Samsung and Verizon Wireless follow up the popular Omnia with a new tablet running Windows Mobile 6.5. Check it out in our Samsung Omnia 2 review.
Review summary of the Samsung Omnia 2:
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 The Samsung Omnia 2 is an impressive phone on paper. It packs some great features, so in theory it should be a top notch business phone with a lot of multimedia power thrown in. DiVX playback, for instance, is still unheard of on most phones, and movies looked great on the Omnia 2's AMOLED screen. But Samsung has gone so wrong with the interface that it's difficult and frustrating to use, and impossible to enjoy. The TouchWiz interface is just horrible, a hodgepodge of problems and ugly interface decisions that make the phone look unpolished and unprofessional. Plus, the Samsung Omnia 2 suffered from performance problems that made the interface sluggish, and the resistive touchscreen often failed to register our touch. It even had trouble when we broke out the included stylus. It isn't all bad. The Omnia 2 has fast networking and good call quality with a large battery. It uses Opera's Web browser, which is a capable client, and its the first phone we've used with a Swype keyboard, a surprisingly quick and fascinating keyboard design that we'd like to see on other (better) phones. But none of that matters because the interface design is ugly at best and unusable at worst. If you're a complete DiVX addict, the Samsung Omnia 2 can get the job done, but most buyers looking for a business tablet with a cool interface and good multimedia features would be much better served by the HTC Imagio, a phone that hits the target where the Samsung Omnia 2 misses the mark. Release: December 2009. Price: $50.
Pros: Solid features, including DiVX playback, 5-megapixel camera and more. Colorful AMOLED screen.
Cons: Unresponsive touchscreen coupled with a poorly designed interface make using the phone a hassle. Poor performance, even in High power CPU mode.
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72%
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Full Samsung Omnia 2 Review:
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Look and Feel Mediocre
The Samsung Omnia 2 on Verizon Wireless is a glossy tablet phone with a style that's reminiscent of the company's Touch of Color LCD TV's. There's a subtle red gradient on the back battery panel that hardly visible from an angle, but bright and red viewed straight on. Overall, the phone feels thick and somewhat cheap, with no real metal or classy soft touch paint accents except the small row of buttons beneath the screen. It's difficult to use one-handed as your thumb probably won't reach across the screen to hit the necessary, somewhat tiny buttons that still flourish in Windows Mobile.
This is a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, but Samsung has slapped their own TouchWiz interface on top. We've never been fans of TouchWiz, especially on smartphone devices like the recent Samsung Behold 2. On the Samsung Omnia 2, the interface design is a disappointment all around. On the home screen, widgets jumble and overlap each other, and they're difficult to manipulate and slow to respond. The main menu is a grid of icons on a series of moveable screens, but it's difficult to manage, and the phone would often open a new app thinking our swipe was actually a tap. Even deeper into the phone, the OS seems unpolished and somewhat goofy. Menus run off the screen and resist efforts to be dragged into place. Fonts are so large that words get broken into parts in strange places. Then there's the Cube. The Cube doesn't get its own button like on the Behold 2, but it's available from the home screen. It's basically a shortcut menu, but its so sluggish and difficult to manipulate, it's more eye candy than shortcut.
You can turn off the TouchWiz homescreen and use the new Windows Mobile 6.5 Today screen instead, but the phone performed poorly with this screen in place, and there's no hiding the rest of the TouchWiz layout. In fact, the phone performed very poorly overall in manipulating the interface. There's an option to boost the CPU performance at the risk of draining battery, but this still didn't seem to help. Programs were very slow to open and occasionally unwilling to close. We had plenty of application crashes. Often we would press a button onscreen and feel the vibrating haptic feedback to let us know the Omnia 2 had registered the hit, but nothing happened. There's a very nice task manager to help you switch between open tasks and close unnecessary apps, but we'd rather have a phone that managed itself better.
The screen on the Samsung Omnia 2 is a 3.7-inch AMOLED display. It looks great, especially showing pictures and movies. It wasn't responsive to the touch, and we often had to use the stylus, but for reading and passive interaction, it was very impressive. The back of the phone also curves out at the edges, providing two ridges on the back so that when you put the phone down, the speakers on the back aren't muffled.
