Now that's a big one - the handset with one of the longest spec sheets we've ever seen has just dropped on us like a bomb. The Omnia HD
is Samsung's go at touch-taming the Symbian S60 and is introducing truly revolutionary stuff.
A 3.7" OLED capacitive touchscreen, an 8 megapixel camera that should be able to humble even some digicams and of course the HD video recording - does it really get any sweeter? Geeks have been warned - continue reading this preview at your own risk. We are not to be held responsible for sleep disorders or compulsive spending.
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is surely one of the most interesting packages to look out for at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. With a specs sheet like that it's hardly a surprise but we cannot quite get Samsung's choice of name. There was nothing wrong with the original Omnia but reusing a name is not exactly suggestive of revolutionary. Oh, and don't get us started on the superscript. It may look cool and all, but just go ahead and google OmniaHD.
With the following preview we did our best to provide you with as much information as possible for the very short time we spent with the handset. Since our unit is at the very early stages of development we would focus mainly on the hardware and ergonomics as the software is well in need of getting polished. By the way, we've already reviewed the Symbian S60 5th edition touch user interface with Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, so you should already know the basics.
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD at a glance:
- General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/1900/2100 MHz, GPRS/EDGE class 12, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
- Form factor: Touchscreen bar
- Dimensions: 123 x 58 x 12.9 mm
- Display: 3.7-inch 16M color OLED touchscreen, 640 x 360 pixels
- Memory: 8/16GB integrated memory, non-hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
- OS: Symbian S60 5th edition
- Camera: 8 megapixel auto focus camera with LED flash, geo-tagging, Face detection, Smile Shot, Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) and HD video recording at 24 fps
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS and optional Samsung Mobile Navigator by Route66, HDMI (dongle needed)
- Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, Proximity sensor for auto screen turn-off, FM radio with RDS, DivX/XviD video support
- Battery: 1500 mAh battery
For starters here is a bunch of photos of the i8910 - while certainly not as sleek as the Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH, the handset spells multimedia and that is enough of an attraction to a lot of people.
So let's waste no more time, the hardware part of the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD preview awaits on the next page.
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD 360-degree spin
The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is hardly the most compact phone around. In fact the first impression it leaves is of an abnormally wide handset. At 12.9mm, it can almost be called slim but it's nowhere near light. If that's the price to pay for the kind of functionality, we guess most people would, no questions asked. As for the rest - the Omnia HD isn't a Samsung U100 but it's no Nokia E90 either. Still fairly pocketable.Design and construction
Designing a fully touch-operated mobile phone certainly doesn't leave too much freedom and all of them look more or less identical. The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD doesn't depart from the standard looks, the metallic frame around the display obviously an attempt to give it a face of its own. We do like the fact the battery cover is entirely metallic but the glossy plastic around the display looks rather cheap.
The design has its ups and downs
Most of the front panel of Omnia HD is taken by its key feature - the 3.7" 16M-color OLED touchscreen. The state-of-the-art unit uses the capacitive touchscreen technology as opposed to the resistive one of Nokia 5800 XpressMusic - the first S60 5th edition handset. The lightest touch will do for a command to be registered - no pressure is necessary.
The highlight of the device - 3.7" widescreen OLED display
The capacitive technology used for the display guarantees the excellent responsiveness of the screen at the expense of making it unable to work with anything else but your fingers (no stylus, no plectrum, no gloves, no anything…). It seems quite a fair trade to us and probably to most other people that don't need handwriting recognition.
The display of Samsung i8910 offers amazing picture quality. The resolution of 640 x 360 pixels (same as Nokia 5800 XpressMusic) is not exactly top of the line but the OLED technology does make a difference. The contrast and colors are really impressive making every image look really vibrant.
The bad part about the display of Samsung i8910 is that its legibility drops dramatically when exposed to direct sunlight. It might not be as bad as the Samsung i900 Omnia for example but finding a proper angle to work with it is quite a problem.
The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD display doesn't give any haptic feedback but that might just be the case with our pre-release unit. We'll check that out when we get hold of a retail unit.
