Samsung Omnia I8910 HD Rewiev Samsung i8910 HD:Overview Samsung wants to be the number one mobile manufacturer, and recent successes show it's having a pretty good go. That doesn't mean it can rest on its laurels - the likes of HTC with the Magic and the Touch Pro 2 show that it's a company to be watching out for, and Apple's new iPhone 3G S is another step towards the ultimate mobile. And that's before you even begin to think about the likes of a Palm Pre-fuelled resurgence, so we bring you the Samsung i8910 HD review to see if a media monster is the way into even more consumers' hands.
The i8190 HD is huge. Let's not beat about the bush with this one, it's a behemoth of a handset. And the reason for this is the 3.7-inch AMOLED screen and the HD camera stuck on the back, clearly screaming to the prospective customer: 'I like media and I don't care who knows!'
And it's certainly not one of these flimsy, plasticky, might-fall-apart-if-you-blow-on-it phones you see these days. No, we're talking a solid metallic and plastic feel with a 148g weight to it... think somewhere between the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 (3g lighter) and the T-Mobile G1 (10g heavier) and you'll understand.
Something that should be noted from the outset is this chassis isn't going to be to everyone's taste; the size and weight mean it's trouser friendly, but you'll certainly know that it's in there. Although if you're like us and constantly panicking that you've lost your phone, it's actually quite comforting.
But Samsung knows what it's doing when making a mobile phone, and if this much technology has been packed into a 123 x 59 x 12.9 mm chassis, then it's probably going to be pretty darn good.
The screen is simply to die for, as anyone that's seen an OLED display in action can attest. Deep blacks, rich colours and pin sharp resolution really make every frame from this phone stand out, and it's very easy just to spend time showing your friends just how beautiful your new handset' screen is.
Slightly marring the waters is the fact that the screen, despite having all the usual OLED traits, is not much use in direct sunlight. It's no worse than your usual LCD screen, but given its potential, we were hoping for a good CSI session in Regent's Park, but ended up having to do it under a T-shirt, which probably made people assume we were looking at porn.
On the hardware side, the phone is well laid out with the Korean firm taking full advantage of the rare luxury of having swathes of chassis space to put buttons. The front three, decked out in chrome, handle the call, terminate and menu keys necessary for a Symbian S60 5th edition handset, and are large and easy to press.
The camera key is in the standard place, on the lower half of the left hand side, and has some nice give and solid feel for taking pictures and activating auto-focus. Above this is the lock key, which could do with being a little lower (as on the Tocco Ultra Edition) as it's a little out of range for the average thumb.
On the top is something we internally cheer about whenever we see it, a 3.5mm headphone jack hidden by a little door to protect it when not in use. This cover is actually fairly difficult to lift, but helps keep the phone chassis sleek.
And on the right hand side, the up / down buttons and the microSD slot complete the look, with the keys feeling smooth and easy to press, and the memory card slot easy to open and pleasing to snap shut.
In the box
There's a good set of kit in the box with the Samsung i8910 HD, with a charger, USB cable, stereo ear buds, installation CD, and what we initially thought was a screen cleaner, but turned out to be a great keyring-attachable stand, allowing you to use the phone as a standalone PMP player.
The stereo headphones are the standard (very decent) fare we've come to expect with from Samsung phones, but this set was sadly a one-piece item, without the headphone extender we're used to. Admittedly, the two piece set was because previous phones didn't have a 3.5mm headphone slot, and we probably were hoping for a bit much to believe Samsung would give us a handsfree set to use our own headphone with. It still would have been nice to have a clip on it though, to hold the microphone in place.
As mentioned, the screen stand is a brilliant surprise and really works, while the rest of the bits and pieces are of good quality, as we've come to expect from Samsung.
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Samsung i8910 HD:Interface
Making full use of being a member of the Open Symbian Foundation, Samsung once again is rocking the Symbian S60 OS, such as that seen on the previous INNOV8 / i8510. However, this one has been updated to include the 5th edition release, very similar to that seen on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia N97.
