Samsung Omnia HD i8910

At A Glance:

Build quality: 8/10
Applications: 7/10
Interface: 8/10
Value-for-money: 6/10
Overall rating: 7/10

+ 8.0 megapixel camera
+ Impressive screen quality
+ Improved UI
- Expensive
- Bulky

In the box

- Samsung Omnia i8910 HD

- MicroUSB Cable

- Charger

- 3.5mm headphones

- TV-out cable

The Omnia i8910 HD is the multimedia oriented version of the Samsung Omnia. With an 8 megapixel camera, this device is packed with features- such as an HD video camera.

Design

The i8910’s candybar design has some very noticeable design changes when compared to original Omnia. The new design is closer to the latest Samsung designs. There’s a huge capacitive 3.7 inch AMOLED screen, displaying at 360 x 640 pixels. The screen displays in HD much like its namesake, it’s vibrant and bright, but and will display both high resolution pictures and videos.

The phone is one of biggest we’ve ever seen, and at 145g, it’s a really heavy phone to heft around in your hands.

The minimalist design is easy to pick up on, there’s a three button layout underneath it- a call button on the left, there’s home button in the middle and on the right an end call/ cancel button. On the left spine, there’s a volume rocker and a microSD slot. On the right spine, there’s a lock/unlock button, a microUSB slot and a quick camera button.

Main memory goes up to 8GB, there’s also a 16GB variant. There is plenty of memory for high quality videos and picture. The phone also has a built-in accelerometer, which extends to messaging, pictures and videos.

The top of the phone has a 3.5mm jack which has a protective cover, the camera in the back has a flash. Crack open the back and you’ll see the battery pack, and the SIM card slot on the top of the battery. There’s also A-GPS on-board, which works in tandem with the Samsung LBS.

The battery life is impressive- the rated standby time goes up to 450 hours and talk time should touch 7 hours. With the extensive multimedia functions, the battery life has impressed us.

Feature

The Symbian OS v9.4 Series 60 rel. 5 powers the i8910 but it looks like a completely different OS compared to the Nokia OS you might be used to. First off, the TouchWiz acts as the cover the Symbian, so there’s the multitude widgets to phone functions. The TouchWiz interface has a bar at the side of the screen as the widget depository, which you can manipulate easily to get your perfect home screen.

The home screen also has four little tabs at the bottom, including the contact, telephone keypad, messaging and main menu button. The Symbian OS is pretty straightforward, there’s 4x3 grids much like on Nokia devices. Additionally, the home screen when swiped to the right, will also access the main menu. Meanwhile, swiping to the left of the screen and will reveal the photo contacts.

During messaging, you can opt between virtual QWERTY keyboard, the keypad, or handwriting recognition.

Additionally, the home screen when swiped to the right, will also access the main menu. Meanwhile, swiping to the left screen and will reveal the photo contacts.

The main menu icons will branch out into more options, video players, gallery, web, and Real player. PIM wise there’s a calculator, clock, converter, notes, calendar, Zip, dictionary, Quickoffice and Abode PDF reader.

The User Interface deserves special mention, as it is vastly improved from previous Samsung UIs. It lacks multitouch or special gestures, but the swipes and icon clicks are noticeably easier to register by the Omnia HD i8910.

Samsung also threw in an on-board GPS, and a dedicated map application- the LBS. Additional functions like voice navigation, traffic info and relevant information will come at an extra cost.

Multimedia

The Omnia HD’s music player is quite similar to Nokia music players, and should be no trouble for users. There is also a virtual 5.1 channel Dolby Surround, which improves audio quality. Tilting the phone horizontally and you’ll notice Apple-esque Cover Flow.

On to the video player, the video quality is amazing if you can get your hands on some HD videos. And you can make your own HD movies with the video camera and play it on the video player. The video supports the accelerometer so we could watch videos in landscape view.

For those of you who rely on HDMI cables you are out of luck, and you’ll need a Wi-Fi TV set which supports DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) streaming format. There is a lower resolution, TV-out port on the phone and Samsung provided a TV-out cable. Note that, the video quality will not be in HD when transferred to your TV.

The Omnia’s web browser is the Symbian’s 5th edition, it supports multiple pages and Flash and Java support, so it’s convincing web browser.

Connectivity

The multimedia device could be mistaken for a smart phone with the multitude of connectivity options available. The phone has GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 frequency bands, data connectivity wise there are HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP support.

Camera

The i8910 comes with a whopping 8.0 megapixel camera, with autofocus and Geo-tagging, face, smile and blink detection, image stabilisation, wide dynamic range, ISO 1600. The camera shoots some pretty high quality images with a plenty of customisation options. With a xenon flash to boot, it’s overall a very impressive camera.

Meanwhile, the video camera shoots at HD quality at 720p at 24fps, D1 (720x480 pixels)@30fps, QVGA time-lapse and slow-mo video recording. There’s also a 3G call camera.