensor. On the sides, it has the button for starting or shutting down the phone, the main menu key, the camera button and the volume control keys. On the back side of the phone, we find the 5 Megapixels camera.

The user interface is the same Windows Mobile 6.1 Interface. Samsung has made a special menu for this operating system that starts when you press the main menu button.

Unlike the HTC Diamond and other smartphones that use the stylus, Samsung Omnia 8GB has it on the outside. It can be hanged with a phone cord through a particular slot.

The keyboard can be seen in three different ways: a full QWERTY keyboard, the version with two letters per key and a version of the classical phones, three letters on each number key. The last version has the largest buttons. The QWERTY version is the most intuitive for those accustomed to the PC but has smaller keys.

The camera has a resolution of 5 megapixels. The pictures can be compared to those made with a Nokia N95 phone. They are very good both in natural light as well as in low light conditions, because of the flash. The phone can record a video at a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels with 30 frames per second or at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels with 15 frames per second.

About the applications speed, Samsung Omnia 8GB has a good processor and enough memory to work quickly, without having any failures or without slowing down the applications.

The display is the weak link, because it has a non-standard resolution of 240 x 400 pixels. You may experience problems in some applications designed for 240 x 320 resolutions. In addition, there are problems in strong light.

The standard agenda from Windows Mobile is good and it easily synchronizes with Microsoft Outlook.

We only have one multimedia file browser, which manages the images, the music and the movies. The images are displayed very well on the big screen. To zoom in or out a picture, it is sufficient to only move up or down with your finger (like in the iPhone). The phone has an accelerometer, so it automatically switches to landscape mode if the phone is turned horizontal.

Samsung Omnia 8GB does not have a 3.5 mm audio jack directly on it, but it has a 3.5 mm audio jack adapter. Therefore, you can change without problems the original headphones found in the box, with some better headphones, if you use them together with the adapter.

The video files are played without interruptions due to the fast processor. The phone also has a pre-installed DivX codec.

The phone has the Windows Mobile 6.1 Operating System pre-installed. The calendar is similar to the Outlook one. You can easily define both the meeting events, and the to-do. It can easily synchronize with the Microsoft Outlook on your PC. The Mobile Office programs are also present. Those are Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Other useful programs that are preinstalled are the RSS Reader, the Podcast Manager, the Video Editor and some applications from Google (such as search engine, e-mail, Google Maps).

Samsung Omnia 8GB has a GPS system, but the navigation software is missing. There is the Google Maps application pre-installed though, but you can install the navigation software separately.

Samsung i900 Omnia is equipped with GPRS, EDGE, 3G, HSDPA, WiFi, with which you can connect to the Internet through a mobile operator or through a hotspot. The phone has two pre-installed browsers: Internet Explorer and Opera Mobile 9.5, the last one having a higher speed in loading web pages. One problem would be that the Flash player is pretty old. The protocols supported for sending emails are POP3, IMAP and SMTP. The phone does not have infrared port, but it has Bluetooth instead. The people from Samsung have chosen to use their own format for a USB port, so they are using a data cable different from the USB or USB 2 standards.

What we did like about this phone
- The CPU is fast, making applications run without interruptions
- The touchscreen has a high quality
- The camera takes very good pictures both in strong natural light and in low light conditions
- The large internal memory

What we did not like about this phone:
- The screen's resolution is average, and the non-standard screen size can lead to problems in some applications
- The phone does not have a place to hold the stylus.