In fact, it's very similar to the N97, with basically a colour change and weird electro '80s theme overlaid on the top (presumably to show off how amazing colours are on the AMOLED screen).
This means we get a very easy to use interface that works in tandem with a very responsive touchscreen, quite probably the best that Samsung has produced on all its touchscreen handsets thus far.
Making the switch to capacitive technology might mean that you can't use a stylus, but not only is the screen so large that you shouldn't ever need one, but the response time and accuracy is greatly improved.
Another great feature gained by using the Symbian system is the ability to multi-task, which should never be underestimated on a media handset. Simply holding down the central menu key (which is large and easy to find in the pocket) allows you to switch between applications, so should you need to pause a video to read a message you won't have to exit and lose your place.
The lock key on the side is a little pernickety, as you have to hold it down to unlock the screen for too lengthy a period of time. If the screen has turned itself off, it can get doubly confusing, as holding the key down will unlock and then lock the screen again as you press it twice trying to get back to the home screen.
Extending the amount of time before the screen powered off helped the problem, but that in turn drains battery life, so it's a trade-off.
The TouchWiz overlay from Samsung is once again improved over previous versions (having come in for some criticism in the past for its lightweight functionality). Not only does the responsive touchscreen allow you to drag and drop the icons more accurately than ever, there are now three home screens to customise, so you can have your media, business and applications all set up for different screens.
Widgets can now also be locked, which means that sliding your finger across the screen won't accidentally pick up the music player or similar and mess up your careful icon arrangement.
However, slightly annoying is the need to have the TouchWiz control panel open in order to use the different screens, which makes the whole process of changing your favoured widget set a bit laboured. Plus you can't have the same widget in two separate screens, which means you sometimes have to hunt to find what you're looking for.
But it's only a minor inconvenience that you quickly get used to providing you don't refresh your icon sets regularly.
The swiping left and right to access different screens option is there again, but this time works much better as moving to the right opens the main menu quickly and accurately Swiping to the left opens photo contacts, which allows you to tag a photo multiple times, with each tag assigned to a different person in the phonebook (or just to a name, but if you need to remember who each person is then they're probably not a favourite of yours anyway.)
The menu screen is the same as you'll find in other Symbian systems, mostly seen in a majority of Nokias, and is easy to navigate with easy to touch and recognise icons.
The menu options are easy to hit thanks to the large touchscreen, although sometimes you have to register a harder press or double tap to open certain options. Users will quickly get used to this, as while it isn't iPhone-like in its function, it's certainly intuitive and very rarely will you press the wrong option.
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Samsung i8910 HD: Calling and contacts
There are a variety of ways to interact with your contacts in the Samsung i8910 HD, with the aforementioned photo contacts adding to the normal contacts list. Users can either search for a name by entering letter (with a clever contact recognition system that removes letters available depending on which name you might be searching for) or by scrolling through.
It's also possible to grab and slide the bar at the side for quick contact searching, or slide and hold your finger at the top or bottom of the screen to move more accurately through contacts.
Each name isn't as well laid out as it is on the Nokia N97, where there are options to message or video call each person; instead you get a simple name and number. However, given the amount of stupid phonebook systems attempting to be intuitive out there, this is certainly a good enough effort.
We tried to get used to using the photo contacts effort by tagging a load of people's faces in a picture - there's probably a four person limit on each photo else the opportunity to accidentally call the wrong person rises dramatically.
In fairness, you're probably not going to use this function a great deal, although if you call and text one person a lot (ie a partner or sibling) then you can quickly assign them to a picture and this idea works a lot better by using it as a 'favourites' screen.
After the failure of the N97 to accurately start a call, we had a certain amount of trepidation over the success of the Samsung i8910 HD, but we were pleasantly surprised. Calls were clear and loud, although so loud that at one point we didn't notice that we'd accidentally hit the loudspeaker on the phone and the voice was blaring out the top, as the speaker is very close to the earpiece.
In fact we often found our face hit some of the icons on the screen, which is strange as the proximity sensor at the top is designed to switch the screen off.
