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Samsung Omnia II & Jet

Omnia II Jet Comments  12  

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  

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  

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.

About the author, Rich Brome & Eric M. Zeman:

Eric has been covering the mobile telecommunications industry for 17 years at various print and online publications. He studied at Rutgers Newark and University of Kentucky, and has a degree in writing. He likes playing guitar, attending concerts, listening to music, and driving sports cars.

Comments

This forum is closed.

This forum is closed.

JKibler

Jul 14, 2009, 11:05 AM

Omnia Ii Dimensions

Your review mentions that this "is a big phone". Are its dimensions different from the Omnia 910? I am planning to wait for the Omnis II to hit Verizon (they won't state when)... But if it's dimensions are a lot larger, I might be better off getting the 910 and doing all the software upgrades.
shoelace_510

Jun 15, 2009, 11:26 PM

The reason it's Resistive...

is because Windows Mobile doesn't support capacitive touch screens... since Windows Mobile doesn't have multitouch now anyway who needs a capacitive screen.
Just my $0.02...
The OS shouldn't care what the hardware is. From an OS standpoint, at least from Windows Mobile's perspective, WM doesn't care if you have a touch creen or a mouse or whatever, they are all just "pointing devices", and unless WM behaves radically dif...
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danbfree

Jun 19, 2009, 12:00 PM

Sprint getting Omnia II as well?

I could have sworn I saw rumors Sprint will get it too? Anyway, sounds like it wil go head to head with Touch Pro II... I got to play with a TPII a bit and it was nice!
Slash8915

Jun 16, 2009, 7:23 AM

Is the Jet considered a "Smartphone"?

Since the Jet isn't running off of Windows Mobile, is it still considered a smart phone? It would be nice if not, so that I can get it w/o having to upgrade my plan to "PDA/smartphone"
I don't think the Jet would be considered a smart phone, but it seems like the Jet isn't coming to the U.S. You can read at the bottom of one of the pages about that...
Overmann

Jun 15, 2009, 5:55 PM

800 MHZ!!! EIGHT HUNDRED MEGAHERTZ!!!

WOAH!

That's a lot of Mega Hurting! Take that iPhone!

800 > 566

Better have a good GPU this time around.
DownhillDude

Jun 15, 2009, 3:21 PM

Capacitance vs. Resistive Touch Screens

Not sure why you dump on resistive touch screens?

Both screens have their advantages: I prefer resistive, as I can use it with gloves on, or with anything pointy to use as a stylus. Ladies like resistive as they can use their finger nails.

Multi-touch has it's place, but I don't want that functionality as much as I want to be able use a stylus or finger nail any old time I want to.

Other users will have more desire for multi-touch, and that's fine too. I just don't get that you don't get that resistive is still a good technology.

I think some iProduct users get frustrated with resistive, when they try to swipe their finger on the screen, but they don't press down when they do it. The swipe feature works equally well on resist...
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