The other noteworthy elements at the front of the Samsung i8910 are the video-call camera and the proximity sensor at the top, plus the three keys at the bottom. The proximity sensor is used for locking the display during calls to avoid accidental presses when holding the phone next to you cheek.
There are a couple of sensors and a video-call camera at the top
The Omnia HD has hardware Call and End keys plus a menu key, much like the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. They look cheap and feel somewhat more wobbly than the price tag might suggest. Of course parts of the design are still subject to change.
The three keys at the bottom are large enough but don't feel too well built
On the left side we find the volume rocker which is adequately sized and quite easy to work with.
The volume rocker is on the left
The right side of the Samsung i8910 hosts the hold key (to lock/unlock the touchscreen), the camera key and the microUSB slot.
It's a welcome benefit that the phone charges off the microUSB port unlike the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. This means that you can transfer data and charge your battery at the same time.
A couple of keys and a USB slot are to be found on the right
At the top of the i8910 we find a loudspeaker and the 3.5mm standard audio jack. Much like the USB slot it is hidden under a small lid to keep dust away.
One of the loudspeaker grills is located right next to the 3.5mm audio jack
A second loudspeaker is located at the bottom, along with the microphone pinhole. This layout seems a respectful nod to the Omnia HD exceptional video skill, around which everything seems to revolve. We guess a desk stand will be an essential and widely appreciated accessory.
Loudspeakers are perfectly placed for watching videos in landscape mode
The back side of Samsung i8910 is our favorite part of the handset. The metal used for the battery cover is much more resistant to fingerprints and smudges than the glossy plastic used elsewhere.
The backside of Samsung i8910 Omnia HD sure looks nice
Along with a bunch of logos, the back side of the Omnia HD also hosts the 8 megapixel camera lens and the LED flash. With video recording so high on the agenda, it's quite understandable why they went for the LED technology instead of xenon. It still is inadequate for low light photos (or video for that matter) at distances over a meter so don't count too much on it.
The battery located under the cover is the same as the one in Samsung i8510 INNOV8 - a 1200 mAh unit. However now that Omnia HD is officially announced, it turned out that the retail product will have a 1500 mAh battery - nice one!
The new 1500 mAh battery should provide better cover for the power hog of a screen
Next to the battery we find the memory card slot. No hot-swap is somewhat of a letdown but maybe they thought they'd get away given the abundant onboard storage. That way or another, it is hard to imagine it was so hard to make it hot-swappable.
The general build quality of Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is a mixed bag. The metal battery cover and the huge OLED display are true high end stuff but the plastic bits are below par. Anyway, the Omnia HD is just too big to misjudge really and there's no doubt the multimedia prowess is the main course here.
We find the i8910 size acceptable. However, we do note that some people are sure to find it too big and uncomfortable to operate single-handedly (unless you've got an extra long thumb). The superbly massive display has its downsides.
The final version of Samsung i8910 Omnia HD will also have TouchWiz UI on top of the Symbian S60 5th edition OS
There are some parts of the interface that come out better on the Omnia HD than on the 5800 XpressMusic even at this early stage.
The Omnia HD runs the Symbian S60 5th edition
The first and most important change we noticed are the two added homescreen layout options. Adopted from the 3rd edition of the UI, they make much better use of the large high-res display bringing shortcuts to more applications on the homescreen.
There are four options available for the homescreen this time
There is also a virtual menu key and a profile switcher key on the homescreen. The messaging center and the phonebook shortcuts also appear on the screen just below those keys.
What the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD lacks is the contacts bar, which was available on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. However we will take the Active standby screen any day over the contacts bar.
Much like with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, most menus of the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD can be displayed as either a grid or a list. The menu organization is pretty intuitive and logical, most items located exactly where you would expect them. The two virtual soft keys make sure finding your way around won't be any different than on a regular phone.