However, after hanging up on a call accidentally, we realised that sometimes the size of the phone meant that the proximity sensor was not being hit, thus allowing us to knock the large touchscreen buttons.
This happened on around one in 20 calls, and simply adjusting the phone a fraction lower seemed to eradicate the problem.
The wide and long nature of the phone makes it an ideal handset to call on, as you're given that extra security that you get with clamshell designs where you know your voice is going to be heard as your mouth is near to the microphone. Of course this isn't actually a problem as most phones are easily sensitive enough, but it's encouraging nonetheless.
Samsung i8910 HD: Messaging
The options to create and open the messaging functions are available from three avenues on the Samsung i8910 HD, with the normal messaging icon on the menu screen giving you the option to open the inbox, sent items, email etc that you'd expect to find.
The option is also available on from the TouchWiz menu, and from this you can also go directly to opening a new message as well. The home screen contains a messaging icon at the bottom (thanks again to the massive screen allowing you the display estate to do so), so there's no shortage of ways in.
The inbox and outbox are much as you'd expect, although you'll probably want to head straight into the settings to alter the amount of sent messages saved - with so much storage on board it's obvious that you'll be looking to have more than the default 20 saved.
The inbox has some nice Symbian touches as well, such as being able to sort messages by sender, type and date, which is handy when you forget to delete for a few weeks and end up hunting for an important number through billions of messages.
The email system seems easy to set up, with a wizard prompting you to enter your email address and password, but you also need the POP3 and IMAP settings to give yourself the chance to download email. These are readily available from your email provider, but most people will feel a little bit unsure entering them in, and will probably not use this function.
Given the likes of Android and Windows Mobile only require you to put in a user name and password for their mobile systems, it would makes sense to see this function added here. But for those that do make it through, the auto-update function is reasonable (if not as spiffy as push notifications, where email automatically downloads to the phone) though sometimes can be a little bit laggy on server connection (when we connected up our Yahoo! Mail account).
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Samsung i8910 HD: Internet
The internet function on this phone is certainly a step up for two reasons: one, the much larger screen means that you can obviously see more of a page, and two, the Symbian internet browser is miles and miles better than the mobile-only option thrown onto the likes of the M8800 Pixon and Samsung Tocco Ultra phones, as it works almost exclusively in full HTML.
Internet connection is quick over 3G or HSDPA, and lightning fast over Wi-Fi, with the Samsung i8910 finding your home network faster than any other device we've tried bar a couple of BlackBerrys (and we all know they have a sneaky business advantage).
However, for all the promise the internet is probably the least impressive feature of the phone. The full screen option doesn't automatically activate when not pressing any of the buttons, which it instinctively does on nearly every other touchscreen phone, and finding the larger screen option means delving into the menu. It's not the most irritating thing in the world, but it's a long way from perfect.
Confusingly, the touchscreen starts to act a little oddly in this setting, with the usually responsive display not enjoying prolonged presses and movements to navigate around the screen, often ending up with either a tap too hard or soft.
Holding your finger down in one place for a few seconds also activates the zoom function, where you can then slide up and down to zoom in and out. However, in the course of trying to press hard enough to interact with the screen, this function was often activated, resulting in an annoying mess of too-large pages.
Perhaps this is a technique that will come over time, but for the time we were testing it we found ourselves getting more and more frustrated with the performance.
The Symbian browser also struggles to be terribly innovative as well, with simple functions hidden down a variety of menus. We upgraded to Opera Mini, and found that while this wasn't as good an experience as on other phones, it was still better than the Symbian browser, which needed three menu presses to simply access the reload button, which is irritating for a mobile browser that easily caches and saves older pages.
But a special mention must be given to the 'Back' button on the browser - while it doesn't just go to the previous site as you'd hope it would, flicking through the panels to see the previously visited sites makes them spin around for no good reason, and that's the kind of feature we'd like to see more of.
