Samsung Omnia II I8000 Review

Introduction:

HTC set a standard for Windows Mobile customization with TouchFLO, and last year Samsung made their entry into the market with the TouchWiz UI touting Omnia.  The Samsung Omnia II I8000 is now here, and a 2 has been added to the end of TouchWiz as well.  This new Omnia is bigger and badder, with just about everything getting a refresh.  The screen has gained half an inch- now up to 3.7” and the resolution has quadrupled to 480x800. AMOLED technology has replaced TFT for improved battery life and more vibrant images.  Video capture is now DVD quality, and connection standards such as 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS are all on board, along with 8GB of internal storage.  The 800MHz processor is one of the fastest currently on the market, and it has a healthy 256MB of RAM and 512MB ROM. TouchWiz now penetrates into the deepest caverns of Windows Mobile, but will it be enough to make up for the clunky UI’s shortcomings?

Included in the box you’ll find:

•    Li-Ion battery
•    AC Adapter
•    microUSB data cable
•    Stylus pen
•    Stereo headphones with microphone extension cord
•    1GB microSD card
•    NAVFone Plus navigation software
•    Carrying pouch


Design:

The design of the Samsung Omnia II I8000 is simple and straightforward.  It closely resembles the Jet, but is bigger and loses the touch of red on the back.  The phone exists to show off the giant 3.7” display, and everything else is kept to a bare minimum.  The front of the phone has a tiny front-facing camera at the top next to the speaker.  On the bottom are the Send and End keys, as well as the Cube key.  The left side has a volume rocker, the right a lock, OK and camera key.  All of the keys have a good amount of travel and it’s clear when they have been activated.  The microUSB port and 3.5mm headset jack are on the top of the device.  The back simply houses the 5-megapixel camera and the Omnia II’s single speaker.




Really though, it’s all about the display.  It dominates the phone in every way, which is a good thing.  The AMOLED screen is brilliant, producing crisp and vibrant images.  The haptic feedback is appreciated, though the phone does have the weird spring feeling when jostled, like the Instinct.  It is plenty bright, but the plastic covering gets fairly washed out in direct light.  The use of plastic is a shame; it is noticeable, produces unnecessary drag and gives the phone a cheaper feel than it deserves.  Another thing holding it back from being the best display we’ve ever used is the use of 65k colors, instead of the 16m found on the Pre, iPhone and N97.  We realize that as a Windows Mobile device it has to do this, but the possibility of an Android device with this screen at 16m colors is downright delicious.  We have to mention that it fingerprints easily, but what doesn’t these days?

The Samsung Omnia II I8000 is a big phone, but it manages to pull it off well.  It is very tall, 6mm more so than its predecessor, but it is narrow enough to fit comfortably into the hand and skinny enough (0.6mm less than the Omnia) to slide into your pocket mostly unnoticed.


You can compare the Samsung Omnia II I8000 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The design is so simple there isn’t much to say about it.  It is an elegantly crafted device, with gentle curves and top-notch build.  Our only gripe is the plastic housing on the display, higher-quality materials or even glass would have been a much better choice.  It’s still hard to find fault with this latest Omnia, it is a device we would definitely be comfortable carrying.

User Interface:

Perhaps the biggest selling point of the Samsung Omnia II I8000 is Samsung’s TouchWiz 2.0 UI.  Short of the Start button at the top left, which takes you to a non-standard menu, you’d never know you were using a Windows Mobile phone.  Samsung has outdone HTC by skinning not only the homescreen and Start Menu, but every single menu on the device!  We’re talking large, finger friendly menus here. In fact, everything is so finger friendly that there isn’t even a stylus slot on the Omnia II.

The homescreen has undergone a complete overhaul.  TouchWiz was originally built around this widget-friendly homescreen, and this time around we have three pages that can be customized with widgets.  As we’ve seen in the past the left side of the phone houses a hideable dock, from which widgets can be drug out onto the main screen.  Back with the Memoir we felt this dock was best used as a launcher, and that is still a very good idea, but the widgets work better with the Omnia II due to the multiple pages.  For example, we set the first page up with a clock and calendar, missed events bar and a launcher.  The second was set up with weather, internet search boxes from Google and Yahoo, as well as the Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and MySpace apps.  The final page was a work oriented one, with CNN headlines, stock quotes and a world clock.  Unlike the OmniaPRO, there is no option to switch between Work and Life modes.



What Samsung’s done with the menus is downright wonderful.  Windows Mobile is now a joy to use, with much better organization and implementation.  Let’s begin with the Start Menu.  There are several pages; 4 by default but the user can customize it up to 10.  Icons are large, and at most there are 12 per screen arranged in a 3x4 grid.  Each page is named, and though it is Productivity, Multimedia, Internet and Office by default the user can rename any of them.  The icons can be added, removed and ordered in any manner one chooses.  A simple swipe moves from page to page.  Along the bottom there are four non-changing buttons: Others, Cube (more on that later,) Task Switcher and Edit.  The Task Switcher is a visually overhauled task manager, allowing you to view and end running programs in either a grid or card interface similar to the Xperia X1 and Pre, respectively.



