Check out our Samsung Omnia review to find out if this Windows Mobile touchscreen phone will be competition for Verizon Wireless' other all-touch smartphones.
Review summary of the Samsung Omnia:
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 The Samsung Omnia is the latest in Samsung's TouchWIZ phones for the U.S. market, and also the most advanced, as that TouchWIZ interface here runs atop Windows Mobile 6.1 instead of a standard carrier OS. This idea of creating an overlay to improve Windows Mobile is all the rage right now, but instead of making things easier, the Samsung Omnia is more confusing and difficult to use. There are a few things this phone does well, including DivX movie playback and Web browsing, courtesy of Opera. But for the most part, there are better all-touch smartphone options for Verizon Wireless. All in all, we think the concept of TouchWIZ on multimedia phones works better than using the widget-based UI to turn a Windows Mobile phone into a multimedia powerhouse. There's no doubt about its potential, but eventually the overall experience left us feeling seriously annoyed. Release: November 2008. Price: $320.
Pros: Good Opera Web browser with cool 'upshifted' navigation. Fine camera with auto focus and loads of pixels.
Cons: TouchWIZ experience disappoints when running atop Windows Mobile. Confusing redundancies in the interface.
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Full review of the Samsung Omnia:
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Hardware Design - Mediocre
The Samsung Omnia is deceptively simple to look at. At first glance, you probably wouldn't notice the optical mouse at the center-bottom of the phone. The phone has few buttons, and it could use a few more, while some of the existing keys need to be remapped. The optical mouse did not make navigating the menus any easier, and added little functionality. The optical mouse button also acts as a select key, but we're curious as to why there needs to be a select key on an all-touch phone. Instead, Samsung should have remembered that Windows Mobile phones need an "OK" button, which also acts to close individual windows and back out of programs.
We liked the fact that a long press of the camera button opens the camera, while our short presses opened the photo slide viewer, though our intuition thinks it should have been the other way around.
Voice dialing is hidden under the "Menu" key on the side, but we like it paired with the "Talk" key. Samsung also includes a dangling stylus charm that hangs off the side of the phone. Definitely too feminine for our taste, and also too clumsy for our spouse, when we insisted she carry the phone around for a day.
The phone's touchscreen was inconsistent in its responsiveness. Sometimes, the phone would give us a haptic twitch, a vibration to let us know it felt our input, but nothing would happen onscreen. We don't just mean that our finger missed the software button. This happened even when we tried to scroll lists, as well. Some apps didn't give us the haptic jolt we were expecting, and in some cases the phone didn't even give us a visual cue when we had made our selection. We simply had to wait and see if anything changed onscreen.
Interface Design - Mediocre
Unfortunately, Samsung's user interface was confusing and inconsistent on the Samsung Omnia. Usually, even if we selected a Samsung app, it was possible to accidentally find ourselves in the WinMo version if we took another path. So, you might find the Samsung Touch Player for media playback, or you might end up in Windows Media Player. You might get the Samsung contact list, or the phone might throw you into the Windows Mobile address book. Additionally, the user interface of our review unit didn't react smoothly to our touch, especially when we were scrolling or selecting items.
Since apps in Windows Mobile tend to be programmed to jump to the last open screen we were viewing, we also found Samsung's own Main Menu to be less attractive. You simply don't start from scratch every time you enter the Menu, which is obviously very annoying at times. So, if we browsed Samsung's "Main Menu," then opened the "Programs" list, the next time we selected "Main Menu," we jumped right back to programs. Clearly not a smart move by Samsung to comply with Microsoft's developer guidelines there, turning a vital part of the TouchWiz system into a dumber version than what's on its feature phones.
The Samsung Omnia uses an accelerometer to switch the screen orientation from portrait to landscape mode when you rotate the phone. You can adjust the sensitivity of the accelerometer, and also choose between a selection of cool-looking transitions. So, instead of simply blinking in and out of portrait or landscape, the screen can do flips and twirls and perform all sorts of visual tricks. We think both of these options need adjusting out of the box. By default, the phone would switch orientation when we leaned slightly to one side, and then it took no less than four seconds, every time, to switch the orientation. That's a lot of time, especially when we didn't mean to make the switch.
