Samsung I8910 Omnia HD: A Review

Samsung has always been known to push the limits with its products, especially with mobile phones. The world has been exposed to some fantastic mobile phones from Samsung in recent years, the more famous being the Samsung Star and the Samsung Omnia. Oh ya, the Samsung Omnia and that's where Samsung has gone ahead and created an even better product this time around. The new phone could well be titled something else but I guess Samsung simply wanted to carry over the legacy of the Omnia. The Omnia HD comes with a whopping 8 MP camera, a 3.7 AMOLED screen and the latest Symbian release. And if that was not enough, Samsung has revamped the entire hardware as well. The phone is now powered by a powerful ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz and a built in 3d Graphics accelerator.

Don't think of this phone as an upgrade to the Omnia because it isn't. My guess is, the marketing guys at Samsung were just too lazy to find a new name.

The Basics:
Design and Display:
A slim body packed in a chrome black body, the Omnia HD is a pleasure to work with. Though a bit heavy at 148 Gms, the phone will still be on the wish list of every geek. The front of the phone is operated by the large 3.7 inch AMOLED capacitive touch screen with only three buttons at the bottom: the call buttons and a shortcut for menu. The rest of the buttons like the volume control, screen lock and camera key find their place at the side of the phone.

The screen is the center of attraction for the phone with a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels and supports 16 million colors. Being capacitive, the screen can be navigated through with just the fingers; no plectrum and no stylus needed. But the engineers at Samsung have gone ahead and made the screen scratchproof anyways to prevent even nail scratching. The Symbian OS v9.4 Series 60 rel. 5 coupled with Samsung's TouchWiz technology makes navigation a real pleasure. The TouchWiz technology also lets you configure your home screen and customize it with widgets.

An accelerometer had been provided to automatically rotate the screen and a proximity sensor ensures the phone automatically turns off.

Multimedia:
Camera:
The phone comes with a great 8 MP camera with every feature one would look for in a professional camera. The list of features is almost endless with some of the prominent features of the phone are camera button, manual touch focus, auto focus for crisper pictures, smile and blink detection, image stabilization and digital zoom, exposure compensation, white balance, sharpness and contrast. Additionally a LED flash has also been provided to brighten up dull environments while shooting pictures. Shooting modes ensure you have the best pictures possible for different ranges and surroundings.

The camera can also be used to excellent quality videos with the screen acting as the viewfinder and the LED flash acting as the video light. A very interesting feature of the camera is its ability to shoot slow motion video as well as in time lapse modes.

A smaller secondary camera is also provided to enable video calling.

Media player:
Samsung has packed a great music player into the Omnia HD which is capable of handling almost all the available music formats. The music library is automatically sorted by artist, album and genre and is also search enabled. Create your own play lists or customize the equalizers to get a better control of your music. Album art and advanced visualization support complement the music player's audio abilities.

The high resolution wide screen, the powerful processor working with the graphics card and the fantastic built in video player takes the video watching experience to an entirely new level. The player supports all popular video formats including DivX and XviD.

All audio is processed through Samsung's DNSe Sound processing engine which is complemented by the 5.1 channel Dolby surround sound.

Organizer and email:
The phone comes with a fully functional organizer with a built in calendar for planning your days in advance and adding tasks.

As for email, it's should suffice to say, the phone supports every form of email, from web mail to enterprise email. Configure your POP email to appear as a push on your screen every time you get a new mail.

Specifications:
Display: 3.7 inch AMOLED capacitive touch screen with support for 16M colors and resolution of 360 x 640 pixels.
Dimensions: 123 x 59 x 12.9 mm
Weight: 148 Gms.
Camera:Main camera - 8 MP, 3264x2448 pixels, touch focus, auto focus, LED flash, shooting modes, geo tagging, smile detection, blink detection and image stabilization.
Second camera - CIF video call camera.
Audio: MP3/WMA/WAV/RA/AAC/M4A.
Video: AVI (DivX/XviD)/WMV/RV/MP4/3GP.
Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email.
Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP, USB, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, DLNA.
Internet: EDGE, GPRS, 3G HSDPA, HSDSC, Opera 9.5, RSS reader.
Games: Regular and motion based games built in and downloadable.
Memory: 256 MB internal and 8GB/16GB storage with support for microSD memory up to 32 GB.
Battery: Standard battery, Li-Ion 1500 mAh with standby time of 450 h and talk time of 6 h 30 min
Extras:
* A-GPS.
* built in picture and video editor.
* FM Radio with RDS.
* 3.5 mm audio jack
* Organizer with local calendar.
* Both enterprise and web email support. Push email.
* Document viewer (Word, excel, PowerPoint, PDF).
* TV out.
* Digital compass.
* Push to talk.
* Accelerometer and proximity sensor.
* Picture gallery.