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Samsung i8910 HD: Camera
The camera on the Samsung i8910 HD is among the best the company has put together, aping the raw ability of the Samsung Tocco Ultra Edition in terms of picture quality.
We placed it head to head with an Olympus SP-565UZ 'prosumer' camera, with a 10MP sensor and a dedicated zoom lens, and the as you can see in comparative terms, there's very little to choose between the two until the light begins to diminish.
In bright sunlight, the Olympus is better at capturing the deep hues of the sky, but both pick out the sharpness beautifully.
The Samsung i8910 HD
Olympus SP-565UZ
When stepping out of the sunlight to take some snaps, we actually had to check which photo came from which camera. In fact, we decided to put a picture from a 2MP sensor on the 5310 XpressMusic to show how washed out a photo can look from a cameraphone.
The Samsung i8910 HD
Olympus SP-565UZ
The Nokia 5310 XpressMusic
On a cloudy day amid the tube strike, we took these two pictures while walking over Millennium Bridge to highlight the prowess of both snappers in cloudy conditions.
The Samsung i8910 HD
Olympus SP-565UZ
As you can see, when the light drops the Olympus really comes into its own. The flash gives some nice even tones, while the LED effort on the Samsung i8910 HD make things a little sharp and dark at places.
The Samsung i8910 HD
Olympus SP-565UZ
When the flash is taken off, both night modes work very well, but the Olympus is clearly leading the way, although Samsung's i8910 HD works very well still.
The Samsung i8910 HD
Olympus SP-565UZ
Overall, if you're looking to use this as a main camera, you could do a lot worse. It's obviously not going to be the best in every category, but there are a lot, lot worse out there on the market.
The 720p video camera is a nice touch on this phone, although we found that not only did it eat up space on the handset, it was a little under-used as a 'flagship' feature. While looking at the videos we uploaded to the computer was great (and adding to YouTube in HD is a much nicer experience than dull old SD) we found that it wasn't as good as Samsung might have you believe.
For instance, a Mino Flip Ultra HD camcorder gives slightly better footage, and is much cheaper than this phone. Admittedly, you are getting boatloads more technology with the Samsung i8910 HD, but we can't help but feel the HD in the name is a little redundant.
Coupled with that is the fact that audio recording can easily get garbled on the device, with the rumbling of a tube sounding like a burbling brook for some reason.
Of course, we (and most of the people we know, so hopefully we're in the majority with this statement) don't use our phones much to capture video, and being able to record in 720p didn't persuade us otherwise. However, if you're partial to a bit of on the go footage, then you obviously can't get much better than the world's first hi-def camera on a mobile phone.
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Samsung i8910 HD: Media
It would be hard to talk about this phone without spending a decent portion of time on the media functions, so let's dive right in.
Video
The video player on this phone is, without question, the best we've seen on a mobile. Of course, Apple's comes close on the iPhone, but that's more about ease of use. In terms of using this as a standalone PMP day in, day out, there's no question that you would be more than happy with the purchase.
The only downside is the amount of storage on board, with the 8GB quickly getting filled up with a single TV series and therefore leaving no room for music or photos. While you can upgrade the memory up to 40GB with a memory card, there's still a part of us that doesn't consider a device a true media hub until there's a massive whack of storage on board.
The video player also doesn't have the option to bookmark, and seems to shut itself down if left running in the background for too long. Also, scrolling through the time bar in a touchscreen manner to scan through a video will only let you jump to pre-defined points, so searching for an exact second is out of the question.
But the screen is simply breathtaking. We typically use the film Speed Racer to show off the breadth of colour on a display, and this phone made it look even brighter and more colourful than before. The audio was crisp and clear (although could have done with being a touch louder) but was easily a match for the noisy Tube ride, except in the quieter speaking stages.
One annoying feature was the fact the video player was hidden, and nowhere to be seen on the home screen. We had to go into the menu, select applications and then choose either video player or Real Player to check out our selection, which rankled a bit. Why would Samsung hide such a crucial feature in such a convoluted fashion?
