Samsung Omnia II & Jet
Jun 15, 2009, 1:38 PM by Rich Brome & Eric M. Zeman
Hands-on with the new Jet and Omnia II from Samsung.
Phone Scoop had some time to play with the newly announced Samsung Omnia II, which is headed to Verizon Wireless at some point later this year. The Omnia II is a new touch-based phone that makes major improvements over the device announced at this same time in 2008.
Samsung Omnia II
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There's no doubt that the Omnia II is a big phone. A lot of that has to do with the large screen. Despite its width, the Omnia II remains fairly lightweight and comfortable to hold. The plastics were not of the highest quality on earth, but they weren't shoddy either. As far as we know, we were using final or near-final units. The build quality was decent. The buttons all worked well and there was (gasp!) a 3.5mm headset jack for regular stereo headphones.
The Omnia II has a gorgeous 3.7-inch AMOLED display. This is one area where Samsung has outshown its rivals. The AMOLED displays simply look stunning, and the Omnia II has one of the brightest displays we've seen. Its size is also notable. With such a large screen, there's tons of real estate for applications to take advantage of. The one negative is that it uses a resistive touch display and not capacitive. Why Samsung continues to churn out so many phones with resistive touch is becoming more and more puzzling to us.
Samsung Omnia II UI
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The Omnia II runs Windows Mobile 6.1 (upgradeable to 6.5), but will come with TouchWiz 2.0, which has a few new features. According to Samsung, TouchWiz 2.0 is more tightly integrated with Windows Mobile than the the original Omnia. It has some new features, such as the task switcher, which allows users to easily switch from one application to another in either a grid or animated "cover flow"-style UI. The main menu completely replaces the Windows Mobile one and lets you re-arrange app icons however you like. It also has a 3D "multimedia cube", which bundles a lot of the phone's media apps into one place. Other than that, not too many of the improvements were readily apparent. It was responsive and quick.
It is packed with features, and in the few moments we spent with the device we took the camera and browser for quick spins. The camera packs 5 megapixels and has a lot of Samsung's modern features on board, such as Face Detection and Smile Shot. It was quick and snapped pictures very quickly.
In all, it is a huge improvement on a spec level and on a user experience level compared to the original.
The Omnia II for Verizon will support CDMA EVDO Rev. A.
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Comments
| Subject | Author | Date |
| Omnia Ii Dimensions | JKibler |
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| The reason it's Resistive... | shoelace_510 |
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| Sprint getting Omnia II as well? | danbfree |
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| Is the Jet considered a "Smartphone"? | Slash8915 |
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| 800 MHZ!!! EIGHT HUNDRED MEGAHERTZ!!! | Overmann |
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| Capacitance vs. Resistive Touch Screens | DownhillDude |
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