Welcome to mid-2008, and Samsung has just released the ‘Omnia’ (Latin for ‘everything’), a handset designed to be the ultimate Swiss Army knife for the Windows Mobile era. The i900 is a sleek, brushed-metal slab that aims to take the iPhone’s touch-centric crown and add all the technical features Apple ‘forgot.’ In the UK, it’s being pushed as the high-end alternative for the professional who needs a ‘real’ computer in their pocket. It’s a 122g masterclass in packed engineering, featuring a massive 3.2-inch WQVGA (240 x 400) display and an optical trackpad that works like a miniature laptop mouse.
On the technical front, the Omnia is a specification warrior. It features a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, a face detection system, and a wide dynamic range mode, features that were unheard of in the touch-screen market at the time. It records VGA video at 30fps and includes a powerful LED flash. The screen uses Samsung’s vibrant TFT technology, and while it’s resistive rather than capacitive (meaning you sometimes need to use the included stylus or a firm fingernail), the ‘TouchWiz’ UI overlay adds some much-needed finger-friendliness to the underlying Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS. It’s one of the first phones to feature a built-in accelerometer that doesn’t just rotate the screen, but also allows you to ‘mute’ a call by simply turning the phone face-down on a table.
Under the hood, the i900 is powered by a 624 MHz Marvell processor and comes with a massive 8GB or 16GB of internal flash memory, a huge technical advantage over its rivals. It also features a microSDHC slot, meaning you could potentially carry a 32GB library of media in your pocket. It’s a 7.2Mbps HSDPA beast with Wi-Fi, GPS, and an FM radio with RDS. One of its unique technical flourishes is the TV-Out capability, allowing you to project your mobile office onto a boardroom monitor. The battery life is surprisingly robust for a Windows Mobile device, with the 1440 mAh pack providing enough juice for nearly two days of moderate use. The Omnia is a technical powerhouse that occasionally trips over its own complexity, but for the UK user who wants ‘everything’ without compromise, it is the most capable handset of the year.