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Samsung Omnia HD (i8910) - User Review

The First 8 Megapixel Samsung Symbian!

Hey guys.. .. ..well as I'm new here I thought I'd give my opinion about the Omnia HD phone. I've had it for a few days now and here are my general impressions. To start with, I had a LG Viewty and I’ve never had a symbian phone before. I also have an Ipod Touch which I use daily. I got the Omnia HD phone through orange (I was an existing customer) and they sent it to me next day last Thursday. You get mostly everything in the box with some extras like the phone stand keyring thing (so you can watch movies on the go). I said mostly because one thing they didn’t include was the TV Out cable for SD output. The phone itself feels about the same weight as my Ipod Touch (32GB) and the plastic battery cover is more sturdy than earlier reports. Everything about the phone screams quality and this is before I even talk about the screen. As I mentioned above, this is my first Symbian phone. At first I wasn’t too sure what to think. Usability wise, it’s not as slick as the iPod touch/iPhone platform. The lack of kinetic scrolling in most places hurts it a bit but if you learn to use the right scroll bar it’s not too bad. Another thing that takes some getting used to is the double tapping of menu options and the single tapping of icons. They should’ve made this more consistent. The built in browser also suffers from the lack of kinetic scrolling (or at least it doesn’t use it well) but it also doesn’t use multi touch. However, its not all too bad coz I was surprised to see that it supported flash and using sites like YouTube in full was a fantastic experience (with the option to view full screen). I've tried other alternatives like Opera mini which works fine for general browsing and is super fast but I'd like to see opera mobile and Skyfire support in the near future. Another thing that I’m not too impressed about is the built in email support. Right now, it doesn’t support HTML email browsing. The only option you get is opening the included html attachment that then loads the web browser... which is slow and cumbersome. I think there’s some 3rd party software that does this properly but I wish I didn’t need to update some of the more vital applications such as the browser or email client to get them to work better. Applications seem to be a hit or miss right now. I'm hoping that once Samsung/Nokia etc.. open their application stores properly; we might see some better things. In my experience from installing applications, it’s been fine in general and the process of signing them takes some understanding. Some of the Nokia apps worked ok (photo browser) while others didn’t. Now onto the good stuff. The screen is the best I've seen on a mobile device hands down. The capacitive screen is just as sensitive as the iPod touch, and with the haptic feedback it’s fantastic. The phone also comes with some very nice speakers that are loud and clear (for a phone). The camera is just as good as early reports said and with a screen like this to see it on is just awesome. The amount of camera options is really nice (face, smile and blink detection etc...). Not to mention the fun panorama option which takes the other photos automatically for you... you only need to move the camera to the right by following an on screen guide. The video recording is also very nice but I won’t get into this too much because there’s been lots of coverage about the poor audio during recording video. I'll just say that yes, it is disappointing and I hope it gets an update. Anyway, hope that helps out some users who wanted to know a bit more as I didn’t see much feedback about the phone here. I'll be keeping the phone coz I’m happy with it overall and the camera is still really awesome to use in my personal opinion.