Music
Switching to the music player was a much easier scenario, as it was a simple as dragging the icon out the TouchWiz list and using it to move between tracks and pause. There was also a link to the Orange Music Store on our test handset, although none of the tracks that were available to preview on the portal actually played any audio so we decided against wasting our hard-earned to test that one out.
But thanks to Samsung's 5.1 virtual surround sound system (the same as it uses on its notebook range) our music was impressive and loud, and easy to control with the virtual keys on the home page. It would have been nice to use some of the external keys to change tracks in the pocket, but it wasn't a constant problem.
Flipping the phone onto its side moved the music player into what looks suspiciously like cover flow mode, with the album covers displaying to be swiped and selected. But adding album art to the songs from the phone was tedious as it had to be performed on each song, so is definitely a task to be completed on PC Studio.
Annoyingly the volume control inverts when in landscape mode, to work with the new orientation. While this probably makes sense in terms of the way the Samsung i8910 HD is held, it's still highly annoying when you're trying to turn it down at an embarrassing moment.
FM Radio
Unfortunately, the radio still need wired headphone to act as an antenna, but having trudged through rubbish radios on phones for so, so long it's nice to see that this radio works. Pressing one of the plus keys saves your station, no other input required. Manual tuning is only available by typing the frequency into the phone, and we would have like to be able to drag the dial forward and back to get to the right place.
But reception was good, and played well on loudspeaker too, so an option for parties when you don't know what to say to the girl next to you. Or perhaps not...
Media streaming
Although strictly an application, the DLNA server on this phone is meant to be able to connect up to other branded devices (for instance, a PlayStation 3) and share media across a Wi-Fi network. It doesn't work.
No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't get the devices to talk to each other. We went through settings, we tried to search for both simultaneously, but nothing happened. If a company doesn't start making DLNA easy to use on a mobile phone, then it doesn't have much longer left as a standard, as running this program on the phone simply munched up memory and after the fifth connection, gave up altogether and we were forced to restart the phone.
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There are a few decent applications already installed on the phone, and the option to add a whole load more thanks to the Symbian system (although Samsung doesn't have its own App Store as yet), so we'll rattle through a few of the highlights, all of which play very well with the Samsung i8910 HD.
The game Asphalt 4 is pre-installed, and uses the accelerometer and touchscreen for motion controlled gaming, which is very slick and easy to pick up and play.
Smart search works in a similar way to Spotlight on the iPhone, in that it will let you search both on the device and the internet, depending on what you're looking for, which is a pretty neat service.
There's a dictionary with an extensive word list, a compass which actually works, Quick Office and PDF reader to let you do all manner of work-related things, as well as RoadSync which lets you hook up to Microsoft Exchange for calendar, email and contacts too.
The GPS data section, which was supposed to let us view things like out position, coordinates and map any trip length, was something of a let-down, as it spent most of the time connecting and trying to find out where we were. However, with a bit more perseverance / luck, we think this could be a really handy feature, especially when coupled with the compass (which will make Google Maps' StreetView a joy to use in the future.)
In short, the i8910 HD is stocked full of applications for many different things you might need. The only three things we would have liked to have seen would be a native Google Mail client, a YouTube video viewer and an FM transmitter, especially with the emphasis on media on this handset.
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Samsung i8910 HD: Battery life
Battery life was pleasantly surprising on the Samsung i8910 HD, lasting over a day on super-heavy usage and nearly two in general day to day use (which consisted of a lot of video watching). The quoted standby time of up to 450hrs is probably a little bit of an over-estimate, but Samsung has been canny with the size of the device and pushed a 1500mAh battery under the hood, which would explain the extended battery life.
The organiser, which consists of a calendar, note taker (which sadly has no handwriting recognition as far as we could see) a converter and a smart card reader for picking up business card details, is stocked enough to be useful without turning the phone into a business handset.
The business card reader was the most disappointing application of the bunch, as despite it managing to find the outlines of a card no problem, it couldn't read any information whatsoever, no matter how hard we tried. We don't think we'd be using this feature that often, but it's so cool we really wanted it to work.