Calling - Good
Calls on our Samsung Omnia review unit sounded very good when reception was strong, but we had reception trouble on this phone. When we got 2 bars of service or less, voice quality took a turn for the worse. At best, calls sounded bright and clean. At worst, calls dropped into a digital-sounding fuzz, and callers reported trouble understanding us.
The Samsung Omnia doesn't get the cool-looking calling screens of the Samsung Eternity. Though it was still an improvement over the standard WinMo stock, we found advanced calling features to be a hassle. For instance, when you make a second call for a 3-way conversation, you join the calls by pressing the "Talk" button. The whole purpose of a touchscreen phone is to have adaptable buttons onscreen, so we wonder why this button, or some other one, couldn't change to say "Join" or "Swap," as it does on nearly every worthwhile touchscreen phone we've seen.
The phone gets a capacious 1440 mAh battery, which Samsung promises will offer 10 hours of talk time. Of course, it's easy to get occupied with Wi-Fi browsing or other multimedia activities on the Samsung Omnia, which drains the power quickly. In a full weekend of testing, the phone ran out of juice every day, and we had to charge it at night before bed.
As with many of the phone's features, there is a standard Windows Mobile contact list and a nicer-looking Samsung version. If Samsung had put the two together they would have had something useful. The WinMo version scrolls nicely, while the Samsung version is jerky and unresponsive to flick-scrolling. The Samsung version has a sidebar tab that lets you jump to a specific letter quickly, while the WinMo version does not. The worst offense among both of these, though, is that the contact search field is obscured by the onscreen keyboard.
Messaging - Good
The Samsung Omnia gets the standard Windows Mobile SMS and MMS client, as well as the standard Outlook e-mail apps. These worked fine, as Windows Mobile is a solid performer. However, when we were typing a name to search for a contact, there was not enough room left on screen to see the results. We had to keep closing the keyboard and re-opening it to check our progress periodically. Still, we like that Windows Mobile handles HTML e-mails nicely.
For instant messaging, the phone gets the archaic Mobile IM client found on the lowliest of Verizon Wireless phones. There is support for AIM, Windows Live and Yahoo, but that's it, and the client looks pretty Spartan. We had some lag in our IM conversations; some messages took a few minutes to arrive, but they always got there eventually.
The onscreen keyboards on our Samsung Omnia review unit were responsive enough, but we still had plenty of trouble typing on the phone. The phone didn't call up the keyboard every time we tapped a text field, we often had to press another icon to get it to appear. Then, when it did appear, it was usually set to the wrong mode. The phone would be in numeric mode when we were typing a text message. Or, even worse, it would be in XT9 auto-complete mode at inappropriate times, like when we were entering our Yahoo IM screen name.
Multimedia - Good
On paper, the Samsung Omnia seems like a multimedia powerhouse. The phone comes packed with 8GB of internal storage, and can accept microSDHC cards as well to double or possible triple that capacity. The music player is an enhanced Samsung Touch Player, with larger buttons that are easier to press than the standard Windows Mobile stuff. It's also one of the few U.S. phones with DivX playback capabilities. Even with all of these features, the multimedia apps suffer from the same navigation problems we found on the rest of the phone.
The music player was simple and bare. It synchronized with our Windows Media library, but most of our album artwork didn't make the sync, for whatever reason. We had little luck with video playback, as well. DivX files played smoothly and scaled properly to the phone's unusually-sized 400 by 240 pixel screen, but we couldn't get any other movies to play properly. Some MP4 files made an appearance on screen, but looked squiggly and jerky, like watching a cable television channel that you aren't supposed to receive.
Scheduling and Productivity - Good
The Samsung Omnia gets the standard Windows Mobile kit for productivity and calendar apps, which is a good thing, but Samsung's TouchWIZ interface tries hard to make things difficult. If you're obsessed with time, the Samsung Omnia has plenty of clock-based widgets to clutter up the narrow home screen. If you want to see today's appointments at a glance, you'll have to do some clicking. There is a tiny event viewer widget, but it just didn't provide enough useful information. This is strange, because most Windows Mobile overlays, like HTC's TouchFLO 3D and Sony Ericsson's Panels, and even the unfortified Windows Mobile 6.1 itself, make the day's appointments easy to view at a glance. The phone will obviously notify you on schedule, but won't give you a broader view unless you ask nicely.
