General: Samsung Omnia

After visting the ChannelFlip studios to do some filming for upcoming netbook reviews, I headed down to the launch of the new Samsung Omnio phone. I was happy with the way the filming went, although my carefully written scripts were thrown out the window and I was left with bullet points to work from. This worked well, but meant I left out some things I wanted to mention, but in reality probably don't make much difference to the conclusions. These will be on the site next week.

The Omnio launch was held in a pretty nice underground venue on Lower Thames Street, which apparantly used to be the local fish market. Amusingly, my Google Maps powered N95 got very confused directing me there and suggested that my current position in the middle of the Thames. Needless to say, I eventually got there (guided by what I thought was a passer-by, which turned ou to be a Samsung employee!). All of the Samsung employees were pretty excited about the Omnio and they really felt it was the best damned thing on the planet. I couldn't help but wonder if they actually thought this, or they were just damned good at their jobs. I'm still impressed by Adam Foat's ability to claim the FX5800 was an awesome graphics card and keep a straight face – even he will admit how hard that was!

As I'm fairlly new the mobile phone sector, it's difficult to form authorative opinions, so I felt it was a good idea to talk to a few other seasoned mobile phone Journos for their opinions. Opinions were not high with suggestions that it was similar to a polished turd. A lot of these complaints originate in the very fact it uses Windows Mobile. Samsung do know what they are doing, but they just didn't have a solid base to start with. I've not had much use of Windows Mobile 6.1, so I have no such predjudice – but my gut reaction from using it is that I don't like it. Although Samsung had made a rather polished vista-esque widget system for the front page, underneath was an operating system that felt complex and out-dated. It took way too long for the accelerometer to recognise me rotating the device (a software issue I felt), and I was often stuck with the display the wrong way around. Options seemed incredibly nested – but frankly, they do on the N95 too – I think that's just an issue with complex devices.

I couldn't help but feel like I was suddenly using my Windows Mobile PDA from 2001. It didn't really feel like the interface had developed much in this time. The device itself was very nice, and the optical mouse was something I'd never used before and really liked. It's a little square that acts a little like a track pad – you move your thumb over it and it moves a cursor around on the screen. This is automatically enabled when you use the inbuilt web browser – which is thankfully, Opera.

Video and MP3 playback was obviously high on the list, but there was no 3.5mm jack. Instead an adapter has to be used. I was giving this some thought the other day and adapters aren't the end of the world as you can always leave them plugged into your headphones in your pocket. However – if you have a 90 degree angled headphone jack (as most of them are) then causes an unsightly bulge in your pocket.

Without using the phone for an extended period of time, It's tricky to judge if I liked it or not, but my general feeling is that it was less of a phone and more of a PDA – I guess it depends which way you like the proportions. Input was via the usual methods of handwriting recognition and an onscreen keyboard. Using the onscreen keyboard was slow using the stylus (and the stylus was tricky to remove from it's holder) and it's frankly no comparison to the iPhone's keyboard, which is remarkable.

I came away with very mixed feelings about the Omnia, but I'm hoping I'll get some more time to fiddle with it later. I think the iPhone is a great reminder, that for a great product the software and the hardware need to be spot on – you can't have one or the other.

One of my workmates is on his second Omnia already, the first one crashed all the time. It took us ages to setup the work e-mails on it, whereas we had my boss's new E51 going in a matter of seconds. He can't get either the Vodaphone nav software going, or Google maps.
It really doesn't seem all that user friendly, the job requires us to be geeks and we're all struggling to work out how it works.