Why You Can Trust CNET Samsung i8910 Omnia HD review: Samsung i8910 Omnia HD
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
First debuting at GSMA 2009, the Samsung i890 Omnia HD turned heads with its gorgeous touch screen and high-end multimedia features. Though it has yet to be released in the United States, Samsung kindly provided us with an unlocked version of the device to try out, and it's certainly impressive. The Omnia HD offers an 8-megapixel camera with HD video recording and playback, smartphone capabilities, heaps of storage, and a much improved TouchWiz interface. On the other hand, since it's not a U.S. version, it lacks support for our 3G bands and call quality could have been better. Is it worth the $600 to $700 to buy an unlocked version? Well, if you have the money to burn (lucky you) and crave the advanced multimedia features, sure. We'd even say it's a better buy than the Nokia N97. However, for most, we'd say just wait as Samsung has a number of U.S. devices planned for the fall and winter season, including the Samsung Omnia 2 for Verizon Wireless.
Design
Given the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD's extra-large display, it's no surprise that the smartphone is on the bulkier side. The handset measures 4.8 inches tall by 2.3 inches wide by 0.5 inch thick and weighs 5.2 ounces, and it's the longer length that makes it a bit of an uncomfortable fit in a pants pocket. That said, it's a very solidly built phone and not bad looking either with its black lacquered finish and silver accents.
However, the real head-turning feature of the smartphone is its 3.7-inch AMOLED capacitive touch screen that displays 16 million colors at a 360x640 pixel resolution. AMOLED stands for Active-Matrix OLED; we won't get into the technical explanation here, but the advantage of an AMOLED display is that colors appear brighter, images and videos look sharper, and it consumes less power than standard LCDs. While we are still conducting battery tests, we can definitely say that the Omnia HD's display is stunning. Everything from menu icons to photos to Web pages looked smooth and vibrant.
Not only does the display look beautiful, but it's also functional. There's a built-in accelerometer so the screen orientation will automatically switch from portrait to landscape mode when you rotate the phone. Meanwhile, a proximity sensor locks the touch screen when you're on a phone call in order to prevent any accidental presses as you hold the handset up to your ear. Both are responsive and unlike some handsets, the accelerometer works in all apps.
As with the first Omnia, the i890 Omnia HD uses Samsung's TouchWiz user interface, which lets you customize your Home screen with different widgets. There is a tray located on the left side with various applications, such as your calendar, music player, Facebook, and clock, where you can then drag and drop these widgets to the main screen so they're easily accessible to you from the home page. Once you've customized the phone to your liking, you can collapse and hide the tray by tapping the arrow button.
While the premise is the same, Samsung has made several enhancements to the user interface that makes TouchWiz much more easy to use and functional. For one, the company has expanded the widget list considerably and added two more panels on which you can add widgets. This prevents the home screen from being too cluttered and it also gives you the option to more neatly organize the widgets; for example, one panel can be dedicated to multimedia while another is for more personal organization apps. There's also a permanent toolbar that appears along the bottom of the display that gives you access to the phone app, your contacts, messages, and main menu. Pressing the latter will take you to a grid of all the core functions and applications of the smartphone.
As far as text entry, you get a soft QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode, while you only get an alphanumeric keypad in portrait mode. However, the keyboard is pretty spacious, so we didn't have too many problems typing messages.
Below the display, there are Talk and End/power keys as well as a menu button. On the left side, there's a volume rocker and a microSD expansion slot, while the right side features a lock button, a camera activation/capture key, and much to our delight, a Micro-USB port rather than Samsung's proprietary connector. The top of the unit holds a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack and on back, you'll find the camera and flash.
Our Samsung Omnia HD came packaged with an AC adapter, a USB cable, a wired stereo headset, video out cables, a software CD, and reference material. Since the phone has not been released for the United States, the travel charger features a European/Asian plug so you will need to get an international adapter. Alternatively, you can use any Micro-USB charger. For more add-ons, please check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and help page.
Features
The Samsung i890 Omnia HD's headliner is its multimedia capabilities, so we only feel it proper to start with those first. Imaging is a strong point as the smartphone is equipped with an 8-megapixel camera that can record HD video. The camera offers a plethora of options, including six shooting modes, 14 scene settings, and eight resolutions as well as more advanced settings, such as ISO and blink detection. Meanwhile, you can record video in one of four modes and four resolutions. There are also some shared settings between the camera and camcorder, including white balance, anti-shake, and Wide Dynamic Range.
Picture quality was indeed impressive. Most camera phones have had problems with our standard indoor shot (below), but the Omnia HD produced a very clear image with rich colors without any weird bluish or amber overtones. We also shot several videos at 1,280x720-pixel resolution and for a camera phone, the video quality was definitely good. The picture was sharp and action scenes weren't blurry or pixelated. However, we did notice that the camcorder had some trouble in bright sunlight as the picture was blown out.