For productivity, the phone gets the professional-strength Office Mobile apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. We had no trouble creating new Word documents or viewing Excel spreadsheets on the phone. Navigating spreadsheets was tough, as the optical mouse was little help among our mass of cells. In addition to these apps, the phone also gets a business card reader. In our tests, the reader wasn't the most accurate we've seen, but did manage to extract 60 - 75% of the correct information from a card.
Camera - Good
The Samsung Omnia had a pretty good camera, which is nice, considering the impressive hardware. The phone has a 5-megapixel sensor with auto focus, and the camera supports a variety of scene modes and shooting modes, including panorama and smile detection, as well as scene modes for sports, fall color and fireworks pics. In our tests, the camera performed admirably under the best, brightest conditions. Occasionally pics would lack balance, blowing out the bright spots into a white mass, but colors were still pretty good, if not over-saturated. When the going got tough, though, the detail took a hike and we got some very blurry or noisy pics. Also, we found the smile detection to be too sluggish to be useful, and the panorama mode was a complete bust.
Long hallway
Perhaps because the center focal point was so distant, we could never get a clear, focused shot of this long hallway. The red tiles on the wall were also washed out to a brownish color. A disappointing start.
Times Square
This Times Square shot is actually not bad. Detail is okay, though the sky is completely blown out, and some of that extra light is corrupting the buildings around it. Still, the camera did a nice job with all the colors, and there's even plenty of detail tucked away. A bit noisier in the dark spots, though.
Times Square panorama
This photo is completely unrecognizable as a panorama shot. To take a panorama, you take the first shot then sweep the camera to one side. It is supposed to automatically take the shots at the correct point, then stitch them together. Even in tame environments with little movement, we never saw a successful panorama from this camera.
Winter Cabbage
The winter cabbage looks rich and colorful. Perhaps too colorful, but since we're fans of purple and deep reds, we'll let it slide.
Self-portrait
The camera catches a nice amount of detail here. Lining up the shot wasn't easy, and we were often on the periphery of the photo. But the camera kept us in focus, and even created a nice depth-of-field effect behind us. Detail is fine enough that you can see our pooch at the end of her leash reflected in our sunglasses.
Close-up figurine
The colors here are nice and accurate, and even the pink isn't too, well, pink. Interestingly, while the top of the figurine seems a little blurry, the camera has nicely captured the texture of the reflective backdrop in our light tent at the figurine's feet.
eBay shot
The camera captures loads of detail here, perhaps too much detail, as it reveals all the wear-and-tear on this action figure card. All the tiny numbers are perfectly legible, and the orange and red explosion are kept nicely in check. Like we said, good lighting produces good results in this camera.
Web browsing - Very good
The Samsung Omnia is the latest phone we've seen using the Opera mobile browser version 9.5. It's a very nice looking browser, and the Omnia has a neat trick to make navigation even easier. While scrolling was an issue in every other app on this phone, the Opera browser doesn't use a 1:1 scrolling ratio. When you move your finger across the screen, the screen itself 'upshifts' your action into an accelerated scroll. So, with a simple swipe, you can move from the top to the bottom of even long Web pages. The browser is also plenty responsive, so this scrolling action felt smooth and accurate in our tests.
The Samsung Omnia is one of the few Verizon Wireless phones to ever use Wi-Fi, as the carrier seems somehow averse to the feature. Unfortunately, we found the Wi-Fi feature to be buggy on this phone. It worked at first, but then, when we tried to activate Wi-Fi, we were informed that Shozu, a media-uploading app that we had yet to try, had crashed. Oh, and no Wi-Fi. Even more strange, the Wi-Fi settings panel took us to an advanced networking card setup, and not the standard network choosing screen. We restored the function with a hard reset, but this was a supreme hassle, since it erased all our e-mail and server settings and erased our media. Perhaps this is why Verizon Wireless has been avoiding Wi-Fi?
Price and availability
The Samsung Omnia is available now from Verizon Wireless, selling for $320 with a two-year contract. A $70 mail-in rebate is given when signing up for a qualifying plan.
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We'll start off 2009 with live coverage of Macworld and CES:
Macworld 2009, Jan 5 - 6
CES 2009, Jan 7 - 11
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