Welcome to the PhoneArena.com video review of the Samsung Omnia II. The Omnia II upgrades in many ways from the original not the least of which is this 3.7 inch AMOLED display. Active matrix, organic LED technology means the display as much brighter and crisper than traditional LED displays.
It also is much thinner and less power which in this case has doubled the Omnia’s battery life. Not surprisingly the phone design resolves around this display. If you see the front is very simple, we have small four facing camera at the top right and also the send and end keys at the bottom as well as the keyboard key which serves as toggle between the start menu and whatever screen you’re on. To the left side of the phone is simply the volume rocker and on the right we find a lock key and okay key and a camera button. The top on the phone houses the 3.5 mm headset jack as well as the microUSB charging and data port. The back of the phone simply has the gigantic camera. In this case it’s five megapixel, the same is on the original Omnia though it does have a dual LED display this time around.
Also on the back is the phone single speaker. To access the microSD expansion slot, we will have to remove the battery cover. As you can see, you also will find the SIM card slot and of course the battery here as well. It has microUSB expansion up to 32 Gigabytes and also has eight Gigs of internal memory.
One of interesting things about the Omnia which we saw the first time around as well is not there is no stylus. It does come with a little pen stylus which you can attach like a lanyard. However, the phone has been completely redesigned to have finger-friendly menus. We saw the touch with interface on the Omnia but Samsung is done one better than TouchWiz 2.0.
We still have the familiar bar on the side. Here we have widgets that we can drag and drop on and off the screen. When we review the Memoir, we found that it was very helpful as a launcher but not so helpful in terms of using it on screen. One of the nice things with the Omnia II is that they give you three home screens however. Here, we have our main home screen where we have a calendar and clock as well as a small launcher bar and some missed info.
As we slide across to the next page, we will see one of the major problems with the Omnia II is lag. You can count the second to how long it’s taking to load these different widgets. This almost completely diminishes their functionality. Still, it’s not the bad thing to have and if you can get over that lag, the Omnia II maybe a great phone for you. For us however, it’s something that we are on the user experience and in the end, we just couldn’t get over it.
It was really hoping the phone back from being good versus great. We are using the stylus here but trust us it’s only for fingerprints sake and these menus are wonderfully designed to be finger friendly. As you can see, all the icons are large. Again, this is a nontraditional start menu something that Samsung has completely is keen. Windows Mobile almost completely taking out the equation.
If it weren’t for the lag you almost never remember that this is Windows Mobile device. By default, you have four pages here however, in the edit screen you can see you can add or remove icons and you can also add up to ten pages total.
One of the things we’ve tried it is to see out in the past is despite that there are great home screen, they haven’t scanned Windows Mobile quite deep enough. Samsung has. You can see the settings menu here, much different than you’d ever expect from a Windows Mobile device. Everything is very nice, very easy to see and very easy to use.
As you can see, the screen is pretty responsive. However, there are certain times when we have to touch the screen two or even three times. It does not have haptic feedback and also makes a noise to let us know if we touched something. But unfortunately, just because that goes of does not mean the item has been touch. We really appreciate this advanced scanning that Samsung has done.
For the most part you do not even realize that you're in the Windows Mobile environment. You do have the start menu button at the top at times and there are certain programs like nodes which take you to the traditional Windows Mobile program. However, even most of those had been redone. For instance, the Smart Memo application is very cool. Not only can we write a new memo, we can also insert images as well as video and sound.
As you can see, the menu options have also been rescanned. This is something that HTC has done but we like Samsungs a little bit better. This memo can then be save as an image and that way we can save it to our computer.
All throughout the device, you see Samsung is wonderful scanning of Windows Mobile. It truly makes the device much more of a joy to use and it’s probably our favorite Windows Mobile port. The one thing we really worry about though is the lag. Again, like we said it can be several seconds, sometime even 30 or 40 before we can get to where we want. There are also times that we cannot swipe through pages properly. It takes one or two tries to get to where we want to go.
One more time, the Omnia II is on the verge of being a great phone however, whether it’s Samsung or whether it’s Windows Mobile, we have a feeling it is latter. The lag really just halted up. It is surprisingly because the Omnia II runs on the very powerful 800 megahertz processors. Short of the Toshiba one gigahertz processors that we just all released this is the winning processor on the market hopefully, maybe on the Omnia III, a more likely an Android device. We will see a much snappier experience which gives the user interface a true better feel.
All in all we really do like the Omnia II. We just wish there was not so much lag and that the user’s experience was a little bit better. You can disable the TouchWiz as you as you like however, we really do not want to do that. It’s one of the things that we like about it. We just wished it worked a little bit better.
The size is good though. It’s large of course. Having a 3.7 inch display, you can really hide that anywhere but its lightweight enough and slim enough that it felt comfortable in our pocket. It also feels comfortable on the hand. It’s not too wide and then talking on it, it feels good up against the face. One of the things we thought was very odd was the cube interface.
If we go to the start menu, we can access the cube which we also saw on the Jott. It’s great eye candy but it does not have lot of functionality and I am not really sure where it fits it on this device. We guess it is one of those things that Samsung just start look really cool.
In the end, the Omnia is a very cool phone. It serves its purpose. It is one of the better Windows Mobile devices out there and the screen is downright fantastic. However, we just can’t get pass the lag. We cannot save enough but it really takes away from the user’s experience. If Samsung can address this with software updates or more likely move it to Android we think they have much better device.
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