The Omnia is the latest challenge for the iPhone. It is built by Samsung and is also known as the Samsung i900. Lets take a look at what it does.
The Samsung Omnia is an advanced mobile phone which has a ton of features packed in. It measures just 12.5mm in depth and has a large touch-screen on the front of the device which has a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels (3.2 inches in size). This allows for portrait or landscape viewing of images, movies, websites and other applications which benefit from a large screen. The exterior of the phone is a sleek black gloss in finish making the mixture of large screen and phone look cool to carry around.
The web browser is powered by Opera 9.5 which makes browsing a lot easier due to the functions built in unlike Windows Mobile which never seem to make IE good enough to want to use over a long period of time. However, the phone is powered by Windows Mobile 6.1 allowing you to make use of the more common applications such as Word, Excel and other various MS Office applications.
On the connectivity and functions side it has A-GPS for satellite navigation. ‘A’ means assisted which makes use of either 3G or a wireless connection to help speed up that first fix time when you switch it on. Navigation software is not included, but this does mean that you can install your favourite application, or use a free one such as Google Maps which works very well as a mapping piece of software. Applications built in include Google Search and GMail response allowing for you to check emails on the go from an application rather then a web page.
Memory wise there is a huge 16GB place to store all your music, videos etc… which is one of the larger memory capacities I have seen on a mobile phone. The Omnia does have a 5 mega pixel camera allowing it to take up a fair few meg per picture. If you do want more variety of music then attach the headphones and tune in to your favourite radio station as this phone can also pick up radio signals making it feature packed.
It seems like Samsung have got it right with the Omnia i900. It has every thing that a fully fledged user might want from a standard phone to a web browser and on to a satellite navigation device. It doesn’t have a keyboard, but it does have a large touch screen which when rotated side ways you can pop up a full QWERTY keyboard on to the screen much like the iPhone has. To help the phone feel more like a regular keyboard the phone gives feedback for every key pressed in the form of vibration helping you to type more comfortably.
By having all the connectivity built in that you could dream of, you should never have a problem getting some kind of signal weather it be using data at speeds of 7.2Mbps, or wifi at what ever speed available there. You should never be left with out a connection to the web and outside world. With the mixture of GPS and Google Search you also get location based searching. Stand in your current spot and search for a restaurant and you will see in the search results the closest restaurants to you with the phone numbers also.
I have to say that the i900 is one serious phone and well worth looking in to as an alternative to the Apple iPhone.