Most menus can be set to appear in portrait or landscape mode
Unfortunately, the issue of accessing an item in listed menus remains unsolved with the i8910 Omnia HD too. This calls for two presses - one to select, and another one to confirm the action. Now, that's something you don't normally see in other touch phones and seems to hurt usability.
The main issue here is that the interface logic is different when you deal with icons instead of lists.When the opened menu uses icons to represent items as opposed to lists, then a single click usually does the job fine. Same as on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.
Anther case of inconsistency throughout the interface is the scrolling logic used. Again we see two different implementations - scrolling of lists and scrolling of icons is different. Seriously - what is the matter with treating lists and icons differently if they do the same thing?
Unlike the 5800 XpressMusic, the main menu of Samsung i8910 Omnia HD doesn't auto rotate to landscape mode when you tilt the phone. The built-in accelerometer kicks in in select applications only, such as the image gallery or web browser for example.
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD also comes with a task manager, which is launched by a press-and-hold on the menu key. The task manager itself is identical to the one found on Symbian S60 3.2 devices but is severely malfunctioning on our pre-release unit.
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD runs on a new 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and has a dedicated graphic processor chip. Given the high-resolution screen, you are sure to need quite a lot of processing power but the results are even somewhat exceeding our expectations.
The handset managed to play video with a bitrate of almost 3Mbps which is simply amazing. Just for the sake of comparison, the HTC Touch HD only went as high as 1.2 Mbps before it started to skip frames.
Update 18 February: It turns out that the samples we managed to get hold of at the MWC 2009 were even able to play videos with bitrate of up to 8Mbps. Now that is really amazing! The Samsung engineers are yet unable to confirm the highest bitrate of the videos that the release samples will be able to play but even if it goes half as high it will still be spectacular.
The Samsung i890 Omnia HD has 128MB of RAM - exactly as much as the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. However due to the snappier CPU, the Omnia HD delivers much better overall performance.
The internal memory of the i8910 Omnia HD is 16GB and that can be doubled via the microSD card slot: even our pre-release unit had no problem handling a 16GB memory card. Now that surely is some capacity and we can hardly think of a scenario where one would need more on their mobile phone.
A decent music player
The music player of Smasung i8910 Omnia HD is identical to the one found on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic or other Samsung handsets running on the S60 3rd edition UI (aside from the whole touch thing, of course).
The application has a good set of features and a large number of supported formats, which means that no converting of you favorite tracks is necessary. Some additional visualizations are also available.
The music player offers good functionality but little eye-candy
Your music library is automatically sorted by artist, album, genre and composer and searching tracks by gradual typing is available. You can also create your own playlists in no time. The process of adding tracks to the library is as simple as choosing the refresh option.
Album art is also supported and if you don't like the default sound of the device you can enhance it by applying one of the equalizer presets. You can create new ones too in a matter of seconds.
Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in background. In this case a tab appears on the stand-by screen indicating the currently running track.
Your own portable cinema
Watching a video on the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is a true joy. The built-in video player has DivX and XviD video support included.
The screen size and resolution count big time here, we're just amazed by the image quality. And with a powerful CPU that can handle really high bitrate videos sky is the limit.
So, if your videos have a bit rate of less than 3Mbps all you need to do is upload them to the phone and start the video player. No need to convert or look for a piece of 3rd party software to run on the still young S60 5th edition.
Watching a video on the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD
The video player itself only works in fullscreen landscape mode but, since anything else would have made the widescreen display useless, this is understandable. When in fullscreen, a press on the screen shows the controls which are otherwise hidden.
Image gallery is good to go but misses on the fun part
The gallery of Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is identical to the one of Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. It is is yet another part of the interface that hasn't been drastically changed. Touch friendly and functional it definitely is but we somehow feel more eye-candy could have been offered.
You can scroll pictures by sweeping your finger across the screen when looking at a single photo. Opting between portrait and landscape mode is automatic, thanks to the built-in accelerometer. Unless you have that feature disabled, all you need to do to switch modes is to flip the phone sideways.