The Settings menu has also been reworked completely.  Categories are arranged in list view with text instead of the traditional icon grid layout.  This makes fingering through them much easier.  Toggling between options is done by touching an onscreen button, a welcome difference from the toggle switches of TouchFLO and Mobile OSX.  It is abundantly clear that Samsung put a lot of time into taking any traces of Windows Mobile out of these new Omnias.

When we said that the Start button was the only thing that gave away this being a Windows Mobile device we told a white lie.  Despite the beefed up processing power the spinning WinMo beach ball still pops up at times and this is most noticeable on the homescreen. Within the menus we rarely saw it, but flicking from homepage to homepage produces a 5-10 second delay while waiting for the widgets to load, which is infuriating.  The widgets are a great idea, and some of them (like AccuWeather and Google) are very helpful, but it’s just not quick enough.  Furthermore, we often found ourselves pressing options two and three times to activate them and not being able to drag widgets around unless they were pressed just right.  This problem was only in the homescreen (here we really missed HTC’s TouchFLO 3D), throughout the rest of the phone it was very responsive and accurate. 

Another small gripe is the lack of gesture use.  While there are some swipes here and there, for the most part you do not see them. Samsung’s done some great work here though, and all-in-all it’s the best overhaul of Windows Mobile on the market.

PIM Functionality:

As with everything else, Samsung has put their touch on the PIM applications.  The calendar is large and finger friendly, with tabs for Month, Week, Day and Agenda views along the top.  Smart Memo is a better version of Notes, where the user can draw notes and insert voice recordings, images or sounds.  The phonebook is easy to navigate, again completely skinned.  The Tasks application is…sadly the same old WinMo Tasks application.  In fact, the standard Contacts, Notes, Calendar, Task Manager and a few others are available as well under that dirty little More option in the Start Menu.  Why anyone would want to use it we don’t know, since the Samsung versions are superior in every way that we could tell.



The dialpad has been slightly reworked, but the functionality remains largely the same.  It will match contacts as you enter in numbers (it matches names at the same time via T9) and along the bottom you have quick access to your phonebook, call history and messaging.  Unfortunately there is no voice dialing out of the box, but software is of course available.

Messaging:

With no physical keyboard there is a premium on an excellent onscreen keyboard, and Samsung has delivered.  The onscreen QWERTY is quick and responsive, and when tapping out a message you can rotate the Samsung Omnia II I8000 and get a larger landscape keyboard.  The haptic feedback again works well here, allowing you to know that you’ve pressed the desired key, and with the XT9 mode enabled the error correction was nearly as flawless as it was unobtrusive.  As always, we would have liked to see an onscreen T9 keypad for easier portrait use, but Samsung only offers the full QWERTY with word prediction.  As well as it worked it’s hard to complain.



All the standards are available, including email, SMS and MMS.  Samsung has again skinned these, but the functionality remains the same.  Windows Mobile is a very robust messaging platform, but it would be great to see popular IM applications integrated into the OS instead of being stand alone apps.

Connectivity:

The Samsung Omnia II I8000 is a quad-band GSM device with 3G on the 900, 1900 and 2100MHz bands, making it a world phone, since it supports both European 3G bands, and AT&T’s 1900MHz one.  It offers 7.2Mbps HSDPA and 5.78Mbps HSUPA, Wi-Fi b/g and GPS.  Bluetooth can be used for short distance data transfer and supports too many profiles to list (see our spec page for full details.)

Rather than use their rather horrible “full HTML” browser found on the Memoir and Instinct, Samsung has wisely chosen to stick with Opera Mobile for all of your web needs.  We’ve of course seen this browser employed on many WinMo devices such as HTC’s Touch phones and Sony’s Xperia X1. The build used here has limited support for Flash (adobe.com worked, espn.com gave us a Flash error,) one of the few drawbacks to the otherwise superior WebKit browsers found on the Pre and iPhone.  Opera Mobile is still a very good browser, and will display webpages just as you’d see them on your desktop.

Camera:

The Samsung Omnia II I8000 sports the same 5MP resolution as the original Omnia, but it now has a dual LED flash and video recording has been vastly improved.  It now records at DVD quality (720x480) at 30fps, and can go as high as 120fps at QVGA resolution for slow motion recording.



Samsung Omnia II I800 Sample video at 720x480 pixels resolution
*Note that due to codecs support, you may not be able to play the file.
** Keep in mind that the video file is about 12MB.

There is some noticeable delay in the camera.  It takes about 3s to start up, another 3 to snap a picture and then another 4-5 to snap another.  These times are acceptable, but not really great. Pictures turned out so-so as well.  As the light got worse they got grainier, and even in bright sunlight color saturation was poor.  Detail was good though, even blown up we were able to make out individual leaves pretty well.




