Samsung I8000 Omnia II

Gather 'round ye gadget lovers, for the tale of Samsung I8000 Omnia II. It's a tale of PocketPC wisdom and touch wizardry, of big screen and pixel aplenty, of ancestry and identity. Lend an ear to this preview as we try to figure out where this creature came from and where it's heading.

Samsung announced the Omnia HD a few months ago and despite sharing a name with the i900 Omnia, it was more a descendant of the Samsung i8510 INNOV8 with its Symbian OS and strong emphasis on imaging.

The number of high-end, touchscreen PocketPC bars is getting ever greater. Off the top of our heads, we could name at least five with WVGA screens over 3 inches and a camera of 3.15 MP or higher. If you include phones with a slide-out QWERTY then the market gets even more crowded. All of these have HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, and sleek UI plug-ins, so this isn't a differentiating factor.

The Samsung I8000 Omnia II roars into action with a 5 megapixel camera, 800 MHz CPU, and a huge 3.7 AMOLED screen and 8/16 gigabytes of internal storage. Here's a quick summary of the main I8000 Omnia II specs.

Samsung I8000 Omnia II at a glance: General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100 MHz, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps Form factor: Touchscreen bar Dimensions: 107 x 59 x 12.9 mm Display: 3.7-inch 64K-color WVGA AMOLED touchscreen, 480 x 800 pixels, Advanced R touch (Resistive Touch) Memory: 8/16GB storage memory, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 32GB) OS: Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional with custom TouchWiz 2.0 UI with 3D effects CPU: 800 MHz Camera: 5 megapixel auto focus camera with dual LED flash, geo-tagging, face and smile detection, image stabilization, Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) and D1 video recording at 15 fps Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP, standard microUSB port, standard 3.5mm audio jack, GPS receiver with A-GPS Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, FM radio with RDS, DivX/XviD video support, DNSe Battery: 1500 mAh battery

The proprietary TouchWiz user interface The Samsung I8000 Omnia II runs on the Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS but normally you wouldn't guess that at first sight. The start menu might give it away but Samsung have done a pretty good job of customizing the rest of the UI.

The company's proprietary TouchWiz UI is installed on top of the Microsoft OS and covers it so completely that it's hard to come across those boring native menus. The only major gap we noticed is the Programs folder which isn't yet customized but then again, it might just be our pre-release unit.

The Samsung I8000 Omnia II actually has four different homescreens. They can be alternated by touching the small cubes in the bottom right corner (the cubes are numbered 1 to 3, and the fourth screen comes on when no cube is selected).

All four screens are there for the user to fill up with widgets. You can also assign different wallpapers to each homescreen to tell them apart more easily.

The widgets are numerous mini applications or shortcuts to different parts of the user interface, sitting in the tray until drawn to the screen. If the user needs to place a new widget on the screen all that has to be done is click the arrow at the bottom left corner of the homescreen and slide the widget bar out.

The available widgets vary quite a lot - from digital clock, through image gallery and profile manager to the CNN news application. You can also download additional widgets via the - yeah you guessed that right - the Download Widget.

The widgets approach is quite similar to the one we witnessed on the Samsung i900 Omnia but the I8000 Omnia II has two key advantages over its predecessor. For one - the widgets interface has been nicely improved since, both visually and functionally. The other great benefit of the I8000 Omnia II is the fact that this time the Samsung engineers decided to go all the way and customize the interface inside out.

Windows Mobile beyond recognition While we are pretty confident that the omnipresent TouchFLO 3D interface will be ported to the Samsung I8000 Omnia II sooner or later there is no need to rush with getting it as the handset has quite a lot to offer itself.

The handset also has a really neat task manager with cool graphics. It displays a scrollable list of thumbnails representing the currently running programs. You can choose to end a task or switch to it.

The new Task Manager is more advanced and is available through the custom Settings menu provided by Samsung. The Task manager not only does it display the currently running processes, but also their RAM and CPU footprint.

You can't switch between them however and in this respect it reminds us a lot of the Windows XP/Vista task manager. The good thing is that it's also capable of showing all the currently running system processes.

Another pleasing aspect of the Samsung I8000 Omnia II UI is the back button functionality. Placed comfortably under your thumb - on the right-hand side of the device - it takes you one step back throughout the whole menu system. It doesn't however quit running applications. Again, this might have something to do with the pre-release status of our unit since the very button has the X pictogram.

