12:29 AM
Samsung Omnia II is glossy with a captivating style. There are subtle red gradient on the rear panel of the battery which is hardly visible from the corner, but the red light and views straight. Overall, the phone feels thick and slightly cheaper, with no real metal or soft touch class accent paint except for a small row of buttons below the screen. It is difficult to use the thumb of one hand as you probably will not reach the screen to hit, it may take a little tiny buttons that are still developing in Windows Mobile.
It is a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, but Samsung's TouchWiz interface has been slapped on top of their own. We had never been a fan of TouchWiz, particularly on devices such as smartphones recently Samsung Behold 2. In the second Samsung Omnia, disappointing all the interface design. In the initial screen, widgets jumbled and overlapping each other, and they are difficult to manipulate and slow to respond. The main menu is a grid of icons on the screen a series of moves, but difficult to manage, and the phone is often open a new application swipe think we're really pressing. Even more in the phone, the OS looks rough and somewhat ridiculous. Run menu screen and reject efforts to be dragged into place. Font so big that words can be broken down into its component parts in strange places. Then there was the Cube. Cube does not get their own buttons like the Look 2, but are available from the main screen. It's basically a shortcut menu, but so slow and difficult to manipulate, more eye candy than a shortcut.
You can disable the homescreen TouchWiz and use the new Windows Mobile 6.5 Today screen instead, but made a bad call with the screen in place, and there's no hiding the rest of the layout of TouchWiz. In fact, the phone performed very poorly overall in manipulating the interface. There are options to improve CPU performance on the risk of draining the battery, but this still does not seem to help. The program is very slow to open and sometimes would not close. We have a lot of application crashes. Often, we will press the button on the screen and feel the vibrating haptic feedback to let us know Omnia has registered two hits, but nothing happened. There is a very good task manager to help you switch between open and close the application task that is not necessary, but we would rather have a phone that is better managed.
The screen on the Samsung Omnia II is a 3.7-inch AMOLED screen. Excellent, especially showing pictures and films. This is not responsive to the touch, and we often have to use the stylus, but for reading and interaction of passive, very impressive. The back of the phone is also out on the edge of the curve, providing two mountains at the back so when you hang up, the speakers in the rear are not damped.
Calling and Contacts
Calls on the Samsung Omnia II sounds pretty good. We heard a little static on our side, and our callers reported the sound a bit far, but this is not a lot of problems, and for most of the clean sound. Reception problems, and the phone is often dyed to a bar or less, even when other Verizon Wireless phones we're testing a more powerful signal is maintained. When the reception is low, some calls will not go through.
Batteries are heavy. We have about six hours of talk time out of the phone, which is exactly what Verizon promises. Even with Wi-Fi enabled and is widely used, Samsung Omnia II no problem lasting through a full day.
Samsung Omnia address book in two basic enough for the smartphone business. It synchronize with our Exchange server, but many of the pictures did not come through our contacts. This phone can not sync with other online address books, such as Gmail contact contact us or our Facebook. Other smartphones in this category that begin to offer more integration with these services, especially Imagio new BlackBerry devices such as HTC and BlackBerry Storm 2.
To call feature, the Samsung Omnia II comes full. There are speaker-independent voice dialing, and it worked great in our testing. Phone gets Visual Voicemail from Verizon Wireless, and we are glad to see this prominent feature is practically standard on all handsets for Verizon. Speakerphone raised slightly off the table thanks to the curved design of the phone, but still too quiet for our tastes. We louder upstage a speaker talking about loud car.
Business
As the device is Windows Mobile 6.5, Samsung Omnia II is equipped with some of the best business software in the market. Calendar and scheduling application is one of the few who really benefit from Samsung's interface design, and both look much better on the Samsung Omnia II of the standard, pure WinMo device. In addition to scheduling application, the phone also comes with Office Mobile, so you can create and edit Word and Excel documents anywhere, and even manages a PowerPoint presentation with the device. This phone has a video output capability so you can connect it to a bigger screen if you spring for the optional accessories video cable.
If you're going to do a lot of writing on the phone, Samsung Omnia II keyboard features an exciting new concept. Instead of pressing individual letters, you start from the first letter in the word and drag your finger over the remaining letters. Based on the way you draw, the keyboard will know which word you meant to type, or offer a choice of possibilities. Like most good display screen keyboard, you can even be a few (or many) out of line and the phone still will choose the right option. It sounds unusual, and it took some time getting used to, but it's actually an incredible technology. Swype keyboard proved surprisingly adept at guessing our feedback, and we can enter text very quickly once we understand it. appropriate name and password that unusual problem, but you still can press the letter by letter on the keyboard, or switch to another style entry altogether. We want to see more Swype appear on your smartphone, it certainly has great potential.
