Samsung's Omnia II

Samsung Omnia II was launched in India on 21st October 2009. I was able to take a look at the handset on the same day at a Samsung showroom, owned by a friend of mine. And the very next day, i sold off my old Nokia E71 and got myself a brand new Samsung Omina II. Looks like i bought Nokia E71 back in January’2009….so i guess 10 months was pretty much it.

I really have never bought any Samsung mobile in my life, except for that Reliance powered cute white colored Samsung mobile that came with Reliance CDMA connection. Anyways, i won’t call that buying, as it was the only available set at that time. I always have trusted Nokia above all. And probably have equally used Sony Ericsson as well. But at this moment of time, Nokia is a big failure in Indian markets. No new models, nothing new whatsoever. It’s pretty annoying to see Nokia dying out from market this way. Anyways, why do i care. Samsung is the new king of the cellular phone market with so many exciting new phones, designs, features and pretty good prices. I am fan of good sound in such handsets, beside the other good features. And Samsung’s sound feature of WowHD, simply rocks. It really is outstanding.

Omnia II is not the first touch screen phone i have used. I started off with Sony Ericsson P900 wayback in 2004. After that i have used Nokia 7710 which was kind of brick but still pretty good. Then came the Apple iPhone which is the best touch screen enabled phone i have ever used. Unfortunately i had to replace iPhone just because it couldn’t offer a simple feature called “Quality in sound”. Neither the ring was audible nor any iPod songs or videos. Other than that there were no other flaws in iPhone that i couldn’t have ignored. Anyways, it’s not cool to compare Samsung Omnia II with Apple iPhone. Samsung are way behind from Apple when it comes to user interface, easiness and comfort of use and stuff like that. But Samsung do provide better quality videos and sounds. So i get that even’s it out.

Okay so, i got the Samsung Omnia II phone on 23rd October. Here’s how the box looks like!

Samsung Omnia II

All seals have been broken now. And the phone has been unpacked. It’s a sheer beauty. Bigger, better and brighter than any other phone i have ever used. It’s a Rose Black color handset. But until and unless i am under lot of bright sunshine, i will always see the color as black. As you must have noticed on the box, Samsung Omnia II works on windows mobile operating system. Okay so here is what the package contains:
1. Handset
2. Battery
3. Travel adapter (Charger)
4. CD-ROM
5. Stereo Headset
6. PC Data cable
7. Stylus Pen
8. Leather Case/Cover
9. TV Out Cable
10. User Manual

Samsung Omnia II

Omnia II has a 480X800 resolution and has a 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED touchscreen for Ultra brilliant display. With 5 megapixel camera and such a huge screen, this phone is the show stopper. The AMOLED screen is pretty large and amazing. It produces sharp and vibrant images thus making it all the more good looking. As compared to iPhone that used 16k colors, Omnia II uses 65k colors thus making it lot brighter and clearer and better quality. I was already in love with the phone.

Samsung Omnia II (Unpacked)

The battery is pretty huge. And with such high graphics and so much of exploring all day long, besides the other activities, this phone somehow manages to keep up the battery up for long durations. After the very first charging, i used it for good 60 hours before the next charge. That’s 2 and a half days. It’s pretty pretty good. For the specs, it has a 1500 mAh battery.

The camera is super cool. I haven’t experienced such a camera in any cell phone that i have owned previously. It has 5 megapixel auto focus camera and it has a dual LED flash which is really strong. The best features are the Geo-tagging, face detection, smile detection, image stabilization, super Wide Dynamic Range (WDR), D1(720×480) video recording at 30fps and QVGA @120fps.

Samsung Omnia II

I have three cellular phones after taking out Nokia E71 and replacing it with Samsung Omnia II. Ofcourse, it’s the biggest phone that i own as it is much bigger than iPhone! Here is some comparison pics. The junior on left is Sony Ericsson’s S500i. I just can’t it let it go for some reason and it has been with me for last 3 years or so.

