Samsung Omnia II- Superb Multimedia Phone With A Huge AMOLED Screen

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Awesome AMOLED touch screen, 5 mega pixel camera, runs on Windows mobile 6.5

Thumbs Down:

Resistive touch screen, heavy and thick.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM
Band: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone design: Candy bar
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: Camera, FM radio, music player, proximity sensor.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Samsung Omnia II is the successor of Samsung Omnia and it runs on the new Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional operating system. Supported video formats are H.263, MPEG-4, H.264, WMV. Supported audio formats are MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+. For messaging there are features like Text messages, Picture messages, Multimedia messages (MMS), E-Mail, HTML Browser and Voice mail.

The AMOLED screen of the phone is 3.7 inches big which gives a whopping resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and 16-bit (65000 colors). The phone has a 3.5 mm head phone jack to plug in your favorite headphones. The battery of the phone has talk time of about 600 minutes and stand by time of 430 hours. Additional features include Intelligent typing (T9), Airplane mode, TTY compatible Speakerphone, microSD card slot, GPS, Voice command and Voice dialing

The phone comes bundled with Wall/USB charger, Standard lithium-ion battery, Mic adapter/FM Radio antenna and Stylus.

Razzle Dazzle:

Samsung Omnia II is very pretty, no doubt about that but it is also unusually heavy for a mobile phone. It is also very thick which means it will struggle to find room in your tight jeans. The most attractive features in the looks department are the huge screen and the shiny red patch in the back.

Inside Dope:

Samsung Omnia was a super hit in the mobile phone market and Samsung are back again to cash in on the device. They have announced Omnia II and it has the same appeal as the previous version, it has been revamped in quite a lot of areas to make it a better phone.

The big screen that the phone had in Omnia is even bigger this time, it is a 3.7 inch WVGA screen which means better videos and better photograph viewing. The high end multi media phone screen is AMOLED based, which is a better performer than the standard LCD screens that you get in normal mobile phones.

The resolution of 800×480 pixels promises more real estate area on the screen while typing and for work related applications. The built in accelerometer sweetens the deal as it changes the display from portrait to landscape when you hold the phone on its sides. The accelerometer is not available for all applications but it is there when you need it the most like message, videos, photos and web browser.

But there is a catch in the touch screen of the Samsung Omnia II; it is not capacitive but resistive. Which means you will have to use the provided stylus for using the phone. Resistive touch screen have been done away with most phones, though they still lurk around a bit and we would like them to be killed forever now that capacitive touch screen technology is here. Using the screen won’t be easy for the first time with the stylus and will take some time to get used to. You need to press harder on the screen of the phone to register the touch.

The physical buttons below the Samsung Omnia II are just like Omnia, there are three buttons but what attracted us the most was the protruding shield button on the center. It is the main menu key and the other two keys around it are the talk and end button. A back button on the phone would have been good, there is an option on the screen but it is not always there. On the sides there is a 3.5 mm jack (a 2.5 mm jack on such a phone would have been a deal breaker) and a button for adjusting the volume. Other than that, the ports on the phone include micro-USB port, camera key, lock key and compartment for the slider.

There have been technology rumours going on for the keyboard, an application was being developed that lets you drag on the buttons you want that make up the word. For example if you want to spell ‘you’ all it takes is moving your finger on the three keys and the word will show up on the screen.

It is finally here and Samsung calls it ‘Swype’ technology, all you have to do is to swipe your fingers on the keys that make up the word and you will have it on the bar above. While we like this technology which saves us from tapping on individual keys, you cannot lift your finger when you are writing big words. Also slang which is often used in messaging friends and IM isn’t recognized by the phone. But the phone will give you a list of words that the phone thinks are the right ones. But the keyboard is very accurate and came up with correct words when we tried our hands on it. Typing will be much faster this way and Swype says that you can type up to 30 words a minute using this.

TouchWiz feature of the Samsung Omnia II which is one of the highlights of Samsung phones have been made even better. It is more user friendly and it is much more customizable than the previous versions. Widget store is also officially open now which means you can buy a host of third part applications.

Bottom of the screen has a notification bar which gives you an alert for missed calls, voice mail and messages. If you tap the screen on the top, the status bar will get magnified where in you can manage options for wireless connectivity, battery life and sound.

The menu interface of the Samsung Omnia II is also revamped and it comes with three pages default to store your application short cuts. You swipe you finger around the screen to access to these various pages. You can also prioritize the menu, which means you can place the application short cuts that you use the most ahead of the rest. There is also a task switcher application which lets you move between the running apps in mobile phone. The ‘end all’ function is like collapse button, it closes all running applications. So when ever you feel that the phone is running on low resources you can always use this option instead of closing the entire apps one after the other.