If not, the Samsung Omnia II features a good variety of additional business. There are business card scanner, and it works quite well in our tests. That would be easier to fix some mistakes than to enter all the information by hand.
Social Networking
Samsung Omnia II comes with several basic features of Windows Mobile which helps if you want to stay in touch with your social network, but in the end left us a bit confused and wanted more. Ships WinMo phone with a Facebook app on board. This is not a big Facebook portals, it does not offer enough to keep the status update we are really up to date with our friends, but it offers good access to search in one package. There is no support on the board chirp, although Windows Mobile Marketplace available if you want to download 3rd party applications. There are applications in two odd omnia called "Community." It seems to offer one-stop to upload images to various sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and many more. In practice, it was confusing because the term is used in instruction are strange (bad translation),? And our pictures to Flickr just made, we never find us uploaded on Facebook.
To e-mail, Verizon Wireless has packed his own e-mail app with your phone, which is odd because Windows Mobile does a good job with their own Outlook e-mail program. We are stuck with Outlook to our corporate Exchange and our Gmail account. Phone e-mail provided a somewhat larger than we wanted, layout and text are handled poorly in HTML e-mail. However, the large text makes it easier to read, if you do not mind rolling over. Doing a good job handling phone text messages and MMS messages. We can send and receive pictures with difficulty, and grouped in the format of text messages, threaded conversations.
Multimedia
If we had mostly negative so far, Samsung Omnia II almost redeemed himself with an impressive set of multimedia features. The phone is a media powerhouse, and did a great job handling our music and video. We use Windows Media Player to synchronize the 8GB internal memory, and all of our files come through, even our subscription music from our Zune Pass. Some album artwork is mysteriously missing, though. Music player interface that are difficult to interpret, because there are strange key float with no clear indication about what they do. But playing a strong choice, with equalizers, sound and even enhancement features such as loop AB. Music does not sound recorded on the built-in speakers, but Samsung has wisely included a 3.5mm headphone jack, unfortunately placed on the side of the phone, so you can connect your own earbuds.
Video playback just as impressive. Although the phone has a problem with some of our MP4 video files, it chewed up our DivX movies without any problems and all our movies rip looks fantastic in the second Omnia's WVGA, AMOLED display. Colors are dark and moody as excited as bright, and the phone never faltered through a high-action scene. If you have a large library of DivX media and you're looking for a smartphone that can handle your files, which may be the best reason to take the two Samsung Omnia.
If you want to create your own videos, the Samsung Omnia II has a video editor surprisingly strong and sturdy on the board. You can cut the film, making storyboards to plan and organize your movies, and add a soundtrack, all on the phone. This is the most sophisticated video editing software we've seen on a mobile device, and when we play with the software, clearly held a lot of potential for fun editing anywhere.
Cameras and Photo
5-megapixel camera on the Samsung Omnia offers mixed bag, but mostly pretty good. Under ideal lighting, the picture looks clean and fresh, and the colors are bright and accurate. The camera did not blow the red like other cameraphones we've seen, and even if we wanted to focus on macro can get closer, the camera still did a great job capturing details from close range. This interface is also one of the best we've seen in a camera phone. All important controls are available as a touch screen icon in the main camera, and it's easy to choose from a variety of scene modes, scene modes and other options. This camera can shoot panoramas and detect faces, although the smile shutter is not too responsive to our cheesy grins. Some pictures can still be disappointing. Cameras are often overexposed when the onboard flash which lit scenes, and background can be a problem, even including the backlight mode is activated. However, we are pleased with the picture we got, and there is even a decent print, especially useful for the Facebook and online sharing basis.
Samsung Omnia II also comes with a nice photo viewer, and even a slideshow option that acts more like a digital photo frame. From the gallery, it's easy to upload to the site of our favorite photos, though, as we say, Facebook uploads never worked right for us. Best of all, the photo looks fantastic in the second Omnia's screen AMOLED. We want the touchscreen is more responsive to help us flip through our pictures smoothly, but to see that simple did a great job.
Stay Informed
Opera browser on Samsung Omnia II feels like a retreat from the version we saw in the last Omnia device. Browsers do a good job of rendering pages, but we had plenty of problems of navigation and clicking links. At first Omnia, the page will accelerate under our fingers, but the missing features in this version. Browsers will feel less responsive overall. Sometimes, the link will not only work, whether we are tapping our fingers or broken telescoping stylus. At other times, pages loaded very slowly, and give us a little feedback so we wondered whether the browser to work at all.
own homepage we looked good on the mobile browser, but the browser Opera Omnia 2's doing poor job on the text zoom. Often will enlarge too much, then try to change the text size to fit the awkward window. Some improvements to the zoom control is very helpful here.
