| |
| |
![]() |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
SINGAPORE: The Apple iPhone 3G is making its much awaited appearance today in 22 countries. Unfortunately, Singapore is not one of them. For those who are not willing to wait an unspecified eternity for the Phone of Phones, you might want to consider the Samsung Omnia (S$1,098), a trendy 3.5G handset that holds bragging rights to being the first 16GB phone on the market.
With a gleaming touchscreen front and a brushed black back, the Omnia looks suitably expensive and should impress most people who don’t own an iPhone. It helps that it weighs a solid 122g, which should convince most the phone’s not made entirely of cheap plastic and shredded foam.
The 3.2-inch WQVGA touchscreen is sufficiently bright and clear, and has an elongated 240x400 format to optimise the display of widescreen movies with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Internet browsing on the wide screen is also a pleasure.
Motion-sensing accelerometers change the screen orientation between the portrait and landscape modes when the phone is rotated. Note: The accelerometers are very sensitive — the slightest movement will rotate the display orientation. It’s annoying and eats up unnecessary power, especially when each change is accompanied by a slight vibration. We recommend that you set the sensitivity level to the lowest (it helps a little) or practise the art of holding the Omnia rigidly.
Samsung’s patented TouchWiz user interface lets you manipulate applications with a touch on the screen. It’s not quite the advanced multi-touch interface the iPhone touts. Stroking the screen to scroll through menus requires patience — it keeps misintepreting the slide of a finger as a selection of an item. What I like though about the Omnia is its accurate haptics technology, which is essentially a buzz to acknowledge your touch.
As a testament of the faith Samsung has in its touchscreen and in TouchWiz, the firm has not bothered to build in a slot for a stylus. You get a stylus in the box, but it’s meant to be attached to the bundled carrying case, which is one of the saddest-looking cases we’ve seen in a while. And since this isn’t the iPhone, it’s unlikely you’ll get third-party accessory makers scrambling to create a nice case for it.
To help navigation, an optical joystick at the bottom of the screen acts as a four-way directional pad and an onscreen mouse pointer. We don’t find the joystick useful. But what is useful is the variety of on-screen keyboards and keypads available to cater to individual text input needs.
In terms of features, the Windows Mobile 6.1-powered Omnia pretty much shines. Onboard the phone is a laudable 5-megapixel auto-focus camera with face and smile detection, and auto-panorama functions.
And what’s a phone without GPS (Global Positioning System) capability? The Omnia dutifully offers navigation and geo-tagging tools, with Agis NavFone bundled to provide maps of Singapore, Johor Bahru, Malacca, Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley (because we go there so often). Other extras include a TV-out function, a music player, Bluetooth and WiFi support.
All those fancy functions do drain the life out of the phone faster than you can ask “Isn’t Omnia the name of a perfume by Bulgari?” I have to charge the phone every single day, and I’m a feather-light user.
For the benefit of geeks, the Omnia is powered by a 624MHz Marvell CPU. An 8GB version is in the works.
VERDICT
It’s tough to make a call on this one (sometimes literally) — it looks amazing and the features are top-notch. But I find the touch sensitivity of the screen less than satisfying and the interface not as intuitive. I just might wait a little while more for the iPhone after all. - TODAY/sh
|
