Samsung just pulled a bit of a "Samsung" and completely blew out its Omnia lineup. We just got some face time with the new
Omnia II,
Omnia Pro,
Omnia Lite and the
Omnia-inspired Jet, along with the
Pixon 12 -- which runs the same in-house Samsung OS as the Jet, but packs a 12 megapixel camera. It's hard not to notice the stunning AMOLED screens on these phones, especially up against the dull-by-comparison Omnia Lite with its petty LCD. Unfortunately, while the build quality is good and the specs are certainly all there, all the phones were fairly slow in regular operation. The Jet and Pixon were passable (and the Jet certainly ought to be, with an 800MHz "application processor"), but we can't imagine anybody finding any pleasure in the molasses Windows Mobile 6.1 experiences on the Omnia trio. The Jet has a fun little 3D UI "cube" gimmick, which involves the pointless spinning of a cube to access different media apps, but most of what we saw was pretty standard TouchWiz. We did like the speed of Pixon's camera, which does a Pre-style trick of sending photo processing duties to the background so you can snap another photo with little delay in between -- it's also pretty good at auto focus and color accuracy for a phone, but we won't be trading in our regular point and shoot in the near term. None of the phones we looked at had network access, so we weren't able to test out the WebKit browsers, but it sounds like a major win for the Jet and Pixon. Let's just work on that Omnia responsiveness a bit, yeah Samsung? Perhaps Windows Mobile 6.5 (the Omnia II and Omnia Pro are 6.5-ready) will help.
Update: we added a video of the Omnia II and Omnia Pro after the break!
posted June 15th 2009 1:28PM
TouchWiz seems so unrefined and half assed compared to TouchFlo. Samsung's got the hardware down, but they're UI's for dumb and (touch) smartphones still blow hard.
So whatever happened to the HD?
Check out this review I always hated Samsungs touchwiz but I love what they have done here & still under construction..
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i8000_omnia_2-review-362.php
are any of these phones the samsung haptic any call or is that phone only available overseas ?
Do they have handwriting input?
@ Garst
All of the windows mobile phones have handwritting recognition.
Based on all of these models from Samsung, it is obvious that they are really leveraging windows mobile and that is fantastic. Between Samsung and HTC we are seeing some very incredible new devices hit the market and I can't wait to see these in action.
first 7 pictures show the jet
I'm confused. So which one out of these is Samsungs flagship phone, aka the best?