For keeping up with news and RSS feeds of our favorite, the Samsung Omnia II did a good job, but no good as other devices. Phone's Web browser to get the most basic version of Google Reader, pages stripped down compared with an optimized version you will get on the phone like Apple iPhone or HTC Incredible Droid . The phone comes with an RSS reader myself, but this can not sync with Google Reader feeds us, so we ended up seeing the same story two times if we switch back and forth.
It is a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, but Samsung's TouchWiz interface has been slapped on top of their own. We had never been a fan of TouchWiz, particularly on devices such as smartphones recently Samsung Behold 2. In the second Samsung Omnia, disappointing all the interface design. In the initial screen, widgets jumbled and overlapping each other, and they are difficult to manipulate and slow to respond. The main menu is a grid of icons on the screen a series of moves, but difficult to manage, and the phone is often open a new application swipe think we're really pressing. Even more in the phone, the OS looks rough and somewhat ridiculous. Run menu screen and reject efforts to be dragged into place. Font so big that words can be broken down into its component parts in strange places. Then there was the Cube. Cube does not get their own buttons like the Look 2, but are available from the main screen. It's basically a shortcut menu, but so slow and difficult to manipulate, more eye candy than a shortcut.
You can disable the homescreen TouchWiz and use the new Windows Mobile 6.5 Today screen instead, but made a bad call with the screen in place, and there's no hiding the rest of the layout of TouchWiz. In fact, the phone performed very poorly overall in manipulating the interface. There are options to improve CPU performance on the risk of draining the battery, but this still does not seem to help. The program is very slow to open and sometimes would not close. We have a lot of application crashes. Often, we will press the button on the screen and feel the vibrating haptic feedback to let us know Omnia has registered two hits, but nothing happened. There is a very good task manager to help you switch between open and close the application task that is not necessary, but we would rather have a phone that is better managed.
The screen on the Samsung Omnia II is a 3.7-inch AMOLED screen. Excellent, especially showing pictures and films. This is not responsive to the touch, and we often have to use the stylus, but for reading and interaction of passive, very impressive. The back of the phone is also out on the edge of the curve, providing two mountains at the back so when you hang up, the speakers in the rear are not damped.
Calling and Contacts
Calls on the Samsung Omnia II sounds pretty good. We heard a little static on our side, and our callers reported the sound a bit far, but this is not a lot of problems, and for most of the clean sound. Reception problems, and the phone is often dyed to a bar or less, even when other Verizon Wireless phones we're testing a more powerful signal is maintained. When the reception is low, some calls will not go through.
Batteries are heavy. We have about six hours of talk time out of the phone, which is exactly what Verizon promises. Even with Wi-Fi enabled and is widely used, Samsung Omnia II no problem lasting through a full day.
Samsung Omnia address book in two basic enough for the smartphone business. It synchronize with our Exchange server, but many of the pictures did not come through our contacts. This phone can not sync with other online address books, such as Gmail contact contact us or our Facebook. Other smartphones in this category that begin to offer more integration with these services, especially Imagio new BlackBerry devices such as HTC and BlackBerry Storm 2.
To call feature, the Samsung Omnia II comes full. There are speaker-independent voice dialing, and it worked great in our testing. Phone gets Visual Voicemail from Verizon Wireless, and we are glad to see this prominent feature is practically standard on all handsets for Verizon. Speakerphone raised slightly off the table thanks to the curved design of the phone, but still too quiet for our tastes. We louder upstage a speaker talking about loud car.
Business
As the device is Windows Mobile 6.5, Samsung Omnia II is equipped with some of the best business software in the market. Calendar and scheduling application is one of the few who really benefit from Samsung's interface design, and both look much better on the Samsung Omnia II of the standard, pure WinMo device. In addition to scheduling application, the phone also comes with Office Mobile, so you can create and edit Word and Excel documents anywhere, and even manages a PowerPoint presentation with the device. This phone has a video output capability so you can connect it to a bigger screen if you spring for the optional accessories video cable.
If you're going to do a lot of writing on the phone, Samsung Omnia II keyboard features an exciting new concept. Instead of pressing individual letters, you start from the first letter in the word and drag your finger over the remaining letters. Based on the way you draw, the keyboard will know which word you meant to type, or offer a choice of possibilities. Like most good display screen keyboard, you can even be a few (or many) out of line and the phone still will choose the right option. It sounds unusual, and it took some time getting used to, but it's actually an incredible technology. Swype keyboard proved surprisingly adept at guessing our feedback, and we can enter text very quickly once we understand it. appropriate name and password that unusual problem, but you still can press the letter by letter on the keyboard, or switch to another style entry altogether. We want to see more Swype appear on your smartphone, it certainly has great potential.
If not, the Samsung Omnia II features a good variety of additional business. There are business card scanner, and it works quite well in our tests. That would be easier to fix some mistakes than to enter all the information by hand.
