Samsung i8910 Omnia HD

The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD is the first cell-phone in the world that captures HD video (720p at 24fps to be precise). It is geared towards being a complete multimedia phone and it manages to do that extremely well. All in all, the Omnia HD left us very impressed.

Thanks to its 3.7 inch display, the Omnia looks intimidating. In fact, apart from HTC's Touch HD we haven't come across a phone that fills up your palm in this manner. However, this does not mean that the phone is bulky. Interestingly, Samsung has managed to keep the phone's width to manageable proportions. Also, the phone does look good thanks to lacquered black body and the aforementioned huge screen. The phone's back has the 8MP camera and the LED flash set into it. Overall, in spite of its size, the Omnia HD still manages to look classy.

One of the Omnia HD's stand-out and most visible feature is its 3.7-inch AMOLED display. Not only is it one of the biggest screens we have seen on a phone, but it is also one of the better screens we have seen. Indoors, it looks beautiful and makes colors pop. Unfortunately,it doesn't look that great under direct sunlight.

The Omnia HD is packed to the brim with features including 8GB of internal memory expandable to 32GB thanks to a microSD slot. There is the very important 3.5mm jack for headphones and stereo speakers(one at the top and one at the phone's base). Of course the phone also has Wi-Fi and GPS, so there should be no problems with regard to connectivity. The phone uses the Symbian OS v9.4 Series 60, the same OS used by the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the Nokia N97. We found no problem using the phone's interface thanks to the 600MHz Arm Cortex A8 processor it uses.

If you have grown wary of the Omnia HD after reading the last couple of sentences, don't be. Although the Omnia might use the same OS as the aforementioned Nokia phones, its interface is much more refined.Yes, there are still some issues- the UI still shows some inconsistencies. For e.g. some actions require a single touch while some need the buttons to be touched twice. However, overall, the UI is immensely usable. The screen definitely helps in this aspect as the phone can afford to use large buttons which are a pleasure to navigate.Typing on the virtual keypad is also aided similarly.

At the end of the day though, the Omnia's selling feature is its 8MP camera that is capable of shooting HD videos. The videos we shot came out crisp and all the colors looked well-balanced. As compared to the Creative Vado HD, yes, the videos were less sharp, but we believe that it was easily the best video we have seen shot by a camera-phone.The pictures shot by the Omnia HD were also very good, especially when the LED flash came to the party. We have only seen the Samsung S8300 UltraTouch shoot better pictures.

The Omnia HD also excels at playing music. Apart from the slightly low volume levels, there was nothing we could complain about.Browsing the Web on the default browser is helped by the large screen, but we still preferred the usability afforded by the Opera Mini browser.

The Omnia HD is priced at Rs. 28,800 (US$612) and in our opinion is the best high-end phone in the market today. It even beats the iPhone at its own game, thanks to a usable UI, exhaustive feature-set and excellent imaging capabilities. How's that for high-definition?

Bottom Line

The Samsung Omnia HD is a high powered multimedia phone. It has a brilliant large screen and exquisite imaging capabilities. No wonder it blew into our Top 5.