3D cube interface is there on the Samsung Omnia II, but we feel it is not too important. It feels great to move the cube along but once the novelty wears off, you feel that a simple interface could have been better. Samsungs gives you a toolbar along with the cube for launching the same applications.

The Samsung Omnia II comes bundled with USB cable, stylus, disc for software, microphone adapter and FM radio antenna and there is the reference manual. The phone run on the latest version of Windows Mobile which is the 6.5 version and Internet Explorer Mobile has been improved. There is a new feature called Microsoft’s My Phone backup service, the phone comes preloaded with applications like Microsoft Office Mobile Suite and you can always download more from Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Other features on the Samsung Omnia II include alarm clock, memo pad, calculator, smart reader business card scanner and voice recorder. Advanced features include conference calling, speakerphone, voice dialing and commands, speed dial, text and multimedia messaging. The phone also has  VZ Navigator for real-time navigation and support for Visual Voice Mail but none of these are free, you will have to pay a fee to access this.

The Samsung Omnia II has support for POP3 and IMAP connectivity through which you can sync your e-mail client with the phone so that you will get the mails delivered directly in your inbox. The phone also has IM clients like AIM, Yahoo and Windows live messenger.

There is no limit to phone book entries on the phone and a single contact can take multiple numbers, birthdays, addresses, notes, etc. you can pair up a contact with a unique ring tone and you can also attach a picture to a contact so that his face flashes when he is calling.

For browsing there is an improved Internet Explorer but recommend you to go with Opera Mobile 9.5 which is also built in on the phone. Opera will give you a better experience than IE. With Opera you can zoom in and out of pages, all you have to do is long press on the screen and there will be a zoom bar which lets you go in and out. Browsing was a great experience on this big screen of the phone, just like videos and photographs.

The camera comes with a five mega pixel camera, we would have a liked a 7 or 8 mega pixel one, but lets not be too greedy. The photos are good thanks to the built in flash which lights up dark environments. There are options like shooting modes, auto focus, white balance, image sizes, ISO and antishake. There are three modes for shooting video – MMS, normal and slow. We were surprised to find a video editor option which lets us add sound, text to our clips.

You can share you photos and videos on the Samsung Omnia II with Bluetooth or you can send them with e-mail or MMS. There is a application for communities which lets you connect to networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket and Flickr for sharing videos and photos. You can flick through the photos stored on the phone, just like the iPhone, there is a Digita Frame feature which rotates through you collection and it displays time, date and phone status.  You can also connect the phone to a TV to watch the photos and videos that you may have clicked.

When it comes to multi media, Samsung Omnia II is one of the best phones around. The device supports DivX playback and has functions for player like playlist creation, DNSe and SRS audio effects and repeat/shuffle modes. You can shuffle through the collection by swiping your finger through the album art and choose the tracks that you want to groove to. Video watching was great on this phone with the big screen and AMOLED feature giving best of both worlds. We must say that this is the best video quality that we have ever seen on mobile phones.

The Samsung Omnia II has FM radio but you must use the bundled head set for this. For storing your music, photos, videos there is a built in 8 GB internal memory and you can put additional memory cards up to 16 GB. The cards are not hot swappable and you have to go digging behind the battery cover.

The Samsung Omnia II was tested for call quality we it was quite good. Our friends could hear what we were saying but we had to struggle a bit. We could not make up what our friends were saying, the signal was strong so we think maybe there is some problem with the phone.  The phone has a built in accelerometer, which is supposed to lock the screen when you place it too close to the face. The phone is long and the cheek might touch the phone while talking. It did happen to us and we found there was no proximity sensor. Our cheek touched the screen and we got haptic feedback.

Speakerphone calls were good but the voice will distort when you push it to the limits. Lot of background noise was attracted during the calls but this problem is ubiquitous when it comes to speakerphone. Pairing up a wireless Bluetooth headset was easy and calls were clear.

The Samsung Omnia II is powered by an 800MHz Samsung S3C6410 processor and this gave us nothing to complain about. The phone was fast at whatever we threw at it and the accelerometer transitions were fast too.

1500mAh lithium ion battery has enough juice in it for 10 hours of talk time and 17.9 days of stand by time, which is pretty good.

Nitty Gritty:

The Samsung Omnia II is one of the best, if not the best, multi media smart phone around. Awesome screen, great video viewing, revamped features like TouchWiz interface make this phone a great buy.