Social Networking
Samsung Omnia II comes with several basic features of Windows Mobile which helps if you want to stay in touch with your social network, but in the end left us a bit confused and wanted more. Ships WinMo phone with a Facebook app on board. This is not a big Facebook portals, it does not offer enough to keep the status update we are really up to date with our friends, but it offers good access to search in one package. There is no support on the board chirp, although Windows Mobile Marketplace available if you want to download 3rd party applications. There are applications in two odd omnia called "Community." It seems to offer one-stop to upload images to various sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and many more. In practice, it was confusing because the term is used in instruction are strange (bad translation),? And our pictures to Flickr just made, we never find us uploaded on Facebook.
To e-mail, Verizon Wireless has packed his own e-mail app with your phone, which is odd because Windows Mobile does a good job with their own Outlook e-mail program. We are stuck with Outlook to our corporate Exchange and our Gmail account. Phone e-mail provided a somewhat larger than we wanted, layout and text are handled poorly in HTML e-mail. However, the large text makes it easier to read, if you do not mind rolling over. Doing a good job handling phone text messages and MMS messages. We can send and receive pictures with difficulty, and grouped in the format of text messages, threaded conversations.
Multimedia
If we had mostly negative so far, Samsung Omnia II almost redeemed himself with an impressive set of multimedia features. The phone is a media powerhouse, and did a great job handling our music and video. We use Windows Media Player to synchronize the 8GB internal memory, and all of our files come through, even our subscription music from our Zune Pass. Some album artwork is mysteriously missing, though. Music player interface that are difficult to interpret, because there are strange key float with no clear indication about what they do. But playing a strong choice, with equalizers, sound and even enhancement features such as loop AB. Music does not sound recorded on the built-in speakers, but Samsung has wisely included a 3.5mm headphone jack, unfortunately placed on the side of the phone, so you can connect your own earbuds.
Video playback just as impressive. Although the phone has a problem with some of our MP4 video files, it chewed up our DivX movies without any problems and all our movies rip looks fantastic in the second Omnia's WVGA, AMOLED display. Colors are dark and moody as excited as bright, and the phone never faltered through a high-action scene. If you have a large library of DivX media and you're looking for a smartphone that can handle your files, which may be the best reason to take the two Samsung Omnia.
If you want to create your own videos, the Samsung Omnia II has a video editor surprisingly strong and sturdy on the board. You can cut the film, making storyboards to plan and organize your movies, and add a soundtrack, all on the phone. This is the most sophisticated video editing software we've seen on a mobile device, and when we play with the software, clearly held a lot of potential for fun editing anywhere.
Cameras and Photo
5-megapixel camera on the Samsung Omnia offers mixed bag, but mostly pretty good. Under ideal lighting, the picture looks clean and fresh, and the colors are bright and accurate. The camera did not blow the red like other cameraphones we've seen, and even if we wanted to focus on macro can get closer, the camera still did a great job capturing details from close range. This interface is also one of the best we've seen in a camera phone. All important controls are available as a touch screen icon in the main camera, and it's easy to choose from a variety of scene modes, scene modes and other options. This camera can shoot panoramas and detect faces, although the smile shutter is not too responsive to our cheesy grins. Some pictures can still be disappointing. Cameras are often overexposed when the onboard flash which lit scenes, and background can be a problem, even including the backlight mode is activated. However, we are pleased with the picture we got, and there is even a decent print, especially useful for the Facebook and online sharing basis.
Samsung Omnia II also comes with a nice photo viewer, and even a slideshow option that acts more like a digital photo frame. From the gallery, it's easy to upload to the site of our favorite photos, though, as we say, Facebook uploads never worked right for us. Best of all, the photo looks fantastic in the second Omnia's screen AMOLED. We want the touchscreen is more responsive to help us flip through our pictures smoothly, but to see that simple did a great job.
Stay Informed
Opera browser on Samsung Omnia II feels like a retreat from the version we saw in the last Omnia device. Browsers do a good job of rendering pages, but we had plenty of problems of navigation and clicking links. At first Omnia, the page will accelerate under our fingers, but the missing features in this version. Browsers will feel less responsive overall. Sometimes, the link will not only work, whether we are tapping our fingers or broken telescoping stylus. At other times, pages loaded very slowly, and give us a little feedback so we wondered whether the browser to work at all.
own homepage we looked good on the mobile browser, but the browser Opera Omnia 2's doing poor job on the text zoom. Often will enlarge too much, then try to change the text size to fit the awkward window. Some improvements to the zoom control is very helpful here.
For keeping up with news and RSS feeds of our favorite, the Samsung Omnia II did a good job, but no good as other devices. Phone's Web browser to get the most basic version of Google Reader, pages stripped down compared with an optimized version you will get on the phone like Apple iPhone or HTC Incredible Droid . The phone comes with an RSS reader myself, but this can not sync with Google Reader feeds us, so we ended up seeing the same story two times if we switch back and forth.
Posted in: Samsung