The picture gallery hasn't changed much in this edition of the UI
The photos can also be zoomed in to see more detail but the screen resolution makes sure you won't need it as much as usual. Zoom is controlled via either the volume rocker or an on-screen touch slider. In all other cases, images are displayed full screen.
Call us picky or whatever you like but touchscreen phones should be fun to use and nice to look at. The OLED screen might just save Samsung this time but some cool and shiny piece of software is still missed. Who knows, maybe the retail version will go that extra step.
Monstrous camera
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD packs one of the most powerful imaging units currently available on the market. Using the camera module of the Samsung i8510 INNOV8 which produced possibly the best images in our grand 8MP shootout, the Omnia HD is trying to outpace its predecessor.
The LED flash might be a disappointment to some but the reason is LED can also be used as a video light. And video is certainly what the phone is really about. We'll get to it in a little while.
The camera key is comfortable enough to work with and the UI has been altered to provide better touch experience. The settings aren't as comfortably placed as on the Samsung Pixon and most of them are squeezed in a shared menu.
A camera like that definitely deserves the time spent getting used to its interface quirks, but we think Samsung could've saved us the effort.
The camera UI isn't as nice as on the Pixon
The range of settings offered by the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is immense: from manual white balance and ISO to exposure compensation, sharpness and contrast. Various effects are also at hand as well as face and smile detection.
Our unit didn't provide geo-tagging of the images but that probably won't be the case with the retail ones. With a built-in GPS we doubt Samsung will miss the opportunity to include this neat feature.
Then again, Nokia added image geotagging to 5800 XpressMusic only recently via a firmware upgrade, so who knows.
As this stage we cannot provide you with camera samples from the Omnia HD. That's the downside of testing a pre-release unit. Eager as we are to take promising gadgets out for a spin, we've been repeatedly sobered by early units, which are so in the rough that experimenting would be pointless.
By the way, the imaging units are usually the last bit in a mobile phone that gets properly finished. But you can count on it we'll get back to you with those samples as soon as possible.
Update 18 February: So here go the promised samples that we managed to take at the MWC 2009. While this still isn't the final version of the camera the photos are already prettey decently looking.
Samsung i8910 Omnia HDcamera sample photos
Waiting for the HD videos
Well, we guess you already know where we're heading with video samples. It will be another little while before we see the real worth of the Omnia HD. We bet you just can't wait. 720p HD video recording appears for the first time on a GSM handset and the excitement is quite worth it. The frame rate is also pretty sweet at 24 fps. WVGA will have to bow its respects - 720p HD videos are about triple the resolution.
Here is the video sample taken with Omnia HD!You can also go and check them out over at Vimeo if you prefer watching them straight from your browser.
GPS Navigation
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD features the Samsung Mobile Navigator application for voice guided navigation. The Route66-made piece of software makes its best to utilize the built-in GPS receiver providing the users of the i8910 with all the goodies of a dedicated satnav unit.
The application itself is something we've seen before and that was also present on the Samsung S8300, which we previewed several days ago. Its functionality and map data is up to the task and the huge display might just render yet another of your gadgets useless.
Bear in mind though that the voice-guided navigation, as well as the map data will probably come at an extra cost.
Final words
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is a remarkable device and it might just have the potential to become the N95 of touchscreen. If we look at it in pure upgrade terms, it outdoes its predecessor by such a sweeping margin that's rarely seen in the mobile world - the massive OLED screen and HD videos are more than enough.
Of course it is not all sunshine and roses for the new Omnia. The Symbian S60 5th edition is certainly maturing with time but it will be a while until it can compete with the established operating systems. The improved homescreen is a start but there are still a lot of issues that need fixing like the scrolling and that annoying one-click-two-click mismatch.
Nonetheless the Samsung i8910 managed to impress us and left us eagerly wanting more. And hey, we haven't forgotten we need to come back with those still and video samples.
I have also use the same Samsung Omnia Mobile.I have found the Unlocking code for My mobile in the site Unlock Zone
ReplyDeletethanxs for your info, i've checked the site...
ReplyDelete