Samsung Omnia W Preview

Introduction:

Samsung Omnia W is part of the second batch of Windows Phones that are about to hit the market in time for the holidays, and judging by the “W” in the title, it is supposed to fit in the midrange spectrum of Samsung's WP portfolio.

The handset might actually be the Europe/Asia version of the Samsung Focus Flash for AT&T, as it sports the same 3.7” Super AMOLED display, 1.4GHz processor, 8GB of storage and 5MP camera with LED flash.

These specs, however, place it in the upper mid-range category, plus the handset runs the latest version of Windows Phone and sports a brushed metallic back cover. Are these features enticing enough to jump on the Mango gravy train? Read our preview to find out...

Design:

The Samsung Omnia W is a compact little handset save for the 0.43” (10.9 mm) profile, which is still decent. It is also very light at 4.07 oz (115 g), despite the metal element in the back cover, and pretty comfortable to hold and operate with one hand thanks to the tapered edges and the reasonably-sized screen.


The 3.7” Super AMOLED (not Plus) display is a good differentiator among the other new Windows Phone handsets that are about to flood the market soon. Its nice, saturated colors are quite appealing. The 480x800 pixels resolution should result in 252ppi pixel density, which is quite good, but due to the Pentile matrix, it is way less.

The display sports the usual for AMOLEDs pitch blacks, high contrast and very good viewing angles, but the colors displayed are on the colder side, again something that seems inherent to Super AMOLEDs, making white appear blueish.


Overall the design of the Samsung Omnia W doesn't stray away from the Windows Phone guidelines, offering the obligatory three navigational keys below the screen, with a physical Home button, and a dedicated camera key plus LED flash to accompany the 5MP shooter on the back. The chassis is a tad bland but pleasant to hold and look at, and if the phone was offered in other colors than black it would even be a looker.

Interface and Functionality:

Windows Phone Mango update is a vast improvement over the first WP edition, and not only via the first things you see – the more functional Live Tiles and the social networking integration with Twitter and LinkedIn joining Facebook in WP.


There is multitasking, and the apps currently running can be called when you long-press the back key (long press the home key calls the voice command service), and you can flip horizontally between their snapshots.


Besides all recent Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn updates from a specific contact with the respective photos, in the People hub you now have the History tab. It puts together all your communication venues with a contact – calls, text conversations, emails, and so on.


The Calendar app also unifies your accounts in sub-calendars, which you can paint in different colors to tell them apart easily. And one of the greatest updates with Mango is better work with SkyDrive, the 25GB free cloud service by Microsoft – documents, photos and other media now sync seamlessly with SkyDrive. Speaking of documents, there are numerous improvements to Microsoft’s Office Mobile on the phone. For example, you can now mark several cells in Excel by dragging your finger down, plus you can now use the famed Autosum function afterward.

The search button calls up Bing, but there you also have two new modes – a song recognition button, and QR code scanner, which also serves as OCR software to scan a page, and then translate it in different languages. The OCR is hit-or-miss, but they all are on mobile phones, you need a really good source of light and contrast on the page to recognize the text correctly.


The point is that all these little helpers are native for Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, and you don’t have to hit the app markets right away to pimp up your WP phone. This, along with the social networking integration are very good differentiators for a mobile OS that aims to become the third player in the Android-iOS race, since it can’t fight with the number of apps available, just with their native integration.

The simple-looking, but effective virtual keyboard on the 3.7” display is easy to use both in portrait and in landscape modes, making messaging a piece of cake. There is built-in spell checker, and nice little perks like a cursor popping up above the text box so you can easily drag it to where you want to make a correction. The minimalistic fashion of moving the cursor, marking and copying text make Android Gingerbread look downright crude in that respect.



The Messaging Hub now puts together in a conversation thread your texts, along with Facebook and Windows Live messages with a contact. The same thread view now goes on in the Email app, which also adds a common inbox for having all your accounts at one place.



Internet and Connectivity:

The IE9 mobile browser is filthy smooth, even in our pre-production version of the Omnia W, on account of the new JavaScript engine and hardware acceleration. Microsoft's claims that with Mango it went from the slowest browser (in WinMo) to the fastest one certainly hold water as far as everyday surfing is concerned – the only thing we could compare the browser experience in Mango to is iOS's Safari. Not only are zooming and panning around silky, but when you double-tap, the browser zooms in three stages, according to the way the page columns are arranged, instead of brutally zooming in from the minimum to the maximum. Text reflow is automatic and fits even more complex pages well on the screen real estate for easier reads. The bad part is, of course, no Adobe Flash support, but Microsoft is adamant that HTML5 is the way to go, and is not planning to include Flash support even in its Windows 8 tablets, at least not in those that are ARM-based.


The connectivity options on the Samsung Omnia W are plenty – 14.4Mbps HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, A-GPS, and FM Radio with RDS. There is no DLNA option or HDMI port for displaying photos and videos directly on a bigger screen, however. A big annoyance is that the phone doesn't have mass storage mode and you have to install Zune software for communicating with the device..

The GPS software is Bing Maps, and the chip located us for 2-3 minutes on cold start. Bing Maps has been updated to cover much more countries with detailed maps, and we liked the way it automatically switches to satellite view when you zoom onto the streets. Microsoft promised that it will offer users ways to opt out of location tracking on Windows Phone, and it delivered – you can turn off tracking completely or selectively in different apps like Bing Maps.

Camera:

The 5MP shooter on the back of the Samsung Omnia W is accompanied by an LED flash, which also serves as a video light when making footage. The phone records 720p HD video at 30fps, and has several preset scene modes and effects you can apply to both the video and the stills.

Before Mango the video settings defaulted to VGA resolution each time we exited the camera interface, which was annoying, but now you have an option to save your camera settings and enter directly into the last setup.

Multimedia:

The music player is with the famed Zune interface, and the Music+Videos hub now allows you to create playlists, also subscribe to and download podcasts, The Smart DJ song recommendation function, that was available only in the desktop Zune software or the Zune Player, can now be used directly on the phone.  The phone plays MPEG-4 video files by default, up to 720p, which look vivid on the Super AMOLED display, but Windows Phone doesn't have DivX/Xvid codec support.


Expectations:

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango is a great update to a  promising mobile OS, while the Samsung Omnia W runs it flawlessly with its 1.4GHz processor, and makes it look sparkling on account of the Super AMOLED display.

We’d like to see more distinctive elements in the design apart from the brushed metal part of the battery cover, but let’s not forget the handset is in the “W” category, which places it a block below the best, according to Samsung’s new titling scheme.

The Samsung Omnia W has every chance to become a bestseller Windows Phone  if priced right. It is compact enough, with distinguishing features like the Super AMOLED screen, and runs the Mango update with its excellent hardware-accelerated browser like a charm, even on our prototype unit.

The Omnia W seems capable enough to meet most Android midrangers in terms of specs, and in terms of mobile OS is a better alternative than Symbian or Samsung's bada. Android has functional advantages over Windows Phone, so in the end it all comes down to personal preferences.

Samsung Omnia W Video Preview: