Samsung OMNIA Review

Camera:

Samsung OMNIA is one of the first Windows Mobile devices sporting a 5-megapixel camera (G-Smart MS820 was announced earlier this year). It is equipped with autofocus, flash and many options borrowed from the high-class cameraphones. The picture and video quality are comparable just with them. In contrast to the rest of the phones running on that OS, OMNIA far ahead.

The first thing that impressed us was its operating speed. The interface starts somewhat sluggish (about 3 seconds), but focusing and saving is very quick (2 seconds each). It is optimized for working entirely with fingers and has large icons with clearly marked functions. All main options (flash, resolution, focus, exposure, shooting mode and scenes) are visible on the screen. Thanks to them, after just couple of taps you can choose an option without having to go through complicated menus, to scroll or confirm. There also are shortcuts to the gallery and the camcorder.

The rest of the settings are separated in two tabs with a few pages each. The first one lets you change the quality (compression), the white balance, to add effects, to change the ISO sensitivity (up to 800), contrast, sharpness, color saturation and focusing mode (center, in a point or matrix). On top of that, if you activate the GPS you will be able to tag the picture with information about the place where it was taken. This would give you the unique ability to send a tagged picture to your buddy saying for example “Look at the honeys in South Beach” without giving him the chance to accuse you in masterful use of Photoshop. However, we prefer using Adobe’s software instead of the Wide Dynamic Ranger option, with which is equipped the camera, because it simply enlightens the darker areas. By using some of the options mentioned above (like the Color swap for example), you can achieve very artistic results.


The second tab gives you access to more general options as for example, where to save the images, how long do you want the camera to be active for, should there be guiding lines, etc.

However, the variety of functions is not the most important for a camera. The overall quality of the pictures taken with OMNIA is over the average. The outdoor photographs have well saturated and beautiful, but unreal colors. The fine detail level is slightly behind the top 5-megapixel phones we’ve used. Indoors, the results are worse, especially if there isn’t a good light source. The images have a lot of noise and low detail level. If you intend to snap pictures in the dark, bear in mind that the flash is very bright and it has to be used from a good distance in order not to blind somebody. In macro mode, the camera performs better, as long as you are not extremely close to the object being photographed. Here, the flash brightness is automatically reduced so it can be used.



When recording a video, you can use the majority of the effects and settings accessible in the picture mode. The max resolution is 640х480 with 15 fps, and the format used is MPEG4, which promises better results than the outdated 3gp. Unfortunately, the videos are choppy when watching (even on a PC) and recording, which is very annoying. This makes the camera unsuitable for recording dynamic videos, which is rather disappointing. The sound, even though accompanied with a slight noise, is relatively good.

Samsung OMNIA sample video at 640x480 pixels resolution.
* Note that due to codecs support, you may not be able to play the file.

Anyways, OMNIA definitely raises the bar for the cameras in the Windows Mobile devices. It performs at the level of the best cameraphones, including Nokia N82 and N95 8GB .


Multimedia:

This is the key moment in presenting the versatile device. Especially for picture viewing, we have a separate application called Photo Slides. It lets you create albums with images from which, you can later make slideshows. Here, navigating is not done by dragging but by using the arrows. This is not inconvenient, but is another slightly confusing moment in the phone – one moment you are scrolling and you are looking for arrows in the next.


When starting the media album, you will once more meet the finger-unfriendly Windows Mobile navigation. Once you open the pictures, you can jump to the previous/next one or zoom in/out by using your fingers. You can choose if you want to either see all documents in a specific folder or only one type (pictures, videos, music, documents).

If you open a song or a video, they will automatically start the Touch Player, and not the standard Windows Media. Samsung’s modification is very easy to use with fingers. You can sort the files by album, artist and genre. Unfortunately, there is no equalizer.

OMNIA will let you listen to quality music. The speaker is not loud enough, but the sound is clear with a slight metallic noise. Once you put the earphones on however, the situation improves greatly. Loud, clear and basically close to the best we’ve heard from a phone. The ear plugs, which have a somewhat extravagant design, will not be comfortable for everyone, but are worth it, because of the great sound quality. But if you really care about the sound, there is a 3.5 mm adapter, so you can use the headphones of your choice. This is one of the rare cases of a Windows Mobile phone, which manages to visualize album art stored in the ID3 tag without any problems. You can also view the albums by these pictures, but that’s not as convenient and flashy as seen in iPhone’s cover flow.



The FM radio, offers two groups where you can store up to 6 frequencies in each. As a whole the interface is quite simple, and the only more interesting function is the ability to record what you are listening to. However, it is made completely useless by the awful sound quality.

The user can play videos via the Touch Player as well. The promised DivX/XviD support is present along with the MPEG4 h.264 one, and can visualize videos with resolution smaller than 720x480. Basically, unless you want to see DVD resolution files, you won’t have to convert them in order to play them on your phone. A 700MB movie is transferred for 5 minutes and a half, which is a very good result.

The main problem, which stops us from announcing OMNIA for the best MMP on the market, is called Windows Mobile. The OS doesn’t allow visualization of more than 65k colors and that’s why sometimes the transition will not be smooth.






Overall, this element is at iPhone’s level. With the Samsung, you can simply upload videos from your PC and view them with a satisfactory quality, meanwhile although you have to convert the files to a supported format for Apple’s child, the beautiful 16 million color picture justifies the time lost.



Software:

OMNIA’s processor is the fastest possible on the market and thanks to that it opens menus smoothly even with a multiple applications running.

The task switcher, which appears when the main menu button is held, is very convenient and lets you stop a given active application or all of them. Besides, if the TouchPlayer is playing, you’ll be able to control it from here.

Since OMNIA is a Windows Mobile device, you can install any additional applications you might need.

The phone comes with Office Mobile (allows editing of Word and Excel files(including Office 2007) and PowerPoint viewing) and a PDF reader. All of them visualize documents correctly and open them rather quick. Unfortunately, browsing a PDF file is done only with the help of the small, inconvenient arrows and not with fingers. We are slightly disappointed, because we thought that with TouchWiz most of the things would be controlled by touch. At least the zoom stays at the same level once you move on to the next page.

Google Maps

The Video Editor at your disposal, can only open QVGA or smaller resolution videos, made with the phone. It’s absurd that you can record videos with a higher resolution, but you cannot edit them. Still, this function offers some interesting options like putting together a picture and video story. You can add subtitles to those and apply various effects.


GPS:

OMNIA is also equipped with a GPS, which of course, is not only used for image tagging. The preloaded Google Maps will help you navigate from A to B. The localizing after a cold start took us about 2 minutes, and the hot one was much quicker at less than 10 seconds.

To our regret, the use of Google Maps requires a constant internet connection. If you travel outside of the coverage area, there is no navigation either. Therefore, if you need reliable navigation, get one of the paid programs like iGO and Tom Tom Navigator.