The Omnia II serves as a nice bridge for first-time smartphone users. Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface makes customizing the home screen easy, but it feels too sluggish and shouldn’t be placed on a smartphone. For $199, the Omnia II has a rich feature set, but you’d be better served by a number of other devices in Verizon Wireless’ portfolio.
The Omnia II measures 4.7 x 2.3 x .5 inches and weighs 4.7 ounces. That’s a bit larger than the original Omnia which measured 4.4 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches but a bit taller and narrower than the 4.6 x 2.4 x 0.5 inches Motorola Droid, Verizon Wireless’ current top-of-the-line handset
In the hand, the Omnia II looks and feels like a premium smart phone. It’s light and feels comfortable when held up to the face for talking on the phone. Its front face is relatively simple. There’s a large and beautiful resistive 3.7-inch 800×480 resolution AMOLED display. Despite Samsung’s claims that the display offers better resistive feedback, I found that it still had to be calibrated out of the box and that I still prefer capacitive screens for their ease of use. Below the screen there are Send/End keys and a central faceted gemstone looking button for accessing the phone’s main menu. Volume keys, an ‘OK’ button, and a 3.5mm headphone jack are on the left side of the phone, there’s a stylus on the top right, and the camera quick launch key, microUSB charging port, and screen-lock button are on the right side of the Omnia II. The black back cover has a unique and stylish red design that makes the rear of the phone look like it’s glowing. There are also two speakers and a 5MP camera with a single LED flash.
The Omnia II is Samsung’s first phone to run its new TouchWiz 2.0 user interface that covers about 90-percent of the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. TouchWiz 2.0 provides three different home screens to customize with widgets, that can be stored on a left sidebar tray and bought from Samsung’s new widget marketplace. (All widgets, for now, are free and the selection is minimal). TouchWiz 2.0 makes the phone feel like a feature phone; menus are colorful and text is large. Also, there’s less digging to get to what you need; simply click the center button to view all of your applications. Unlike Windows Mobile 6.5, you can actually customize where the icons sit, so that your most used ones are on the first screen. The ease of use is a good thing for first-comers to the smartphone game, but Windows Mobile old timers may prefer the standard Windows Mobile 6.5 user interface.
On the bottom of the home screen there are four touch sensitive buttons to quickly access your incoming SMS/MMS messages, e-mails, missed calls, and Verizon Wireless’ Visual Voicemail service. Samsung added an excellent addition to the top-right taskbar on the homesceen; when you click it, a small menu with larger versions of the signal strength, battery life, and messages, pops up so that it’s easier to tap one with a finger instead of trying to poke it deliberately.
My biggest gripe with the user interface is that it’s still slow despite the phone’s 800Mhz processor. I frequently saw the colorful spin-wheel that told us the phone was still processing a request. Also, when I flicked through the various home screens that were loaded with widgets, I noticed that it took a second or two for all of them to load, which is a problem we don’t often see on Android devices. To eliminate a bit of the sluggishness, Samsung did include a handy Task Switcher inside the main menu, which makes closing programs a breeze.
The Omnia II has a unique keyboard that uses Swype technology, and it’s the first phone in the United States to offer it. While you can tap-type on both of the fairly good landscape and horizontal keyboards, I actually found myself typing faster using Swype. Here’s how it works: simply slide your finger from one letter to the next to spell out a word, then lift your hand, and start swyping out the next word. The software automatically puts a space in every time you lift your finger, which is useful, but a pain when you’re trying to type out web addresses. It learns, too: as you type out words that you use frequently, it will begin to use them as a default. If Swype doesn’t understand a word, you can choose from a host of words that it does recognize instead.
As a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone at its heart, the Omnia II has native support for full Microsoft Exchange which lets you sync with your work e-mail, calendar entries, and contacts. If you aren’t an Exchange user, you can setup your own IMAP/POP accounts using the e-mail setup wizard. I setup a work account in about five minutes, and if you use GMail, Yahoo, or dozens of other popular accounts, it will automatically pull the correct settings in for you so you don’t have to fumble with server addresses.
E-mail attachment support is rather robust thanks to the preinstalled MS Word Mobile, MS Excel Mobile, MS Power Point Mobile, and Adobe Reader LE applications. The Microsoft Excel and Word apps let you edit and create new documents.
Mobile IM support is rather upsetting for a smart phone. AIM, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo can be accessed through Verizon Wireless’ Mobile IM client, but it’s more of a feature phone experience than a true smartphone one. I suggest downloading BeeJive IM or Palringo for a more robust chat experience that can also combine multiple accounts into one buddy list.
Opera Mobile 9.5 is the default web browser on the Omnia II, and I prefer it over Internet Explorer Mobile because it renders web sites better and has an easier menu system to navigate. You can zoom in one handed by holding your finger down and moving it up (to zoom in) or back (to zoom out), and I found this feature to be useful when I wanted to quickly pan around and view articles on large HTML pages without having to use two hands. Multi-touch pinching and pulling, however, is a speedier and better form of zooming. Panning around the page was fluid and there wasn’t much lag or reloading. The Omnia II also supports 802.11b/g Wi-Fi networks.
The Omnia II is a powerful multimedia device with DLNA support for outputting video wirelessly to TVs, DiVX movie playback support, and fairly good speakers. I played Pearl Jam’s Daughter and found the audio to be clear and fluid but noticed that it was hard to hear Eddie Vedder’s vocals. Samsung created a special divot on the back of the phone to help amplify the music when it’s placed with the speakers facing down on a desk. I noticed this helped improve the audio quality a bit. Also, Samsung included an etiquette feature that automatically turns off the music when you place the phone face down. A hip-hop video streamed from YouTube by Drake looked awful when blown to full screen, but audio came through crystal clear. The image library looked excellent, however, and home movies were top notch.
The Omnia II comes with a handful of applications and widgets, including Bing, Facebook, Microsoft My Phone, a podcast player, and an RSS reader. However, there are a few hundred more available in Microsoft’s Marketplace. That’s not much considering there are thousands available for BlackBerry and Android phones and over 100,000 available for the iPhone.
I found the Omnia II’s 5 megapixel camera to be satisfactory. Shots taken outdoors were crisp and colors were represented well. But indoors, the flash flooded some images with too much white balance, so I found that I had to often retake shots. The video camera’s quality was more than YouTube worthy but when I played the clips back on the computer I noticed some noise in the image. Also I thought it odd that the flash remained on while shooting video, so be sure to have a charger nearby for longer clips.
During the testing period in New York City, I was surprised to see the reception drop to just two bars in a lot of areas. Most of the Verizon Wireless devices I test report a full signal around New York City, for the most part. However, I didn’t notice any drops in call quality during testing and all calls came through loud and clear. Also, despite the fact that the phone was reporting just 3 bars, the 3G speeds averaged 1021kbps, which is quick.
The Omnia II got about a day of battery life under heavy usage where I checked my e-mail at least once an hour, browsed the web, and placed phone calls.
The Omnia II isn’t a bad phone, but its Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system feels a bit stale. Windows Mobile fans will appreciate its innovative Swype text input, which is a fun and accurate way to enter in text on the phone. Its camera is decent, but not amazing, and at the end of the day it placed great phone calls and had solid data speeds. A multi-touch screen, zippier browser, and an improved TouchWiz user interface that’s closer in design to HTC’s Sense would make this a much more improved device. For $199 on Verizon Wireless, I suggest you check out the Motorola Droid or HTC Touch Pro 2, which both offer a gamut of customization options that will better suit your needs
No comments:
Post a Comment