Review: Samsung Omnia W

Samsung Omnia W RRP incl GST: $699
Contact: samsung.co.nz
AT A GLANCE

• 3.7-inch, 800 x 480-pixel Super AMOLED display
• 1.4GHz single-core Snapdragon CPU
• Windows Phone 7.5 ‘Mango’
• Incredibly tight Facebook integration

A great option for the first-time smartphone owner or Facebook fan.

With the Omnia W, Samsung joins the likes of HTC, LG and Nokia in offering a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) smartphone in the New Zealand market.

I’ve been a WP7 user since the platform launched locally in 2010, with the HTC 7 Trophy. The Trophy is a great phone – we scored it an ‘excellent’ four stars. A year down the track however, the Omnia W does feels like a real upgrade and not just a switch in brand and model.

The Omnia’s display is a 3.7-inch, 800 x 480-pixel Super AMOLED panel. It’s bright and readable, but not as colour-rich as Nokia’s Lumia 800’s (the Lumia being the other hot WP7 device of the hour – see our review on page 36). The entire face of the phone is a single surface, indented very slightly into its bezel to give your finger a nice clear stopping-point at the left and right edges.

11mm at its thickest point, the Omnia isn’t a record-breaker – however, it’s more than slim enough to fit into the average pocket. It’s also sturdy enough not to break in half doing so, despite weighing in at just 115 grams.

WP7 (technically Windows Phone 7.5 ‘Mango’) is running atop a single-core 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor, with 512MB of RAM. Apps are quick and responsive, though there seems no appreciable performance difference from the older HTC 7 Trophy or the current Nokia Lumia 800.

Storage is a fixed 8GB, of which 6.34GB is available to the user. By a limitation of WP7, there’s no external storage via MicroSD card or anything similar. That 6.34GB is all you’ve got for whatever apps, photos, music or movies you want to carry around. WP7 also won’t appear as a USB flash drive when plugged into a PC (as Android phones can), so those that like to use their phone a general-purpose storage device will be left wanting.

Samsung have thrown in a few applications of their own, but nothing that redefines the Windows Phone experience or gives the phone some massive advantage over its competitors. Nonetheless, Samsung’s AllShare DLNA server is pretty neat, letting you wirelessly stream videos, photos and music to any DLNA-compatible entertainment devices such as TVs or PCs.

Through plain-old WP7, the Omnia W includes deep and powerful Facebook integration. Contacts and calendar entries sync up perfectly, and you can even opt to treat Facebook messages exactly like text messages. If you do so, you can then swap mid-conversation from Text to Facebook Message or vice-versa, just by tapping a single button. Excluding the very meagre data costs it incurs, it’s essentially free text messaging with anyone on Facebook.

Thanks to WP7.5, there’s also Twitter integration – it is, however, nowhere near as deeply tied in as Facebook is. That said, the official Twitter app for Windows Phone is clean and functional. Skype is also on its way to the platform via a public beta in the US, but not currently available in New Zealand.

The only thing that really annoyed me about the Omnia W was the nature of its ‘back’ and ‘search’ touch buttons beneath the screen. On my HTC 7 Trophy they’re painted-on. The Omnia W’s are backlit; at night, you can’t see them all the time. Despite my familiarity with Windows Phone, I still found that led to a number of ‘how do I go back’ moments before I realised that I had to tap a certain part of the dark area beneath the screen. By daylight, it’s not an issue as the outlines of the two buttons are just visible.

The Omnia W is not a groundbreaking phone, other than that it’s Samsung’s first WP7 offering. It is, however, a very strong offering for existing Windows Phone 7 fans. At a midrange $699, it’s also a good starting point for Facebook addicts or those looking for a simpler interface than Android or perhaps even iOS can provide.

Thank You : http://pcworld.co.nz/