All that being said, Samsung I8000 Omnia II has one other novel software feature, which is also a key element of the external design of the handset - it's the Cube that has inspired the big 3D key below the display.

The Samsung 3D Media gate Cubes seem to be what every touchscreen phone wants to have when it grows up. Back in the day, the cube interface of the HTC Touch received pretty positive reviews (ours included) and they've been the fad ever since.

Now Samsung I8000 Omnia II has taken the whole thing to a whole new level by adding a dedicated button for bringing the cube onto the screen. Unlike the original HTC cube however, the one on the I8000 Omnia II is mostly in charge of the multimedia package on the handset.

The Samsung 3D Media gate is an intuitive six-sided cube UI that you flick on screen for quick and easy access to six key features, such as Main menu, Camera, Photo album, Music player, Video player, games or web browser.

Even at these early stages, we have to admit the Cube rolls smoothly and usability is on a very good level indeed, reminding of the responsiveness of the LG S-class user interface.

But if you are not into flipping cubes, all the shortcuts to the content you're looking for are available as small icons at the bottom of the screen.

The music and video player have been nicely revamped. The browser button displays your bookmarks in an innovative way "deck-flipping" manner and starts the Opera web browser once you have made a selection.

The program shortcuts menu brings up nine large on-screen shortcuts to some of the most frequently used applications. We are quite curious whether the assortment of shortcuts will be user customizable in the final version of the handset since our pre-release unit didn't offer this kind of functionality.

You get phonebook, call log, touch player, clock, camera, touch calendar, task switcher, photo album and settings and that's non-configurable at this point.

Two in one - the new Touch Player Samsung have wisely decided to give users a new touch-friendly media player and spare them the inconvenience of installing a third-party one to substitute for the poor default WMPlayer.

The Samsung Touch Player handles both video and audio files, supports playlists and has the standard album/artist/tracks sections.

There are two main views available in the I8000 Omnia II player. The first one is the Library - at the top you have six tabs: all music, albums, artists, genres, videos plus Now Playing. When you switch into play mode, you see a simple and clean interface. It has the standard music buttons you would expect - volume, next/previous track, play/pause and shuffle, while the album art fills most of the screen above them.

A camera well done The Samsung I8000 Omnia II is capable of taking 5 megapixel photos and capturing VGA clips. There is a dual LED flash to assist with low-light pictures and videos.

The I8000 camera viewfinder is familiar to us from Omnia HD, Beat DJ, 8300 UltraTouch etc. The comfortable interface is nicely touch-optimized and has all you need in the two vertical taskbars on each side of the viewfinder.

Touch-centric web browser with true Flash support Our Samsung I8000 Omnia II came with the Opera browser, which makes Internet Explorer Mobile redundant. The Opera 9.5 browser is extensively touch-optimized and seems heavily inspired by the iPhone Safari browser. While the latter won't get Flash support even with the iPhone OS 3.0 expected later this month, the Opera 9.5 browser already has it. Having said that, the Opera 9.5 browser is a great solution but it has its flaws too.

All the software aboard The Samsung I8000 Omnia II comes loaded with additional third-party software to meet various users' needs. It's got regular stuff such as the RSS Reader and Streaming player, but it has some really original applications to go along. You should bear in mind though that the software package might be market-specific.

The RSS Reader application is rather self explanatory. It gives you quick access to RSS feeds for staying on top of the latest news and content on your favorite websites.

The Podcasts application allows you to subscribe and download video and audio podcasts of your choice.

The Samsung I8000 Omnia II arrived with a pre-loaded app called Application Download, granting you access to Samsung's app store. Of course, here comes again the inevitable comparison to the App Store. The structure and the whole idea screams "App Store" but that's according to expectation.

Applications are displayed into several tabs - Recommended, Hot and Category. You can also see all downloaded items or to search for new ones.

Before you download an app you can read its detailed description and check its rating.

A cool GPS navigator to be The Samsung I8000 Omnia II will feature a built-in GPS receiver that can be used by multiple applications running at the same time. There is also A-GPS support for much faster satellite lock upon cold start thanks to current satellite data downloaded over Wi-Fi or the 2G/3G network.

With its huge 3.7" display the I8000 Omnia II has the potential to be a very cool GPS navigator.

It would have been nice if there was a pre-loaded GPS navigation app but since there isn't you'll have to purchase one separately. Google Maps however is already on-board, so you can always use that as a stop-gap.