| Samsung Omnia, the most iPhone-esque WM phone yet? |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Tuesday, 11 November 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 Indeed it means only one hand/thumb is required to perform operations, rather than needing two hands and two fingers as with the iPhone, although multi-touch has its benefits as we all know. Featured Whitepaper
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Although the Omnia is available in sizes of up to 32GB in overseas markets, the Omnia has been released in Australian with 8GB internally, upgradeable with at least 16B more with today’s microSD cards and 32GB in tomorrow’s. The precipitous drop in the Australian dollar has made larger capacity models a little too expensive for the Australian market, but with 8GB offered as standard and a microSD expansion socket you still have lots of space for an excellent mobile selection of digital media, plus one can always carry as many microSD cards as desired if one additional 8GB or 16GB storage card isn’t enough. The internal 3.5G HSDPA modem is also 7.2Mbps-class capable, delivering speeds 10 times as fast as regular 3G, dependent of course on the quality of the 3.5G network you are connected to. The upload speed of the phone is 384kbps, so while upload speeds are only 3G-class and not HSUPA class, uploads are not something you’ll be doing huge amounts of on this phone, for most users it’s all about the downloads and the Omnia is ready. You also get an inbuilt GPS and AGPS as is standard on high-end smartphones, while the WM supplied Microsoft Office Mobile still provides the best compatibility with desktop Microsoft Office documents when compared with suites such as DataViz to Go. Coupled with Mobile Outlook, push email and Office Mobile, the Omnia is as much a business phone as it is an entertainment fashion phone, a space which almost all smartphones these days want to play in. Curiously there is no 3.5mm headphone socket on the Omnia, relying instead on Samsung’s proprietary headphone socket. This is a shame, because a 3.5mm headphone socket should be standard on all smartphones just as is the case on Apple’s iPhone and Nokia’s N-Series devices. Still, the Omnia is arguably the best Windows Mobile phone on the market, with its only other “missing” feature being a slideout keyboard as with the HTC Touch Pro. That would make the phone much thicker, and if the iPhone can survive quite happily with only a touch screen, so can a phone like the Samsung Omnia, and no doubt Samsung have models with keyboards on the way. Right now, in 2008, there is no WM 6.5 or 7, and if you want a very iPhone-esque phone with much better features, a smaller size, expandable memory and more, the Omnia is right up there solidly competing against the best models from all of its competitors – and even Samsung’s own non-WM phones. If a touch screen phone is what you want, and you aren’t already an iPhone owner, the Omnia shows what the iPhone could have sometime next year while offering it right now. Given that the pricing is ultimately similar, it all comes down to whether you need those extra features, prefer the iPhone interface, prefer Windows Mobile, or prefer something with traditional phones buttons like a regular Samsung model, or phones like the Nokia N96 or the upcoming Sony Ericsson CyberShot 8 megapixel camera. There’s never been more choice in the highest-end smart phones on the market, and they’ve never been more affordable to more people. Choose wisely and well, but whatever you choose, you’d be hard pressed to be unhappy with the cornucopia of features, capabilities and benefits on offer. |
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