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Samsung Omnia Pro

By Joseph Hanlon, CNET.com.au on March 16th, 2010

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Topics

mobile phone, samsung, windows mobile, pocket office

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Overview

It looks like a BlackBerry but behaves like an old-school Windows Mobile. Samsung's Omnia Pro struggles to deliver on our basic expectations of what a smartphone should be.

Editors' rating:

5.0/10

RRP:

AU$529.00

The good

  • Decent battery life
  • Access to Microsoft App Marketplace
  • Basic suite of Office tools

The bad

  • Sluggish performance
  • Poor web browsing
  • Cumbersome Samsung UI

Available plans

9 plans available starting from $49 to $250

Design

The latest phone from BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is ... hold up, this isn't a BlackBerry. No, but it sure looks like one. This is the Samsung Omnia Pro but its likeness to the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is uncanny. And it's not just the fact that it's a candybar with a QWERTY keyboard, it's the fine details too. The way the rows on the keyboard bend like a smiling mouth, and the face of the top and bottom of the phone has a tapered, curved moulding.

Omnia Pro and BlackBerry

The Omnia Pro (left) and its Canadian Idol(Credit: CBSi)

Where Samsung varies its design from the Bold are places where the Omnia Pro is definitely less appealing. The navigation panel looks pinched together and is cramped and hard to use, for example. The screen is also far less impressive; though its shares the Bold's 2.4-inch screen size, its QVGA resolution lacks sharpness and a depth of colour. This won't impact everyday tasks like making calls and reading emails, but it definitely makes a difference when you try to watch videos or browse the web.

The QWERTY keyboard is OK but not fantastic. Each key is curved and raised to a soft peak, and while this doesn't offer the same precision as Nokia's E72 or the Bold, it is fine for tapping out emails. Around the edge of the handset, Samsung has covered the various ports and buttons with covers that lay flush with the edge of the phone, a nice touch, though we were disappointed to discover that this range of inputs didn't include a 3.5mm headphone socket.

Windows with a sprinkle of Samsung

The software running the Pro is Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard Edition, a version of WinMo we've only seen once previously on the HTC Snap. This isn't the trendy-looking Windows Mobile 6.5 that Microsoft showed in its photo galleries, this is the ugly step-sister. Samsung has tried to dress her up with a variation of its TouchWiz UI overlaid on top of the basic WinMo UI, but Samsung's efforts actually make things more difficult. Down the left-hand side runs a column of shortcuts, each of which activates a menu, but moving between the shortcuts and their menus requires you to hit the "home" button, rather than just moving the cursor with the nav-pad. This might sound like a pedantic complaint, but it's so counter-intuitive that it really got under our skin.

As with all new Windows Phones, the Samsung Omnia Pro offers users email, calendar and contacts synchronisation via their MS Exchange server at work, plus the ability to read and edit MS Office documents. Of course, just about every other brand of smartphone also offers these tools so they are not exactly a competitive advantage for Microsoft and its OEM partners any more. In fact, there are elements of its business tools equation that other phones do better. We discovered while reviewing the Pro that you cannot adjust the synchronisation schedule for your mail, etc, from the handset, and that you need to connect to a PC to adjust these settings. Users, like us, who change their sync schedules often will find this completely unacceptable.

The Windows Marketplace can be easily installed on the Omnia Pro, and it's a glimmer of hope for an otherwise boring, business-like Samsung smartphone. The store gives users the chance to improve their smartphone experience with a huge selection of software to download, though we did notice a much shorter list of programs available to the Omnia Pro than other WinMo phones we've seen recently, probably due to hardware incompatibilities, or the landscape orientation of the screen.

Performance

More damaging to our impressions of the Omnia Pro than the drab UI is the Pro's somewhat sluggish performance. We aren't talking about unusable and slow performance, but the interface certainly couldn't keep up with our input via the navigation pad during our testing. Moving the cursor around the screen takes a little patience, and today's modern mobile user isn't known for their patience. This lag is also noticeable when you access applications, but it's most noticeable when surfing the web.

Every page you load, every link you click, will be met by a long pause and a blank screen, even for pages with almost no data to load, like mobile sites. This isn't entirely an issue with the processing power, as the in-built Internet Explorer browser shares an equal amount of the blame. Moving the cursor around a page in the browser feels like dragging your finger through a pot of thick honey, and large desktop versions of sites will struggle to load at all. The Omnia Pro might as well be a 2G with no Wi-Fi for the amount of good this high-end hardware will do you as it battles the crappy browser to bring content to the screen.

The saving grace for some will be the decent battery life cycles the Omnia Pro delivers. With typical usage we managed to get two full days of use out of the Omnia Pro without recharging, and always at least a day even with heavy usage of data transferring applications.

Overall

Samsung's blatant "re-imagining" of the popular BlackBerry Bold should be the least of your worries. The Omnia Pro doesn't pack enough processing power to run its simple watered-down version of Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.5, and the end result is a handset that struggles to deliver on our basic expectations from any device in the smartphone category. The upside for Samsung fans is its reasonable price, with Telstra in Australia offering the Pro on an AU$30 plan or for AU$529 outright. We'd recommend spending a little more and getting a Nokia E71 instead.

Find the best Samsung Omnia Pro plans available.


Specifications

General
Availability Telstra
Dimensions (W x D x H) 59.6 x 12.6 x 111.8 mm
Weight 110 g
Form factor QWERTY keyboard
Phone type 3G, Business
Processor Qualcomm MSM 7201
Processor speed 528 MHz
RAM 256 MB
ROM 256 MB
Connectivity
Networks GSM 850, GSM 900, GSM 1800, GSM 1900, UMTS 850, UMTS 2100
Connectivity Bluetooth, 802.11b, 3G, HSDPA, HSUPA, USB, GPS
Data services GPRS, WAP, EDGE, HSDPA
USB connectivity Yes
Display
Screen resolution 240 x 320 pixels
Number of colours 65K
Physical features
Included accessories Manual, Software (Windows), Charger, Stereo headset, USB cable
Available colours Silver
Battery
Battery capacity 1480 mAh
Talk time 10 hours
Standby time 590 hours
Messaging
Messaging options SMS, MMS, E-mail, Instant Messaging, Push e-mail, IM
E-mail protocols POP3, IMAP4, SMTP
Social Networking Facebook
Memory
Internal memory 100 MB
Expansion slot microSD
Functionality
Input method QWERTY keyboard
Operating system Windows Mobile
Version of OS 6.5 Standard Edition
App Store Yes
Supported audio file formats AAC+, MP3, WMA
Supported video file formats MPEG-4, WMV, H.264
Other supported file formats PPT, DOC, PDF
Video calls Yes
Web browser Yes
Push-to-talk No
Voice recorder No
Ringtone options MP3
Java Yes
Supported picture file formats JPG
Camera
Camera resolution 3-megapixel
Camera flash none
Video capture Yes
Digital zoom 2 x
Entertainment
Games Yes
FM radio Yes
Video player Yes
Music player Yes
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