Once you're done shooting, the Omnia HD offers various ways to review and share your images with family and friends. The MediaBrowser is pretty cool in that it provides new ways to search and browse through your images. For example, you can flip through your images by tilting the phone left or right, though you can certainly use the onscreen arrows or finger swipes. There are also options to upload files to the Web or post them to various social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace. If you're up for a public screening, you can do so via the included video-out cables or through a DLNA-compliant TV since the i890 Omnia HD supports this standard.
However, you can enjoy videos as well as music right from your device, thanks to the robust multimedia players. Supported video files include MPEG-4, WMV, H.263, H.264, DviX, and Xvid, and of course, you can watch content in HD resolution. The music player supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, Enhanced AAC+, MIDI, XMF, among other formats, and it includes advanced functions, such as 5.1 channel sound, an equalizer, sound effects, and visualization. The player's interface is quite nice with album art support and in landscape mode, you can scroll through with a feature similar to iTunes' Cover Flow. Other goodies include podcast support, a streaming media player, and an FM radio, though you have to use the included headset for the latter. With all these multimedia capabilities, one has to wonder about memory and we think you'll be pretty relieved as the i890 Omnia HD comes in 16GB or 8GB model and both offer microSD expansion slots that can accept up to 32GB cards.
Oh, but wait, there's more. On top of the multimedia capabilities, the Samung i890 Omnia HD is also a smartphone running Symbian's S60 platform, similar to the Nokia N97, though a departure from the Omnia, which ran on Windows Mobile. As we noted in our N97 review, the Symbian OS is getting fairly outdated, but Samsung does a nice job of masking it by adding its own fresh touch to the interface.
That said, as far as business use, the Omnia HD comes with Quickoffice for viewing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, but you will have to upgrade to the Premium Edition to do any sort of editing. In addition, e-mail setup isn't as streamlined as others. Whether you're configuring a POP3 account or your Exchange e-mail, you have to manually enter all the server information whereas a majority of smartphones these days automatically do it for you. The device comes preloaded with a good helping of other organizational tools, including a file manager, a PDF reader, a dictionary, a unit converter, and more.
Phone features include quad-band world roaming, a speakerphone, conference calling, voice dialing, and text and multimedia messaging. The phone book is limited only by the available memory (the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts), and there's room in each entry for multiple numbers, e-mail addresses, instant-messaging handles, and birthdays. For caller ID purposes, you can assign a picture, one of 40 polyphonic ringtones, or a group ID. Bluetooth 2.0 is also onboard for use with mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets, hands-free kits, object push, file transfer, serial port, basic printing, and dial-up networking. GPS/A-GPS is also onboard as well as a compass; however, our review unit didn't come with a mapping application so you may need to add one.
Watch this video to get a first look at the Omnia's TouchWiz interface
Given that the Omnia HD has not been released for the U.S., the smartphone, unfortunately, doesn't support AT&T or T-Mobile's 3G bands. It does have integrated Wi-Fi, however, and the smartphone's Web browser is excellent. It offers Flash support, keyword search, a page overview mode, and multiple windows, among other things.
Performance
We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1,800/1,900) Samsung i890 Omnia HD in New York using T-Mobile service and call quality was mostly good, though better on the caller's end than ours. We encountered some problems as sound occasionally cut out so we had often had to ask our friends to repeat themselves, which has to be annoying. Meanwhile, our callers were quite impressed with the clarity of calls and reported no major complaints. However, when we activated the speakerphone, they did say that there was a bit of an echo. We found the speakerphone quality to be acceptable; there was some slight hollowness but plenty of volume. We paired the Omnia HD with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset and the Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones.
The Omnia HD proved to be a very responsive device throughout our testing period. There was very little sluggishness when launching and using apps, though we did have a couple of issues when trying to view YouTube videos. When we launched the dedicated YouTube app from the home screen, the screen went into a slight freak out mode and went through a couple of cycles of going black and then coming back to life. Eventually, we were able to get onto the site and stream a couple of videos, which played back smoothly. Just remember to close out of the app when you're done since we forgot to do so and then couldn't play music or other video clips because of shared memory.
The multimedia performance really was top-notch. Video playback on the Omnia HD's AMOLED screen is brilliant and given the generous size of the display, there wasn't as much eye strain as with some other touch-screen devices. The smartphone's speakers also pump out plenty of volume as we accidentally discovered when we launched the music player without checking the audio levels first. We enjoyed rich-sounding tunes by plugging our Bose On-Ear Headphones into the device's 3.5mm jack.
Web browsing was surprisingly not that painful even with the lack of 3G. Using T-Mobile's EDGE network, CNN's and ESPN's mobile sites came up in 17 seconds and 7 seconds, respectively. Meanwhile, CNET's full site loaded in 57 seconds.
The Samsung i890 Omnia HD features a 1,440mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 10 hours and up to 10 days of standby time. The smartphone offered up an impressive 11.25 hours of talk time in our battery drain tests. According to FCC radiation tests, the Omnia HD has a digital SAR rating of 0.67 watt per kilogram.