Samsung Omnia - First Impression Part 2

Samsung Omnia - First Impression was never meant to have Part 2 but it does and this is it. I thought that I have expressed everything I could from my first 7 days experience using Samsung Omnia yet I left out some important parts.

Call Quality
Among the mobile phones I had used before, the reception was never good in my room. Normally, I would only get a bar of signal though it seemed to work fine when receiving and making calls. However, if I were to talk longer than 30 or 60 minutes, the call would normally disconnect itself. Sometime during the call duration, the person on the other side could hear not me correctly.

However, since using Samsung Omnia, I get full reception occasionally and the call quality is the best among the mobile phones I have used in my room before.

Battery
I do a lot of installation, browsing and changing of settings and the battery seems to be quite good. The battery indicator does not seem to show the correct charge as whenever I use the USB connection to transfer files, it will charge the mobile phone. Overall, I only need to charge my Samsung Omnia twice in a week.

GPS
I made a wrong comment regarding the GPS in my previous post; Samsung Omnia - First Impression. The GPS took a long time looking for satellite if I were to use it in my room. However, I launched IGO 8 in my car yesterday and it detected the GPS satellite in seconds. I tried to use it to navigate me back to my home but it did not cope well. When I approached a roundabout, it notified me about the roundabout but never told me which exit to go to. Maybe the settings are incorrect but I never intend to use it as a car navigator.

Camera - WDR
There is a WDR setting on the camera and I did not know what it does until I googled for it last night. It stands for Wide Dynamic Range. According to Wikipedia, it is a camera function that is intended to provide clear images even under back light circumstances where intensity of illumination can vary excessively.

Photos available here.

The way it works, a camera is fitted with two CCDs; one high speed CCD and one low speed CCD. The two CCDs take 2 scans of the same image instead of one scan like a typical camera. The image processor will then combine two images to provide one balanced image. It is kind of hard to imagine that Samsung Omnia camera has two CCDs fitted. I might have to do a bit of googling to seek for some proof.

Even though the flash is a bit of disappointment, but this WDR feature seems to be a solution to capture low light photos without the use of flash.

Web
The Opera web browser is good but not the best. Well, Internet Explorer is worst though. The Opera web browser in Samsung Omnia enables me to see any webpages at ease. However, when I try to type emails in Yahoo Mail, it does not allow me to edit the email text box. I can edit the To:, CC: and Subject but not the big content box. Having said that, setting up Yahoo Mail or any other email accounts is relatively easy using the Outlook email function. I do not even have to setup the POP3 and SMTP address. Omnia finds it automatically for me. The problem I am having now is that it does not save the sent messages even though I have enabled the setting.

By KH Tan