Sony Ericsson S500i & Samsung Omnia II & Apple iPhone

Another look at these cellular handsets from a different angle:

Sony Ericsson S500i & Samsung Omnia II & Apple iPhone

I can really go on and on about the cell phone. I haven’t even described half it’s features yet! I guess right now it would be best to let the small specs do the talking

• General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100 MHz, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
• Dimensions: 118 x 59.6 x 11.9 mm
• Display: 3.7-inch 64K-color WVGA AMOLED touchscreen, 480 x 800 pixels, Advanced Resistive Touch
• Memory: 8/16GB storage memory, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 32GB)
• OS: Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional with custom TouchWiz 2.0 UI with 3D effects
• CPU: 800 MHz
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP, standard microUSB port, standard 3.5mm audio jack, GPS receiver with A-GPS
• Accelerometer for screen auto rotate
• DivX/XviD video support
• FM radio with RDS
• DNSe
• Battery: 1500 mAh battery

Some people might face the problem of changing the font size in Samsung Omnia II. The font size in text messaging and related function is very large in size. To shorten the text size in Samsung Omnia II, you will first have to Seetings >> General Settings >>Samsung TouchWiz UI >> Disable Samsung Touchwiz UI. Now come back to main screen. Click on Start…there will be two Settings option. One will be the same one you accessed earlier. The other will be right at the bottom of the menu, just above “Help”. Click the Settings tab. In the bottom of screen you will see three tabs named “Personal, Sytrem and Connections”. Tab the system panel. In there you will see an option for Screen. Click on it and it will show you “Align screen” page. In the bottom there will be another panel called “Text Size”. Now make the size work as per your comfort. After you are done with this, you can enable Samsung TouchWiz again. Font size will not revert to old one.
I just searched for the same problem but couldn’t find any answer. Now that i do have the answer, i thought why not spread the message!!!!
If you have some queries about the phone or it’s features, then do let me know about it. Always here to help you out!

Last January, i bought an Apple iPhone, which was then known as God of all cellphones. Well, i would have to say it was King of all phones back then. But every King’s reign has to come to en end sooner or later. Honestly, i got bored of iPhone. I can point out two reasons at this point of time. Firstly, it was almost an year and i couldn’t find anything amazing or any new updates that could have ket me interested. Secondly, me, myself being a music lover expected lot of things from iPhone. I know that no other phone can beat the iPod application in iPhone but what good is it when you can’t even hear it loudly and clearly.

Few days back, my friend Sumit Bahl bought Nokia E71. The phone looked real thriller compared to iPhone. Plus the quality and volume of music was mind boggling. But the small QWERTY keypad delayed my buying decision. So i started looking for alternatives. Initially i was looking for something with touch screen technology. So i checked out Sony Erricsson’s XPERIA. Undoubtedly a great slide phone. But it was just a little too much on the bulky side. No doubt my friends call it a Brick. Moving on i went to Nokia center to check out Nokia 5800 or NokiaTube. It looked all good on Nokia’s official site. And i was pretty sure i will go for it. But damn! Have you seen a high range Nokia phone with a cheap plastic body. Yuck! It looked like 25 years old and had absolutely no appeal compared to what it looked like online. So i moved on and went to a HTC retailer. I checked out two phones named “HTC Touch Pro” and “HTC Diamond“. Both of them look absolutely fantastic. But oh my… The prices were sky high. Apart from these i found no other cell phone as per my requirements.

Disappointed and depressed i came back home. Next day i went onto play snooker along with few other friends and there i had some time to check out Sumit Bahl’s Nokai E71. And  honestly, it felt pretty good. Due to the QWERTY nature of the keyboard i got my hands set on the messaging and other applications pretty fast. Plus i have had many Nokia’s before iPhone. So all in all, it was a great phone that nearly matched my needs. So i said “To hell with touch screen” and after the snooker i went to Nokia dealer to get myself a Nokia E71. inally, i got the handset i was looking for. Priced at INR 20,400 it definitely is a great buy. I had to visit certain Nokia dealers in order to get myself a white colored Nokia E71. No offence to black color E71 users, but the white colored handset looked pretty smart. Enough of the story. Bottomline, i bought my new Nokia E71 two days back and already have my stuff onto it. My younger brother, Rajat Jaswal, is the new owner of the iPhone now.

I am ending this post with some pics of my new handset. If you want to read the features of this phone, then go ahead and visit Nokia’s official site because it’s really not possible to write about all the features of this great handset. Of course if you have the same cell phone and are facing some difficulties with some application, then feel free  to ask me about it. I will try my best to provide the solution for you!