Calling and Contacts Good
Calls on the Samsung Omnia 2 sounded pretty good. We heard a bit of static on our end, and our callers reported a slightly distant sound, but this wasn't much of a problem, and for the most part voices sounded clean. Reception was a problem, and the phone often dipped to 1 bar or less, even while other Verizon Wireless phones we're testing maintained a stronger signal. When reception was that low, some calls would not go through.
Battery life was solid. We got about 6 hours of talking time out of the phone, which is exactly what Verizon promises. Even with Wi-Fi turned on and plenty of use, the Samsung Omnia 2 had no trouble lasting through a full day.
The address book on the Samsung Omnia 2 was fairly basic for a business smartphone. It synchronized with our Exchange server, but many of our contact's pictures didn't come through. The phone isn't able to sync with other online address books, like our Gmail contacts or our Facebook contacts. Other smartphones in this category are starting to offer more integration with these services, especially the HTC Imagio and new BlackBerry devices like the BlackBerry Storm 2.
For calling features, the Samsung Omnia 2 comes fully loaded. There's speaker-independent voice dialing, and this worked great in our tests. The phone gets Visual Voicemail from Verizon Wireless, and we're pleased to see this standout feature is practically standard on all of Verizon's top handsets. The speakerphone is lifted slightly off the table thanks to the phone's curved design, but it was still too quiet for our tastes. We prefer an abusively loud speaker to talk over loud car noises.
Business Very Good
As a Windows Mobile 6.5 device, the Samsung Omnia 2 comes with some of the best business software on the market. The calendar and scheduling apps are among the few that actually benefit from Samsung's interface designs, and both look much better on the Samsung Omnia 2 than on a standard, unadulterated WinMo device. Besides the scheduling apps, the phone also comes with Office Mobile, so you can create and edit Word and Excel documents on the go, and even manage a PowerPoint presentation with the device. The phone has video output capabilities so you can connect it to a larger display if you spring for the optional video cable accessory.
If you're going to be doing a lot of writing on the phone, the Samsung Omnia 2 features a fascinating new keyboard concept. Instead of tapping individual letters, you start at the first letter in a word and drag your finger over the rest of the letters. Based on the path you draw, the keyboard will figure out which word you meant to type, or offer a selection of possibilities. As with most onscreen good onscreen keyboards, you can even be a little (or a lot) off track and the phone will still pick the right choice. It sounds unusual, and it took some time to get used to, but it's actually an amazing technology. The Swype keyboard proved surprisingly adept at guessing our input, and we were able to enter text very quickly once we got the hang of it. Proper names and unusual passwords were a problem, but you can still tap letter by letter on the keyboard, or switch to another entry style altogether. We'd like to see Swype show up on more smartphones, it definitely has great potential.
Otherwise, the Samsung Omnia 2 features a nice assortment of business extras. There's a business card scanner, and this worked fairly well in our tests. It was certainly more convenient to correct a few errors than to enter all the information by hand.
Social Networking Good
The Samsung Omnia 2 comes with some basic Windows Mobile features that help out if you want to keep in touch with your social networks, but in the end it left us a bit confused and wanting more. The phone ships with the WinMo Facebook app on board. It's not a great Facebook portal, it didn't offer enough status updates to keep us completely up to date with our friends, but it did offer access in a nice looking package. There's no Twitter support on board, though the Windows Mobile Marketplace is available if you want to download a 3rd party app. There is a strange app on the Omnia 2 called "Communities." It seems to offer one-stop uploading for pictures to various sites like Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and more. In practice, it was confusing as it used strange terminology in its instructions (bad translation?), and our photos only made it to Flickr, we never found our uploads on Facebook.
For e-mail, Verizon Wireless has packaged their own e-mail app with the phone, which is strange because Windows Mobile does a fine job with its own Outlook e-mail program. We stuck with Outlook for our corporate Exchange and our Gmail accounts. The phone rendered e-mails somewhat larger than we'd like, and text layout was handled poorly in HTML e-mails. Still, the large text made it easier to read, if you don't mind more scrolling. The phone did a fine job handling text messages and MMS messages. We could send and receive pictures with no trouble, and text messages were grouped in a threaded, conversational format.
