Samsung Omnia i900: Too little too soon

Image courtesy: Alibaba.com

End-user impression of the i900

1. Hardware: Easy to handle lightweight candybar body with responsive buttons and a big screen. Don’t let the big screen fool you because the resolution isn’t the sharpest. Could have really done with a decent VGA at least. The screen, in comparison to HTC Touch pro is much more responsive. The clunky text (as a result of the resolution) and low color depth makes up for it though. The camera is decent enough to take a “mobile” picture. Video capture works at 640×480 resolution but given the 400×240 resolution it’s scaled down during playback. The stylus hangs outside of the body and looks like a half-pen. Could have really done with some smarts there.

2. Software: Works off the standard WinMo 6.1 pro. The omnia sports a neat phonebook, FM tuner, smart reader (scanner), quick settings, unit converter, “touch” player, streaming media player, and a widget based “today” screen item. By the looks of it samsung hasn’t put in a lot of work integrating the “utility screens” with the device. The online widgets assume network connection availability and for the size of the screen do little to help. Another today screen layout is very iPhone-like and yet another one that delivers the bare minimum. I tried using the SPB mobile shell which completely transforms the phone with some intuitive eye-candy. Auto screen rotation works as expected i.e. the layout changes each time the screen is rotated as opposed to working only with certain apps.

The overall picture: Not the best phone to have if you’re spending money (I picked mine up for free on a contract). Might as well put in a little extra cash and get something worthwhile like an HTC Touch HD. Everything about the device screams “… just get the beta out to market and we’ll work on it from there …” and truly so, Koreans are enjoying a high resolution version of the Omnia. At the end of the day its still a windows mobile 6.1 phone, the OS itself wasn’t designed for finger-touch so you’ll be left pulling out that ugly stylus or pushing into the screen with your nail or worse still picking on corners with anything sharp.