Dare we say it – but another touch screen operated mobile has hit the streets, perhaps numbering the iPhone's days. Will Samsung’s OMNIA outshine Apple’s market dominance?
If you’re to believe the recent hype and the marketing speak, the touch screen has apparently become the digital messiah of mobile geekdom. Chasing down the dominance of the iPhone is a big task and so it comes as little surprise to see Samsung’s latest honouring of the very features that made the iPhone so popular.
We got a sneak peak of the super skinny (12.5mm), lightweight OMNIA at a Samsung event a couple of weeks ago and were pleasantly surprised by Samsung's new creation.
Style and features
We grabbed the OMNIA excitedly; hoping for anything that could prove iPhone-competitive. At first glance, the OMNIA appears very similar to the iPhone. The OMNIA’s touch face operates via a patented TouchWiz UI interface; so typing on the touch size QWERTY keyboard feels quick and relatively painless. The 3.2” screen is a little smaller than the iPhone’s (3.5”) – but enough to make us notice the visual difference.
The OMNIA trumps the iPhone with its multi-codec support; an invitation for enthusiasts to play all kinds of audio-visual files on their phone without being bothered by the sort of codec dictatorship that springs to mind with the iPhone.
Bigger capacity
The OMNIA’s 32GB is vastly superior to the iPhone’s 16GB offering and that’s great for music and movie fans. The OMNIA is perfectly suited to be used a portable movie or music player, offering native widescreen movie playback in a light all-in-one phone. At 32GB, that’s around 32 DVDs or 12000 images. Nice
Better camera
Samsung OMNIA’s 5 megapixel camera comes with auto-focus, panoramic shot and face and smile detection functions and dwarfs the 2MP quality of the iPhone by more than double the pixel quality.
Interesting pre-loaded functions
The OMNIA comes preloaded with Windows Professional 6.1 and a full Microsoft Office suite, designed specifically for mobile use. Internet browsing has long been the high point of the iPhone and the OMNIA has that base covered with its full internet browser, using intelligent zoom for better web page coverage and ease of readability.
The OMNIA also boasts a 7.2 Mbps HSDPA connection, which ensures more than ten times the average 3G speed. The standard GPS and geo-tagging features are all there to impress as well, leaving us confident that the OMNIA could possibly be the next big thing in mobiles. We'll know more when we see a review model in the near future.