Samsung i8910 Omnia HD

The Omnia HD is Samsung's go at touch-taming the Symbian S60 and is introducing truly revolutionary stuff.

A 3.7" OLED capacitive touchscreen, an 8 megapixel camera that should be able to humble even some digicams and of course the HD video recording - does it really get any sweeter? Geeks have been warned - continue reading this preview at your own risk. We are not to be held responsible for sleep disorders or compulsive spending.

Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is surely one of the most interesting packages to look out for at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. With a specs sheet like that it's hardly a surprise but we cannot quite get Samsung's choice of name. There was nothing wrong with the original Omnia but reusing a name is not exactly suggestive of revolutionary. Oh, and don't get us started on the superscript. It may look cool and all, but just go ahead and google OmniaHD.

With the following preview we did our best to provide you with as much information as possible for the very short time we spent with the handset. Since our unit is at the very early stages of development we would focus mainly on the hardware and ergonomics as the software is well in need of getting polished. By the way, we've already reviewed the Symbian S60 5th edition touch user interface with Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, so you should already know the basics.

Samsung i8910 Omnia HD at a glance:

General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/1900/2100 MHz, GPRS/EDGE class 12, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps Form factor: Touchscreen bar Dimensions: 123 x 58 x 12.9 mm Display: 3.7-inch 16M color OLED touchscreen, 640 x 360 pixels Memory: 8/16GB integrated memory, non-hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB) OS: Symbian S60 5th edition Camera: 8 megapixel auto focus camera with LED flash, geo-tagging, Face detection, Smile Shot, Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) and HD video recording at 24 fps Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS and optional Samsung Mobile Navigator by Route66, HDMI (dongle needed) Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, Proximity sensor for auto screen turn-off, FM radio with RDS, DivX/XviD video support Battery: 1500 mAh battery

Design and construction Designing a fully touch-operated mobile phone certainly doesn't leave too much freedom and all of them look more or less identical. The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD doesn't depart from the standard looks, the metallic frame around the display obviously an attempt to give it a face of its own. We do like the fact the battery cover is entirely metallic but the glossy plastic around the display looks rather cheap.

Most of the front panel of Omnia HD is taken by its key feature - the 3.7" 16M-color OLED touchscreen. The state-of-the-art unit uses the capacitive touchscreen technology as opposed to the resistive one of Nokia 5800 XpressMusic - the first S60 5th edition handset. The lightest touch will do for a command to be registered - no pressure is necessary.

The capacitive technology used for the display guarantees the excellent responsiveness of the screen at the expense of making it unable to work with anything else but your fingers (no stylus, no plectrum, no gloves, no anything…). It seems quite a fair trade to us and probably to most other people that don't need handwriting recognition.

The display of Samsung i8910 offers amazing picture quality. The resolution of 640 x 360 pixels (same as Nokia 5800 XpressMusic) is not exactly top of the line but the OLED technology does make a difference. The contrast and colors are really impressive making every image look really vibrant.

The bad part about the display of Samsung i8910 is that its legibility drops dramatically when exposed to direct sunlight. It might not be as bad as the Samsung i900 Omnia for example but finding a proper angle to work with it is quite a problem.

The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD display doesn't give any haptic feedback but that might just be the case with our pre-release unit. We'll check that out when we get hold of a retail unit.

The other noteworthy elements at the front of the Samsung i8910 are the video-call camera and the proximity sensor at the top, plus the three keys at the bottom. The proximity sensor is used for locking the display during calls to avoid accidental presses when holding the phone next to you cheek.

The Omnia HD has hardware Call and End keys plus a menu key, much like the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. They look cheap and feel somewhat more wobbly than the price tag might suggest. Of course parts of the design are still subject to change.

Along with a bunch of logos, the back side of the Omnia HD also hosts the 8 megapixel camera lens and the LED flash. With video recording so high on the agenda, it's quite understandable why they went for the LED technology instead of xenon. It still is inadequate for low light photos (or video for that matter) at distances over a meter so don't count too much on it.

The battery located under the cover is the same as the one in Samsung i8510 INNOV8 - a 1200 mAh unit. However now that Omnia HD is officially announced, it turned out that the retail product will have a 1500 mAh battery - nice one!

Next to the battery we find the memory card slot. No hot-swap is somewhat of a letdown but maybe they thought they'd get away given the abundant onboard storage. That way or another, it is hard to imagine it was so hard to make it hot-swappable.

The general build quality of Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is a mixed bag. The metal battery cover and the huge OLED display are true high end stuff but the plastic bits are below par. Anyway, the Omnia HD is just too big to misjudge really and there's no doubt the multimedia prowess is the main course here.

We find the i8910 size acceptable. However, we do note that some people are sure to find it too big and uncomfortable to operate single-handedly (unless you've got an extra long thumb). The superbly massive display has its downsides.

User interface Samsung i8910 Omnia HD runs on Symbian OS with the S60 5th edition user interface. It's one of the very first devices running this UI to see daylight, right behind Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic and N97. Having reviewed the 5800 XpressMusic we already had pretty good idea of some of its pros and cons.

The Samsung Omnia HD unit we had didn't differ much from what we've already seen in Nokia 5800 XpressMusic for example.

