The Samsung Omnia i900 raised some eyebrows this year when it was released in the US but was deemed unsuitable for the market due to its lack of 3G in the States. It can only operate on 3G in Europe. Despite this, the phone has sold in the thousands to users who want an iPhone with a twist. One look at the phone and I knew I had to have one
It has the looks – sleek, stylish and a ‘brush effect’ back that really gives it that something extra. I love the big screen. I threw up a few photos and it handled them well. The color is fantastic. This only improved when I used the media player to watch Cloverfield. It was in my opinion fantastic. Great sound too - much better than that of other phones such as the sound on the Nokia N97.
What’s even better about this phone is its connectivity. It has Wi-Fi to enable you to surf for free in hotspots or indeed your own home and it is also 3G compatible boasting speeds of over 7Mb/s for great HTML browsing. Connecting is easy to set up and once you're up and running you'll be able to connect in seconds to WifI, EDGE and 3G. I had no problem loading pages like Yahoo!, MySpace, YouTube and of course Bright Hub. The e-mail function is also great. Next, the full QWERTY keyboard is great with plenty of room so if you want to press 'J', you actually press it instead of pressing 'H' or 'K' by accident.
The i900 also has a 5mp camera with a flash which provoked many ‘thank you’s" from users who wanted to see a phone with digital camera quality and a flash to match. For a bit of fun, I went into my garden and started snapping some of the flowers. When you look at them on fullscreen they're fantastic - again owing to the screen display quality. There is also a second camera on the front of the device to enable video calls (keep in mind that this feature is available everywhere but the US).
This Smartphone runs the Windows 6.1 OS and as such you have all your basic Windows features such as the Start Menu and programs such as Word and Internet Explorer. These programs come in handy when you’re planning on syncing the phone with your computer and need to open Word document on the move. I easily read documents I had typed up on Word and could easily edit them.
The touch screen and the way Samsung have utilised it is also a great feature of the phone. You can drag and drop current programs onto the main landing page and open or close them as you please - which I liked in particular. It's as simple as flicking programs around your screen as you please and this enables several programs to run at once with each one being only a finger tap away.
One bad thing I will say about the i900 is that it comes with a stylus that can only be attached via a string and can't be hidden away in the phone which is what I would have liked to see. All in all though, this is a great phone that serves as both a personal phone with all the media applications and a business phone with Microsoft’s OS doing them proud.
Overall: 8/10