First Impressions|SAMSUNG Omnia II i8000

The much awaited successor to the very successful Omnia.

This bad boy had one of nicest screens I’ve seen, better than the fruitphone even. The 3.7in AMOLED WVGA display was just gorgeous…  The slab type device has good heft the screen had haptic feedback (just like the 1st Omnia). Of course it has all the bells & whistles any top tier device should have. The 5MP auto focus shooter w/ photo LED (yes HTC camera's do need flash), the 3.5mm jack, a choice of 16 or 32Gb internal storage, plus microSDHC expansion (hey Apple how about a card slot for the iPhone) make this ideal for multimedia creation or playback. Samsung is touting 480p video recording & playback… yes kiddies that’s DVD quality. I was not able to try out the camera because I kept on playing with the screen. Like most touch based devices Samsung releases this one comes with their TouchWiz system of widgets. The heavily skinned touch optimized UI is nice to look at but I feel it makes the device sluggish (just like early version of TouchFlo from HTC). Again Samsung promises a FREE upgrade to WM6.5

Specifications

http://ph.samsungmobile.com/mobile/Samsungi8000

The Omnia II is a worthy adversary to any modern device hardware wise. I would recommend this to people who require massive amounts of storage and don’t want to get tied down with Globe or the iPhone. In terms of software I think Windows Mobile Professional needs to adapt or it will die out. Don’t get me wrong I still use Windows Mobile daily the raw power is amazing it just requires a re-design (ground up please) for the UI, I feel like: XP is to 6.1 whilst Vista is to 6.5, hopefully WM7 is to Win7.