The calendar is pretty standard fare, with the haptic feedback working nicely to let you know when you've hit a day, and an array of meeting or reminder buttons placed along the bottom so you don't have to go trudging through menus make the experience a lot nicer. In the future, you have to feel that this application will only become truly useful should more mobile phones start syncing with the likes of Google easily (although Exchange is supported).
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Samsung i8910 HD: PC Software
Samsung has packed its New PC studio software in the i8910 HD box, which essentially turns your phone into a Mac-like server on the PC. Its well-designed, clean software is among the best on the market (bar iTunes and the Apple iPhone, of course) as you can open and close things like video and music player, as well as edit images and mess around with contacts.
In essence, it lets you use the phone to its full extent without having to mess around with icons, which can only be a helpful thing in our eyes.
A common feature of mobile phone PC software is the ability to encode files to fit the handset, and while this is possible here (for instance with MP3 playback) the sheer amount of codecs supported (MP4, DivX, AVI) mean that you're very unlikely to need to, which is a real bonus.
There's the option of using the phone as a modem as well, which might not please your network, although if you don't constantly use your Samsung i8910 HD for surfing day in, day out, you might just get away with it.
We especially liked the dashboard bar at the bottom of the software, which lets you quickly access key phone functions. Other software is only just starting to catch up with the Phone to PC relationship, so we're happy Samsung has put some thought into this one.
Other connectivity worked well too, although all too frequently the Wi-Fi would drop out once the phone locked itself, which was frustrating when trying to download something over the airwaves, meaning you have to keep poking the screen to keep it alive.
The phone can be connected to the PC by either mini-USB or Bluetooth, depending on your poison, and happily it's defaulted to Bluetooth which means that setting it up to connect wirelessly is a piece of cake, rather than having to force it to do so.
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Samsung i8910 HD: Gallery: Official photography
Mobile phones Review
Samsung i8910 HD review
Renamed from the Omnia HD, it's a beast of media phone
Our Score User Score
Last reviewed: June 12th
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Samsung i8910 HD: TechRadar verdict
The Samsung i8910 HD plugs a hole in Samsung's portfolio by giving it a media monster to offer consumers, and there's a lot going on inside the handset for consumers to discover.
We liked
It's important to bear in mind that this is a media-centric handset, so when we say we love the screen size, it's for that reason. Should it have been utterly useless at video or the internet, then perhaps we might have been a lot more scathing, but the AMOLED Screen is to die for and video and music playback is simply awesome.
The range of applications and features on the phone is staggering, and the touchscreen interface and response is Samsung's best yet (and we haven't even mentioned the brilliant stand that comes in the box).
We disliked
The chunkiness of the phone might not be to everyone's taste, and the internet was a little bit picky to play with. The DLNA server was a complete joke, and we're a bit upset to not see more native clients on board out the box.
Some areas of the phone aren't as polished as we'd have liked, but you have to search jolly hard to weed them out.
Verdict
TechRadar's tip for Samsung's handset of the year so far, easily taking 'Best in Class' in terms of media functionality. It can match the Palm Pre and the Apple iPhone 3G S in terms of ability and raw processing power, and just works in the right way when you need it to. A handset that we really had to work hard to find much wrong with (providing you don't mind carrying around a pretty hefty phone).
How it compares to the rivals
The Palm Pre - The Samsung i8910 can't match the sheer integration the Palm shows, but it kicks its virtual ass at media playback.
The Apple iPhone 3G S - takes on the media darling and wins. The larger and richer screen makes it the choice for watching video, and the Exchange support is a winner too. Shame there isn't an App Store on board to compete.
HTC Magic - Google's latest darling is the other phone to recently nab 4.5 stars, and the two are pretty closely matched. However, the Magic might be more appealing to a wider audience thanks to its more conventional size and shape.
Nokia N97 - The 'other' S60 5th edition handset on the market (apart from the 5800 XpressMusic) and despite having a QWERTY keyboard and solid design, can't even begin to compete with Samsung's slick interface and better processing grunt.
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