Samsung I900 Omnia – Windows Touch on Samsung

Samsung i900 Omnia feels solid with chrome and black casing. The display is flush mounted which means that the screen will not be messed up by fingerprints, which is one of the disadvantages in most of the touch-screen phones. The display is 3.2 inches large and offers good 240 x 400 pixel resolution. Omnia provides a nice touch feedback when you touch the screen. It vibrates shortly to confirm every key press. Unfortunately, this feedback doesn’t always mean your key press was actually accepted and the command is executed.

The display screen is sufficiently bright for most situations and can be set to automatically adjust its brightness based on the amount of ambient light available to save power. The Samsung Omnia Mobile is designed with minimalistic looks hence it has only call & end keys and the optical mouse below the display.

The optical mouse controller has two modes. One is the regular touchpad mode; it can be used in a fashion similar to D-Pad. It allows the user to swipe the finger across in one of the four cardinal directions to move up, down, left or right. Sometimes a fast swipe will cause Omnia to scroll quickly and is somewhat uncontrollable.

The other mode of control is the mouse pointer mode where a real mouse pointer is used to control the phone similar to laptops. This mode is pretty interesting and can substitute the stylus allowing single handed usage. You can easily scroll with this mouse control by holding the pointer, dead centre on the scrollbar and pressing it longer. This activates the scrolling mode and a single sweep takes you up and down. Then a single press deactivates the scrolling action.

Samsung Omnia offers a telescopic stylus which is not so comfortable to use and there is no stylus compartment anywhere on the phone, which may be considered as a disadvantage but Omnia responds very well to the finger touch hence the engineers at Samsung might have avoided a slot for this stylus.

Though this mobile is powered by Microsoft’s Windows mobile OS, it is customized such that the main menu screen looks totally different. Samsung’s widget sidebar looks good and provides quick access to some of the functionalities. This sidebar reminds of the Windows Vista’s Sidebar. A good thing is that you can hide this sidebar if you don’t want it.

Omnia has a nice 5 megapixel camera which produces images with a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. It is equipped with autofocus, digital image stabilizer, face recognition, smile detection and geotagging. The LED flash next to camera lens helps you to take good pictures even during the hours of darkness.

The camera interface is quite good and easier to use with several shooting modes. An interesting feature of the camera is the smile detection mode. In this mode the camera doesn’t capture the photo as soon as you press the shutter key. Instead it waits for a smile on all recognized faces in the frame and then captures the image. The picture quality offered by Omnia is really good, producing very sharp and clear images.

Finally, it is good to see Windows on a Samsung Mobile Phone; everything is fine with Omnia from the innovative touch interface, rich connectivity and excellent multimedia capabilities to exclusive hardware characteristics such as optical touchpad and high quality 5 megapixel camera. It is probably the first time that a Windows Mobile Pocket PC turns out to be a fully fledged multimedia device. Omnia is good for both business and entertainment. Samsung has to be really appreciated for integrating the office device and personal mobile.

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