Samsung Omnia i900 review

With a name that is an amalgamation of Latin and Arabic words meaning 'everything' and 'wish' Samsung obviously has high aspirations for the i900 Omnia.

You'd be forgiven for mistaking it for an iPhone at first glance; it certainly seems to model itself on its massively successful competitor, particularly with that large 3.2-inch touchscreen crowning its sleek silver and black stylings.

Dimensions-wise, the Omnia is a little narrower and shorter than the iPhone but we're talking a difference of millimeters at most and it also only weighs in at 125g meaning that it won't become too much of a burden in your pocket.

The display is a generous 3.2-inch touchscreen affair, and whilst the WQVGA resolution of 240x400 pixels is a little disappointing, at least you get plenty of screen real-estate to play with. It's fairly bright and crisp on the whole, but visibility in direct sunlight can be a bit of a problem.

The only 'hard' buttons on the front are the 'call answer' and 'call end' buttons and unassumingly placed between the two is an optical mouse which unfortunately wasn't much use outside of web browsing.

The TouchWiz interface overlaying Windows Mobile 6.1 is certainly consumer oriented in terms of appearance and functionality; the graphics on the main menu are large and well spaced which makes finger, rather than stylus, operation a viable option. Business users may find that the appearance isn't to their taste and the icons a little 'cartoony', particularly the customisable, widget-enabled home screen that also featured on the Tocco.

One of the biggest complaints of Windows Mobile handsets is lag in response time, fortunately Samsung have managed to improve this for the Omnia which means that on the whole there isn't too much delay when opening apps or performing other functions. Sadly the same can't be said of the accelerometer which is somewhat sluggish in switching from portrait to landscape and vice versa.

The raft of pre-installed software includes many of the usual suspects; the Mobile Office suite, email, TV output, a media player plus preinstalled opera browser.

The Omnia is ready for DIVX playback straight out of the box and has a very good media player that made no fuss of handling the standard file types. The handset also features A-GPS which can be used in conjunction with SatNav, Google Maps or geo-tagging snaps.

Samsung has a history of releasing high-specced cameras on its handsets and so it is no surprise that one of the best features on the Omnia is the five-megapixel snapper that ships with LED flash and autofocus as well as other neat features like smile, face and blink detection, multiple scene selections, panoramic/macro modes and auto image-stabilisation. This is one area in which the Samsung far outclasses the iPhone; the picture quality is really very good , though you do have do drop to VGA resolution for the panoramic mode, and in low light/high ISO conditions, snaps become a little noisy.

Unfortunately, writing that text, email or Word document may well drive you crazy, as one of the most disappointing aspects of the i900 Omnia is the on-screen Qwerty keyboard.

In portrait mode there isn't enough space between keys meaning that it is too easy to accidentally hit the neighbouring letter and in landscape mode the typing is a little easier but the keyboard takes up so much space that you only get a line or two of visible text when replying to a message. Whichever orientation you plump for we found typing agonisingly slow, and whilst using the supplied stylus can improve things a little it's still by no means perfect.

Overall, the Omnia is a better than average Windows Mobile smartphone; it has a high-end feature set that is overlayed with an appealing and user-friendly interface in the form of TouchWiz. The camera is fully featured and produces some of the best phone-snaps we've seen from any WinMo device and we also liked the quick access widgets on the home screen.

Minor niggles include the use of a proprietary headphone socket rather than a standard 3.5mm and no storage for the stylus; but the major negative is the keyboard, it is just too cramped and unresponsive.
In some ways the Omnia is placing itself between two markets; a consumer phone with business features and  business phone with consumer looks and apps. The problem is, a business phone needs an excellent keyboard and a consumer focused phone needs to be extremely user-friendly;  the i900, whilst competent with both, excels at neither.