There are plenty of options to play with.  In camera mode the user can select 5, 3, 2 or 0.3 megapixel resolutions, set the ISO from 50-400 or let the device do it for you, adjust the contrast, saturation and sharpness, choose from four preset or automatic white balance and enable Anti-Shake, WDR and geotagging.  There are several different scene modes to produce more realistic images: Portrait, Landscape, Sunset, Dusk & Dawn, Night Shot, Text, Sports, Backlight, Party & Indoors, Beach & Snow, Fall Color, Fireworks and Candle Light.  Features we’ve seen from Samsung before, like Smile Detection, are also available. The easy-to-use panoramic mode has gotten even easier, now taking 8 shots with the camera virtually doing all the work for you.  All the user has to do is snap the first shot and then slowly pan to the right or left while the camera lines it up and snaps the rest of the shots.  Results were good, but the resolution gets significantly lowered to 2912x400




Multimedia:

Samsung’s Touch Player handles music and video playback.  No surprise here, but it’s very well laid out and has large icons for easy finger use.  The layout is pretty straight forward, you can view all tracks or by album or artist, and can create your own playlists. Sound quality with the included headphones was excellent, especially after enabling the WoW HD. Samsung’s DNSe technology is employed for more realistic sound reproduction. Even though the included headphones were very good, since the  Samsung Omnia II I8000 has a 3.5mm headset jack you can choose to use whatever headphones you wish.



The Touch Player is much more polished this time around, with better controls and a more professional look.  One cool hidden feature is that when listening to music, if the device is locked you can swipe down from the top to reveal music controls.  We do have to mention that it failed to read any ID3 information on 2 of our 6 test albums, which was a disappointment.



Video playback was brilliant. It supports MPEG4, WMV, DivX, XviD, H.263 and H.264 and was able to handle every file type, frame rate and resolution we threw at it. It should be noted that none of our test files have a higher resolution than the Omnia II’s native WVGA. The quality of video was amazing, everything looked fantastic on the wonderful AMOLED screen.  There are two preloaded promo videos which really highlight the brilliance of the screen.

There is an FM radio tuner that uses the headphones as an antenna.  It works as advertised. The onboard video editor left a bit more to be desired; it was a bit awkward to use, and does not support videos taken at the phone’s highest resolution.  In theory you can stitch videos together, add text and/or audio to them or auto clip them based on certain parameters, but we were not impressed.

The same 3D cube interface we first saw on the Jet is available on the Omnia II. It is a watered down multimedia interface, and we’re really not sure what Samsung is trying to do here. In addition to music, videos, games and photos there is a favorite contact side and web bookmark side. Functionality is OK we guess, but it’s a very primitive app that doesn’t fit with the theme of the device and really offers nothing in the way of convenience.



Software:

The Omnia II is a Windows Mobile 6.1 device which will be upgradable to Windows Mobile 6.5 once it is released.  It runs on a lightning-fast 800MHz processor with 256MB of RAM and 512MB ROM.  One would think this should be plenty muscle to power the device, but as noted earlier we saw too many beach balls for our liking and there was noticeable lag at times.

Besides all the Samsung software found on the Omnia II there are a few other helpful programs. DNLA’s Connected Home allows the user to access music libraries from remote computers, and Midomi will listen to the song playing and return track information.  The Streaming Player is similar to HTC’s Streaming Media player, neither of which are all that practical for playing internet videos. Qik allows you to share live video from your phone with friends and family. There is an RSS reader and Podcast feed reader for keeping up with the latest current events. There is a communities option that lets you link your Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Photobucket, Picasa and Friendster (people still use that?) accounts so you can upload photos or go to the website (where you’ll have to login again,) but that’s the extent of it.


The Samsung Omnia II I8000 comes with included NAVFone Plus software, but that did not do us any good here in the States.  Fortunately any GPS program you can get your hands on will work since it is unlocked, and we had no issues downloading and using Google Maps.  Samsung uses their XTRA software to give quicker GPS locks, much like HTC’s QuickGPS program.



There is a very interesting Smart Reader application which will not only scan business cards, but also documents and will even translate words captured with the camera (in our review unit’s case, from English to French and vice versa.)  Last but not least the Office Mobile suite is included as well as Adobe Reader LE for .pdf documents.

Performance:

The phone performance on the Samsung Omnia II I8000 was adequate. We had no issues understanding callers, and they said the same, but the voice quality could have been better. As one caller put it; “its fine, but it is far from crystal clear.”  They rated us a 7.5/10 which we think is a fair rating on our end as well.  Sound could have been a bit louder and it sounded as if there was some distance between us and the caller.

Battery life is rated for a much improved 10h of talk time, up from 5.8 on the previous version.  Standby is rated at 430 hours.  Both of these times are well above the industry averages so the Omnia II gets high marks for that. Keep in mind, however, that your results may vary due to different usage patterns.

Conclusion:

The Samsung Omnia II I8000 comes very close to nailing it, but there are a few things that really hold it back.  First and foremost is the lag, especially on the homescreen.  It is bad enough at times to ruin the entire user experience. Still, Samsung has done a great job of penetrating the Windows Mobile interface.  The menus are a joy to use, and they go much deeper than any Windows Mobile overhaul we’ve seen.  If they could take care of the front end as well as HTC has with TouchFLO 3D they might just have a true winner on their hands.  As of now however, they have a great phone that needs some software optimization badly.