Samsung i8910 Omnia HD
Maxabout Review
Fully Loaded Handset
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Photos
Samsung Omnia HD
Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is surely one of the most interesting packages to look out for at this year's Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona.With headline grabbing features such as HD video recording and playback, 8 megapixel camera and a large AMOLED screen, Samsung managed to create a lot of buzz.
In style terms, the Omnia HD is a mix of the original Omnia with some of the elements of the i8510 thrown in. It's fairly typical for a high end Samsung device, with metal and hard, gloss plastics making up the major portion of the casing materials, with tempered glass covering the screen. It is predominantly finished in black with a few silver highlights. The overall build quality feels very good with no noticeable squeaking or flexing.
Designing a fully touch-operated mobile phone certainly doesn't leave too much freedom and all of them look more or less identical. The 3.7" touchscreen dominates the front of the device, there are three buttons (call, home, hang-up) placed on a silver band at the bottom of the device, with a VGA camera and light/proximity sensor at the top of the device. The keys are large, well defined and give good tactile feedback - exactly what you want. The light sensor at the top of the screen controls screen brightness based on ambient light conditions and the proximity sensor prevents accidental screen touches when you hold the phone to your face.
The screen uses AMOLED technology, which is generally brighter, uses less power, has a wider viewing angle and better contrast ratio than similarly sized LCD TFT screens. It looks absolutely fantastic, especially when displaying photos and other multimedia content. In common with other S60 5th Edition touch devices, the screen has a resolution of 360 x 640, a real boon when viewing web pages and other content-heavy information. On the right side of the device there's a thin, two-stage camera key, a microUSB port (also used for charging), and a hold key, which locks the screen and other keys. On the left hand side of the device, there's a microSD card slot, and volume up and down keys. At the top of the device, there's a small hatch covering the 3.5mm audio jack.
There are twin speakers at the top and bottom of the device and they're impressively loud. As with any small mobile speakers, they sound distorted at higher volumes, but they're perfectly adequate for basic use, and are well positioned for use in landscape mode. The back of the device, which is covered with a hard, glossy plastic, houses the Omnia HD's 8 megapixel, autofocus camera and an accompanying LED flash. Opening the battery cover reveals a 1500 mAh battery. 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.
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. 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. Inside the Omnia HD, there are GPS and magnetometer/compass sensors for geotagging and mapping and a G-sensor or accelerometer, which is used in a number of games including a customised version of Gameloft's Asphalt and also enables system level functionality, such as auto-screen rotation and 'flip to silence'. Including the previously mentioned proximity and light sensors, there are a total of five sensors, all of which should be addressable by third party developers.
The Omnia HD boasts the usual connectivity options: WiFi, Bluetooth (including support for A2DP and HID profiles) and USB 2.0 (including HiSpeed). It's a quad-band GSM and tri-band UTMS/3G (900, 1900, 2100 Mhz) device with both HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) and HSUPA (5.76 Mbps) support. HSUPA, which allows faster upload speeds, is a nice extra, and while it is not widely implemented yet, it does provide good future proofing. The Omnia HD runs on the OMAP 3x chipset (most likely the 3430) from Texas Instruments (TI), which is based on the ARM Cortex A8 architecture, and includes a graphics co-processor which uses Imagination’s POWERVR SGX graphics technology.
OMAP 3 is the next generation chipset on from the OMAP 2 family that was used in the Nokia N95, Samsung i8510 and a number of other popular devices and TI say the OMAP 3 provides three times the ARM performance of previous ARM 11 based processors. The integrated POWERVR SGX graphics technology provides graphics, imaging and video acceleration and enables the support of Open GL ES 2.0 and Shader 4.1 graphics APIs.
Main Features Of Samsung Omnia HD:
- GPRS/EDGE class 12
- HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
- 3.7-inch 16M color OLED touchscreen, 640 x 360 pixels
- 8 GB integrated memory, MicroSD card slot (up to 16GB)
- 8 megapixel auto focus camera with LED flash, geo-tagging, Face detection, Smile Shot, Wide Dynamic Range (WDR)
- HD video recording at 24 fps
- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, Standard microUSB port
- GPS receiver with A-GPS, Samsung Mobile Navigator by Route66, HDMI
- Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, Proximity sensor for auto screen turn-off
- FM radio with RDS, DivX/XviD video support