Multimedia Very Good
If we've been mostly negative so far, the Samsung Omnia 2 almost redeems itself with an impressive multimedia feature set. The phone is a media powerhouse, and it did a great job handling our music and videos. We used Windows Media Player to synchronize the 8GB of internal memory, and all our files came through, even our subscription music from our Zune Pass. Some album artwork was mysteriously absent, though. The music player interface was tough to interpret, as there are strange buttons floating with no clear indication of what they do. But the playback options are powerful, with equalizers, sound enhancements and even features like A-B looping. Music didn't sound noteworthy on the built-in speaker, but Samsung has wisely included a 3.5mm headphone jack, placed unfortunately on the side of the phone, so you can plug in your own earbuds.
Video playback was just as impressive. Though the phone had some trouble with some of our MP4 video files, it chewed up our DiVX movies with no trouble and all our ripped films looked fantastic on the Omnia 2's WVGA, AMOLED screen. Colors were moody when dark and vibrant when bright, and the phone never stuttered through high action scenes. If you have a large library of DiVX media and you're looking for a smartphone that can handle your files, that might be the best reason to pick up a Samsung Omnia 2.
If you want to create your own videos, the Samsung Omnia 2 has a surprisingly robust and powerful video editor on board. You can slice up movies, create a storyboard to plan out and organize your film, and add soundtracks, all on the phone. It's the most advanced video editing software we've seen on a mobile device, and in our time playing with the software, it clearly held a lot of potential for fun editing on the go.
Camera and Photos Very Good
The 5-megapixel camera on the Samsung Omnia offered a mixed bag, but it was mostly pretty good. Under ideal lighting, images looked clean and crisp, and colors were bright and accurate. The camera didn't blow out reds like other cameraphones we've seen, and though we wish the macro focus could have gotten closer, the camera still did a great job capturing fine details at short range. The interface is also one of the best we've seen on a cameraphone. All of the important controls are available as touch icons on the main camera screen, and it was easy to select from a variety of scene modes, shooting modes and other options. The camera can shoot panoramas and detect faces, though the smile shutter wasn't very responsive to our cheesy grins. Some images could still disappoint. The camera often overexposed when its onboard flash lit the scene, and backlight could be a problem, even with the included Backlight mode turned on. Still, we were pleased with the images we got, and some were even print-worthy, let alone useful for Facebook and basic online sharing. Check out our image samples below.
Pink Flowers
Colorful Toys
Palm Fronds
Palm Fibers Close Up
eBay Shot
Nerd Cubby
Clock Close Up
Interrupted Self Portrait Indoors
Self Portrait with Face Recognition
Self Portrait, Flash Only
Living Room Panorama
The Samsung Omnia 2 also comes with a nice photo viewer, and even a slideshow option that acts more like a digital photo frame. From the gallery, it was easy to upload to our favorite photo sites, though as we said, Facebook uploading never worked right for us. Best of all, images look fantastic on the Omnia 2's AMOLED screen. We wish the touchscreen was more responsive to help us flick through our images smoothly, but for simple viewing it did a great job.
Staying Informed - Good
The Opera browser on the Samsung Omnia 2 feels like a step down from the version we saw on the last Omnia device. The browser did a fine job rendering pages, but we had loads of trouble navigating and clicking on links. On the first Omnia, pages would accelerate under our finger, but that feature is gone on this version. The browser feels less responsive overall. Sometimes, links simply would not work, whether we tapped with our finger or broke out the telescoping stylus. Other times, pages loaded very slowly, and gave us little feedback so we were left wondering if the browser was working at all.
Our own homepage looked good on the mobile browser, but the Omnia 2's Opera browser did a poor job zooming in on text. It would often zoom in too far, then try to resize text awkwardly to fit the window. Some fine-tuned zoom control would have helped here immensely.
For keeping up with the news and our favorite RSS feeds, the Samsung Omnia 2 did a fine job, but wasn't as adept as other devices. The phone's Web browser gets the most basic version of Google Reader, a stripped down page compared to the optimized version you'll get on phones like the Apple iPhone 3GS or HTC Droid Eris. The phone comes with its own RSS reader app, but this couldn't sync with our Google Reader feeds, so we ended up seeing the same stories twice if we switched back and forth.
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