More updates for Samsung i8910 Omnia HD on the way

A month ago one really patient Omnia HD user wrote a rather extensive report on the handset explaining its issues, suggesting improvements, new features and describing what he feels should be done to make it better. Well, Samsung have obviously studied it carefully and here comes their answer to the points made.

The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD report covered the handset's strong and weak points thoroughly and even went as far as to suggest possible solutions to many of them. Now we don't know how many of you took it seriously but Samsung obviously did and arranged a meeting with the author to tell the other side of the story. Here is a brief round-up of what the Korean company had to say about it.

The first discussed topic were the firmware updates changelogs. In every new update there are a lot of changes, but most of them are concerning the underlying platform, rather than the user interface and naturally go unnoticed by the masses. Furthermore, all the updates are region and carrier specific, so it takes even more time to adapt every new update with all carriers and countries. Still, new updates are constantly developing, but Samsung have very strict policy for quality assurance before releasing, which impacts on the public release.

Next comes the camera and more specifically the video recording. Samsung Omnia HD frame rate issues have been giving the users valid reasons to complain since day one. Fortunately, Samsung are working on it, promising a fix in the near future. They are also considering adding auto-focus in camcorder mode and time-laps videos.

Web browser will be improved with the next firmware, kinetic scrolling is also in it, but larger UI customization is not coming at this stage.

And here come some more bad news. The FM transmitter won't be enabled, despite the hardware being all there. Since the Omnia HD isn't part of the company business lineup of devices VPN also won't be coming to it. Freeing more space on the system partition also turned out impossible without compromising the performance of the device.

Next you won't see the portrait QWERTY (due to negative feedback), voice commands, threaded SMS and easy email configuration (too hard to implement), native VoIP (conflicts with carriers) or WMV/WMA codec compatibility. Luckily most of those shortcommings are already fixed with third party app.

The best part of it all is that Samsung promised to improve the performance of the i8910 Omnia HD through future updates. They are already working on new algorithms that should make the device feel much snappier in the future.

If you are curious to see the full report on the meeting follow this link.