However now that the the Omnia HD has been announced, it turns out that Samsung have greatly customized the OS and even added a TouchWiz homescreen on top of the well known UI. So essentially, we'll try to get you a scoop of the new stuff as soon as we get our hands on one here at the MWC 2009.

Update 18 February: Here are several shots of the new user interface. The TouchWiz interface has been added on the homescreen, allowing you to configure up to four different screens with widgets. There is also a nice cube-like transition effect when going from the standby screen to the main menu. The rest of the navigation of the handset has also received graphical boost, which makes it even more visually appealing.

A decent music player The music player of Smasung i8910 Omnia HD is identical to the one found on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic or other Samsung handsets running on the S60 3rd edition UI (aside from the whole touch thing, of course).

The application has a good set of features and a large number of supported formats, which means that no converting of you favorite tracks is necessary. Some additional visualizations are also available.

Your music library is automatically sorted by artist, album, genre and composer and searching tracks by gradual typing is available. You can also create your own playlists in no time. The process of adding tracks to the library is as simple as choosing the refresh option.

Album art is also supported and if you don't like the default sound of the device you can enhance it by applying one of the equalizer presets. You can create new ones too in a matter of seconds.

Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in background. In this case a tab appears on the stand-by screen indicating the currently running track.

Your own portable cinema Watching a video on the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is a true joy. The built-in video player has DivX and XviD video support included.

The screen size and resolution count big time here, we're just amazed by the image quality. And with a powerful CPU that can handle really high bitrate videos sky is the limit.

So, if your videos have a bit rate of less than 3Mbps all you need to do is upload them to the phone and start the video player. No need to convert or look for a piece of 3rd party software to run on the still young S60 5th edition.

Image gallery is good to go but misses on the fun part The gallery of Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is identical to the one of Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. It is is yet another part of the interface that hasn't been drastically changed. Touch friendly and functional it definitely is but we somehow feel more eye-candy could have been offered.

You can scroll pictures by sweeping your finger across the screen when looking at a single photo. Opting between portrait and landscape mode is automatic, thanks to the built-in accelerometer. Unless you have that feature disabled, all you need to do to switch modes is to flip the phone sideways. The photos can also be zoomed in to see more detail but the screen resolution makes sure you won't need it as much as usual. Zoom is controlled via either the volume rocker or an on-screen touch slider. In all other cases, images are displayed full screen.

Call us picky or whatever you like but touchscreen phones should be fun to use and nice to look at. The OLED screen might just save Samsung this time but some cool and shiny piece of software is still missed. Who knows, maybe the retail version will go that extra step.

Monstrous camera Samsung i8910 Omnia HD packs one of the most powerful imaging units currently available on the market. Using the camera module of the Samsung i8510 INNOV8 which produced possibly the best images in our grand 8MP shootout, the Omnia HD is trying to outpace its predecessor.

The LED flash might be a disappointment to some but the reason is LED can also be used as a video light. And video is certainly what the phone is really about. We'll get to it in a little while.

The camera key is comfortable enough to work with and the UI has been altered to provide better touch experience. The settings aren't as comfortably placed as on the Samsung Pixon and most of them are squeezed in a shared menu.

A camera like that definitely deserves the time spent getting used to its interface quirks, but we think Samsung could've saved us the effort.

The range of settings offered by the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is immense: from manual white balance and ISO to exposure compensation, sharpness and contrast. Various effects are also at hand as well as face and smile detection.

Our unit didn't provide geo-tagging of the images but that probably won't be the case with the retail ones. With a built-in GPS we doubt Samsung will miss the opportunity to include this neat feature.

Then again, Nokia added image geotagging to 5800 XpressMusic only recently via a firmware upgrade, so who knows.

As this stage we cannot provide you with camera samples from the Omnia HD. That's the downside of testing a pre-release unit. Eager as we are to take promising gadgets out for a spin, we've been repeatedly sobered by early units, which are so in the rough that experimenting would be pointless.

By the way, the imaging units are usually the last bit in a mobile phone that gets properly finished. But you can count on it we'll get back to you with those samples as soon as possible.

Update 18 February: So here go the promised samples that we managed to take at the MWC 2009. While this still isn't the final version of the camera the photos are already prettey decently looking.

Waiting for the HD videos Well, we guess you already know where we're heading with video samples. It will be another little while before we see the real worth of the Omnia HD. We bet you just can't wait. 720p HD video recording appears for the first time on a GSM handset and the excitement is quite worth it. The frame rate is also pretty sweet at 24 fps. WVGA will have to bow its respects - 720p HD videos are about triple the resolution.

GPS Navigation Samsung i8910 Omnia HD features the Samsung Mobile Navigator application for voice guided navigation. The Route66-made piece of software makes its best to utilize the built-in GPS receiver providing the users of the i8910 with all the goodies of a dedicated satnav unit.

The application itself is something we've seen before and that was also present on the Samsung S8300, which we previewed several days ago. Its functionality and map data is up to the task and the huge display might just render yet another of your gadgets useless.

Bear in mind though that the voice-guided navigation, as well as the map data will probably come at an extra cost.