A day with the Samsung Omnia HD - Hardware and First Impressions

10x guys you are the best cant wait for the rest of the hands on i think you would agree this has to be the best smartphone of the year for now for some reason the 720by480 is just not starting and it would be nice to upload somewhere the full size images of the phone reeeeealy awesome device( its a shame to call it a phone )

Great review I'd really like to see how the Omnia HD compares to the N97 with web browsing. Could you do a video? I have a Nokia E90 at the moment and the web browsing is great on the 800px screen. Also, will the Omnia work with a Nokia bluetooth keyboard?

What does "humungous 163MB of RAM free after booting" means? Does it mean OmniaHD has 256MB or total RAM?

Where does it report 30fps? Here's what I see:

VIDEO: [mp4v] 1280x720 24bpp 20.000 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)

vlc reports the same, 20fps.

[Antoine of MMM]

Nice overview; nicer pics. Man that screen looks incredible. Granted, its of no benefit if it washes out in the sunlight (for my uses) but sheesh that's a nice screen there.

Apple have the patents for multi-touch so unless you have an agreement with them you won't find muti-touch on a "phone".

There maybe workarounds such as simulated multi-touch which may not infringe on Apple patents but this is a very sketchy grey area.

I played the 720p clip in VLC player. It seems alright. But Quicktime is showing some sync issues.

Well, the phone is just gorgeous!!. I think Idou and this ultra piece of technology will surely put nokia in concern. I hope samsung get right along into firmware updating path seriously! Great preview AAS

[jonnybruha]

For a lot of people, including myself, single-handed use is still king, which is why I don't care if it has multi-touch or not. Zooming and scrolling with one finger press isn't as "fun" as pinching and zooming, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient.

I welcome the capacitive screen not for the technology itself, but for the durability of it. The 5800XM always felt like it would tear to shreds if a sharp object came into contact with the screen.

Great Review Guys! So Finally How is The CPU,Ram,Rom????

btw i published ur news on my blog


Regards

[slitchfield]

Some answers:
- Yes, the unit we tried had 256MB of dynamic RAM. Though of course, there's a possibility that production units won't have this? We won't know until a boxed one arrives and we fire that up. Here's hoping though.

- If Quicktime says/shows a clip has sync issues then it does - Apple's MP4 routines are just about king in this dept.

- Yes, by multi-touch, all I'm angling for really are more intelligent ways to handle apparent screen coordinate presses, so that text entry can be quicker

- I doubt the Omnia HD would work with Nokia's Bluetooth keyboard driver, so we're probably waiting on Samsung writing one, or at least resigning Nokia's.

[Jaggz]

Steve. Is the sound recording really just 8 kHz AMR? Please say isn't isn't really so?!!!

[malbry]

Hi Steve,

My question is this: on capacitive screens such as the one on this Samsung, is it possible to select small areas of the screen with a stylus or other pointing instrument? For example, some programs written for earlier touchscreen OS like EPOC or UIQ or Windows Mobile require that you point to specific (small) areas of the screen to select an item or take some action. Do these programs become unusable in a device that's designed to be finger-friendly? Is it even possible to use a stylus on this Samsung? I understand that this wouldn't be the normal mode of operation, but it would be nice to have the option of using a stylus for programs that might be more usable that way.

Best regards,
Malcolm
www.freepoc.org

[jonnybruha]

For those experiencing lag on the video, downloading it and watching it in your player of choice will give you the true playback quality. The Firefox Quicktime plugin causes TONS of lag but it plays much better in WMP.

[slitchfield]

@malbry: no, capacitive screens work using human skin contact... Watch for an article from me on resistive vs capacitive touch technology....

@johnny: no, you're giving people false hope. The test clips from the preproduction device had appalling sound sync. Period. They fixed it for VGA, however, over and above the problems of the INNOV8. The question is whether they can fix it for 720p HD recording, when there's obviously a lot more video info to encode and tie up the processors....... Hopefully they can, this being one of the Omnia HD's selling points.