Samsung I8000 Omnia II preview: First look

One hell of a gallery

The Photo Album is the main picture viewing app. It sorts the photos by month and shows the first six from every album. Scrolling is easy as a finger sweep.

The Photo Album

Selecting an image loads it in a single view where you can zoom or slide to the next one. There are dedicated on-screen buttons for zooming, which toggle on and off automatically. Tapping somewhere on the photo zooms directly on that part.

Zooming in on different parts of a photo

There is, of course, slideshow functionality and you can adjust the direction, slide time and transition effect. It works fine and combined with the huge screen turns the phone into a perfect slideshow device.

The slideshow options

If you open a picture directly from the file manager, you'll find yourself in the same basic gallery, though you do lose the ability to slide to the next or previous image.

The other very intriguing feature in the photo browser was something that we missed the first time. After a few shakes of the phone the whole interface changed into a 4 x 5 grid of pictures sorted by date. You can slide the whole thing just like the standard picture viewer.

The grid view

There is a button to exit and another to bring up an alternative view. This next type of gallery was another surprise for us. It reminds us of the Photo Contacts in the Samsung S5600 but with extended functionality.

The 3D arc view

First of all your photos are collected into a 3D arc and they slightly overlap one another. You scroll them with a sweeping finger gesture,.

But that's not all - there is an alternative arc of thumbnails crossing the current one - and it holds the folders. It is not exactly smooth at this point, but the basic idea is commendable. Samsung wants to create a superior photo browsing experience with the help of 3D graphics and an innovative interface. So with a single move you can scroll either the images within a folder or the whole list of folders.

The two intersecting arcs - picture rotation and folder rotation

Please don't look too critically at the reversed photos and the FPS indicator - it's still an early piece of software and there are occasional bugs like that.

We already have great expectations of the whole new WinMo user interface and the 3D cube thing, but adding the new player and gallery raises them even higher.

It may as well turn out that Samsung have given their WinMo handset the total interface makeover that Windows Mobile has been needing for quite some time.

A camera well done

The Samsung I8000 Omnia II is capable of taking 5 megapixel photos and capturing VGA clips. There is a dual LED flash to assist with low-light pictures and videos.

The I8000 camera viewfinder is familiar to us from Omnia HD, Beat DJ, 8300 UltraTouch etc. The comfortable interface is nicely touch-optimized and has all you need in the two vertical taskbars on each side of the viewfinder.

The camera interface

The basic options are here - ISO, white balance, default storage, stabilizer, etc. You can see the presence of WDR, which continues to makes its way into many recent Samsung cameraphones. You can switch the default storage between the main memory, the built-in 8 gigs flash and the microSD card.

Camera options

Unfortunately we are unable to provide you with camera samples as our unit had some issues related to its pre-release status. We will of course make up for that as soon as we acquire a more stable device.

Since the camera was non-functional, we weren't expecting much from the camcorder, but it worked just fine and we were able to shoot a sample video at VGA@15fps. It's recorded in the inferior 3gp format, rather like on the XPERIA X1. Of course, the whole camera software will surely receive a complete overhaul by the time the I8000 Omnia II hits the shelves. As far as the official; specs go, the Samsung Omnia II should be able to record video at D1@30fps.

The camcorder interface

Here is a sample video for you to check out.