Samsung I8000 Omnia II review: A surprising experience

Getting yourself organized

Windows Mobile offers several time-management features and all of them are easily syncable with Outlook. In the Omnia II you mostly get the standard Windows interface for the calendar. It has been slightly modified in the new version of the OS and doesn't look as repulsive now but there aren't too many changes in the functionality.

The Calendar offers daily, weekly, monthly and even yearly and agenda views but there are no different appointments available for setting up. Instead you get a single appointment item that you can place in different categories but you always get the same fields.

The Omnia II regular calenadar

There is support for cutting, copying and pasting of events and you also filter them by categories if you wish. Any of the available view modes can be set as default and you can choose the first day of the week to be either Monday or Sunday.

You also get the Touch calendar with the Omnia II, which has much better looks and is better optimized for finger use but slightly lags behind in terms of functionality.

The touch calendar is way more convenient

The Tasks application allows you to add tasks and assign them priority. The Notes also come in handy, as you can either type or directly write the text down on the screen. The Audio Note and the Calculator need no explanation - their interface is only slightly polished, compared to previous-generation WinMo devices.

Smart Memo is an application that allows you to take notes by writing directly to the phone's screen. You get different colors and brush sizes plus you can zoom in and out of those notes. You can even save them as JPEG files or send them over MMS, email or Bluetooth if you want to.

Smart memo allows you to draw directly to the phone's screen

The Alarm clock allows you to set a vast number of alarms to act as either wake-up or reminders. The dedicated wake-up alarm has three slots, which should allow you to wake up at different time in the different days of the week.

The Alarm clock app is just great

You can however set as many additional alarms as you want, each with its own name, repeat pattern, snooze time and ringtone. You also get to pick the volume and whether or not the alarm should power on the phone if it happens to be switched off.

The other extra features of the clock application are World clock application that can keep you updated with the time in as many time zones as you want, a stopwatch and an anniversary list. In the latter you can enter as many anniversaries as you want and optionally set up an alarm for each one to act as a reminder on either the day of the event or up to 7 days before it.

The World clock and the stopwatch add-ons

The final item in the organizing package is the neat and simple converter (fancily named Smart converter) that offers weight, length, area, volume and temperature conversions. There is also a currency converter and a neat Tip calculator.

The converter even offers a tip calculator

Document editor is at your disposal

Among the other WM core applications is the Office Mobile package featuring support for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. With the latest version of Office Mobile, you also have the OneNote application.

Not only are their very good for viewing your office documents straight from the phone, but they also offer editing too. There are no extra charges - you are good to go straight out of the box.

Once again, the WVGA display of the Omnia II proves superior in fitting as much of the documents contents on the screen as possible - especially in portrait mode.

The Omnia II handles all kinds of office documents with ease

Thanks to Adobe Reader LE, there is also support for viewing PDF documents. We are extremely pleased with the performance of the Omnia II in this area, as opening and handling PDF documents is usually rather slow on most handsets.

PDF files are also supported thanks to Adobe Reader LE

There's also some extra apps

The Samsung I8000 Omnia II has got preinstalled applications, outside its organizing and multimedia packages too. It comes with plenty of preloaded applications - the essentials are already installed, which means you can start using it straight away. There's the regular stuff such as an RSS Reader and a Streaming Media manager for a start but there's some new cool stuff also.

The RSS Reader application is rather self explanatory. It gives you quick access to RSS feeds for staying on top of the latest news and content on your favorite websites. The Podcasts application allows you to subscribe and download video and audio podcasts of your choice.

The Picture Frame application allows you to use the I8000 Omnia II as a digital picture frame with content of your own and highly customizable styles.

The Digital Frame app even shows your appointments in the calendar

You can have music playing in the background too and, if needed, event alerts such as incoming message or alarms can be suppressed when the Digital Frame is running.

Another application is the rather handy Search Phone, capable of searching throughout applications and the whole file system. You have the option to set filters so that the application searches only in the places you need.

Search phone application

In fact the Omnia II is equipped with two search applications - the other is named Smart search and adds some nice graphics and transition effects to the whole searching thingy. Oh and it's pretty good at actually finding what you are looking for too.

Smart search looks a lot better

The MSN duo of applications - Money and Weather - is also here. Those are convinent tools for retrieving weather and stocks updates straight from you handset.

The Smart reader is an impressively accurate business card/document reader which works in English and French on our unit. It can be set to shoot automatically once it detects a business card within the frame. All the contact details can also be stored in your Phonebook should you choose so.

The Smart reader app

The Midomi app a music recognition software, which however comes with a twist. You are not limited to recording the song from the radio any more - you can just sing it yourself or even simply hum it to the microphone and in most cases it will recognize the track. After that Midomi allows you to find lyriucs and even video of the track in question.

Midomi music recognition service

The Omnia II also comes with a video editor that allows you to make your own videos with up to VGA resolution. You can insert photos, video clips, audio tracks and even custom text through the nicely designed interface.

Video editor

The Samsung I8000 Omnia II arrived with a pre-loaded app called Application Download, granting you access to Samsung's app store. Of course, there's the inevitable comparison to the App Store as the structure and concept is quite close.

The Samsung app store

Applications are displayed into several tabs - Recommended, Hot and Category. You can also see all downloaded items or to search for new ones. Before you download an app you can read its detailed description and check its rating.

We also found the Microsoft's own Marketplace in the Main menu but the service is not yet ready to launch so it was inactive with a Coming Soon tag.