MWC 2009: Samsung overview

Here we are at one of the hottest spots of the Mobile World Congress 2009. The Samsung booth hosts quite a number of really cool devices including the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD. Samsung high-end phones are all about touch UI, GPS receivers and OLED displays this year. And guess what - we happen to really dig the combination of all those.

Samsung booth at the MWC 2009

The world's second largest mobile phones manufacturer announced more than twenty new phones at the start of the Mobile World Congress and quite naturally we were really eager to check out all the interesting players.

The Samsung conference revealed the major goals and trends of the phone's portfolio development

Samsung i8910 Omnia HD

Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is definitely among the highlights of the MWC 2009. The incredibly powerful all-round device has a specs sheet that is unprecedented in the GSM world.

This monster of a handset comes with a 3.7" OLED capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels, capable of displaying up to 16 million colors. An 8 megapixel shooter with the industry-first 720p HD video recording at 24fps has made headlines well before the official launch. The other imaging assets include geo-tagging, face and smile detection and WDR (Wide Dynamic Range) setting.

The 3.7" OLED capacitive display provides room for a larger QWERTY keypad than to iPhone 3G one

The i8910 Omnia HD runs on the latest Symbian S60 5th smartphone touch UI. On the connectivity side, the device is just as well prepared as in imaging, offering Wi-Fi with DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, a standard microUSB port, 3.5mm audio jack and TV-out. A GPS receiver with A-GPS is aboard along with the optional Samsung Mobile Navigator by Route66.

Using GPS navigation on the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is a nice experience

The Omnia HD comes in two flavors: with 8 or 16GB of integrated memory, that both have a hot-swappable microSD card slot handling up to 16GB in turn. The other notable features include DivX/XviD support, accelerometer for screen auto rotate, proximity sensor for auto screen turn-off and FM radio.

The i8910 OmniaHD is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE handset with tri-band UMTS support topped with HSDPA (up to 7.2 Mbps) and HSUPA (up to 5.76 Mbps) support.

Samsung i8910 Omnia HD

Samsung have done a great job customizing the standard S60 UI that we've already seen in Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. The TouchWiz homescreen plugin is installed on top of the Symbian S60 5th edition OS, bringing a really improved homescreen usability.

Though a Symbian smartphone, the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD still has a TouchWiz homescreen

Some of the other nice touches to the user interface include changing the camera interface, which is now very user-friendly, unlike the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic one.

The large display is also nice as a viewfinder in camera mode

The photo contacts screen is another novelty where you can dial contacts by simply clicking on their photos.

The Symbian S60 Touch UI is nicely customized by Samsung

The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is one hell of a device even though it is quite a large device. but you've got to understand there is no way of including that many features and a 3.7" screen on anything much smaller than that.

The back side of the handset

We managed to take a few sample snapshots with the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD camera. The 8 megapixel camera is undoubtedly one of the main features of the device but since the device is still far from complete the quality of the samples is quite lower than what the final units are going to offer.

Have a look at the camera samples:

However even at this pre-release unit managed to record really impressive HD video clips. With plenty of detail and quite acceptable frame rate the video quality is way better than what we have ever seen from a mobile phone. There are still some tidbits to fix but we are quite confident that this will be done before the handset hits the shelves. A quick glimpse at the recorded clips details almost made our jaws drop, revealing a bit rate of 7800 kbps.

Here are two samples for you to check out.

Video 1

Video 2

You can also go and check them out over at Vimeo if you prefer watching them straight from your browser.

Video 1 at Vimeo (recompressed)

Video 2 at Vimeo (recompressed)

Watching HD videos on the i8910 Omnia HD is also a really cool pastime.

Watching HD movies on the i8910 Omnia HD is surprisingly possible