Announced on Monday, the Samsung Omnia 2 is making its way onto Verizon very soon and we sat down with it for a little groping session.
The first word that comes to mind when looking at the Omnia 2 is wow. That 800×480 3.7-inch AMOLED screen is bright. It’s still a resistive screen, which I’m not a big fan of, but it’s much, much better than the one you’ll find on the Instinct. The rest of the hardware has also lost that ‘cheap’ feeling and the 5-megapixel AF camera puts it onto the premium smartphone tier.
TouchWiz 2.0 appears to be worthwhile this time around. Unlike v1.0, which was basically just shortcuts, the widgets on 2.0 are now active. Did your friend just send you a message on Facebook? The FB widget will tell you if you did. Want to know what the weather is going to be like today? Check the widget.
It doesn’t have the Webkit-based Dolfin browser like the Jet, but Opera will have to do. *sigh* It will ship with Windows Mobile 6.1, but the Omnia 2 will be upgradeable to 6.5 when it goes live.
It seems as though Samsung has ditched the Croix UI and might be going with the Cube from here on out. The six-sided interface is a tad finicky, but I’m used to a capacitive touch-screen and I didn’t really have enough time to readjust the way I handle resistive touch screens. I took a very short video of the Cube interface that’s not very flattering as its probably better than the video makes it out to be. I didn’t really get a full rundown of how it worked before I shot the video anyway.
Overall, the Omnia 2’s biggest selling point is the beautiful 3.7-inch AMOLED screen. Sure, it’s still WinMo, but Samsung has done a pretty good job of covering it up. TouchWiz has also seen a huge jump in terms of functionality with 2.0. So long as the widgets at launch are worth using, I’d say TouchWiz 2.0 will be a huge selling point on future Samsung devices.
Oh, the stacked image is of the Omnia B7610 on the bottom and the Omnia Lite in the middle.
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I see a phone that specwise is better than the iPhone 3Gs. I see a phone that judging by that picture contains every single useful app from Apple’s App store, minus the fart apps of course.
I also see the things that you see, but I also see a company that fails to listen at what their customers want. We want android. (And not, I’m not a fanboy, you just have to look at the android phones’ sales in europe specifically). I don’t get what these big companies reluctance to put android on their top-of-the-line phones is, but it clearly makes not sense to me. I mean even if they ddn’t want to “risk” bringing an (relatively, and arguiably) untested platform to the market, then what’s the sense in releasing these new phones with this new from-scratch OS? Why would they NOT take advantage of the FREE android OS already mostly made, that would require only slight modifications on their part to make it work. android has been available to consumers for more than a year now, and to phone makes for even longer, there’s no excuse for them NOT to include them. Does anyone know of any reason for this? Does this new samsung phone incorporate a me-too app store whose revenue they don’t want to sahre with google? Because otherwise this makes no sense.
Big phone companies are failing to see android as an opportunity and are instead treating it like some crazy fashion they include in one mediocre phone of their line to please their geek crowd.
There’s hope, tho. The newer companies entering the game (acer, dell, garmin/asus, huawei, teh chinese ones and even a french one) DO seem to get the opportunity and are taking advantage of the big companies failure to embrace the future with their (sometimes) cheaper phones and full of features. The rest of these year and the next one will be very eye opening to big phone companies who are used to another way of making business (I’m looking at you motorola, hire a CEO that actually uses email for god’s sake!). In this economical climate, I think the only company who can afford to resist change for a little longer is nokia. But even they will have to fold, by the end of next year I think.
To the fellow above, Jerry, who wonders why Samsung does not start off the bat with the Android OS in the ONNIA line of phones:
Jerry, what do you want? You want all phones to be just Android phones or Iphones. This is a WinMo phone. It is a phone for people that don’t want any limits with what they can do with their phones. WinMo phones are business and play phones all rolled into one. In my case, I want to be able to receive email and extract the “Word” or “PDF” attachements and store and organize them in folders. I also like to have the option of using Google’s cloud applications if I chose to do so.
I don’t just want to manipulate visual gunk or shuffle icons from one screen to the other all day long. I want to use my phone for work and for play. Android is turning out to be a very good phone OS, but it is not ther yet, my friend.
I like what i see, as stated above i would have like to seen android. But the screens shots from 6.5 look half way decent, hopefully it wont take to long for the full release. Any specifics on time frames my renewal comes up in a month
I agree. This phone, based on its specs and fun features, looks like the first realistically legitimate contender to the Iphone 3GS. My only real gripe is that Samsung and LG still refuse to go with a capacitive touch screen. I own the Ipod Touch, and I love the touch responsiveness and feel.
Often times, it seems like the you have to really press and drag hard to get the resistive touch screens to work.
Aside from that, I can’t wait for this to release.
Omnia will never host Android as Samsung has reserved the “Omnia” line for Windows phones. Maybe other phones from Samsung will. People looking for Omnia look for a .Net platform continuity and extensibility, they also want to empower it with the vast variety of applications that third party developers create for Windows Mobile (which is huge)
Any word on when Verizon will have the Omnia 2?
The phone looks great, but how much will it cost me??
i read an articule on engadget.com that some one leaked a screen shot from a best buy computer, the pictures included in the articule, and it shows a launch date of 8/28/09. hope this helps sorry i didnt add link but a little searching and i can find it
How much will Samsung omnia be? SG$ …
Please reply soon~
Thanks!