Samsung Omnia II Reviewed

[Nurhisham Hussein]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.phonearena.com/htmls/Samsung-Omnia-II-I8000-Review-review-r_2231.html' target='_blank'>http://www.phonearena.com/htmls/Sam...iew-r_2231.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"This new Omnia is bigger and badder, with just about everything getting a refresh. The screen has gained half an inch- now up to 3.7" and the resolution has quadrupled to 480x800. AMOLED technology has replaced TFT for improved battery life and more vibrant images. Video capture is now DVD quality, and connection standards such as 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS are all on board, along with 8GB of internal storage."</em><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/ppct/auto/1249630444.usr14226.jpg" style="border: 0px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>Thinking of getting one? Want to know what the fuss is about? phoneArena have a fairly full review chock full of photos of the Omnia II, and are fairly complimentary on TouchWiz, battery life, and multimedia capability; so-so on the camera and call quality; and but disappointed on the actual speed of the device. That's really odd with a 800MHz processor on board - or are these fancy new interfaces outrunning the capability of the hardware to keep up?</p>

[whydidnt]

First the Toshiba, and now the Omnia II - both with Fast processors, yet seemingly having performance issues. Is it a driver issue? Slow Memory? Bad architecture decisions when building the OS? It seems strange that these devices are released with performance issues, when they seem to take forever to come to market anyway. Almost like an inherent problem hiding somewhere.

Performance concerns aside, this looks like a great option for those that prefer high-end Windows mobile devices.

[Gerard]

Not to worry. Once these devices have been commonly available for a couple of months, some good ROM cooks on XDA-developers will whip up alternate ROM versions with all the junk chopped out and neat freeware apps thrown in to facilitate smoother functionality. They've worked wonders with lots of devices, and these should prove no different. The OEMs seem often to feel it necessary to try and compete with the iPhone in the gee whiz department, GUI-wise. Bad idea, considering it's the depth of functionality which makes WM special, not the pretty pictures and slidey things. Once garbage like 'Manila' and the 'HTC Cube' are gone in phones, general operation speeds right up and these devices become a pleasure to use, even with sub-400MHz processors. My Elfin runs nicely with only 200, thanks to the cook called dsixda and his tweakings to WM6.5.

Regarding the comment in the review about home screen page switching taking 5 to 10 seconds per swipe; this is a common problem with resource file loading since the beginning of the Pocket PC. The system simply takes ages to locate and then display icons in many kinds of EXE files, whether native or third party software. My solution, arrived at many years ago, has been to generate a series of folders and sort the shortcuts into those folders, so no one folder is too full and they generally display within a second or two. Multimedia programs seem to take longest generally speaking, but that is generally not a folder I need to open quickly as I do with PIM applications or web browsers and email clients. Keeping them separate makes use much more efficient, if not entirely solving this inherent problem with the WM structure.

I would suggest that since even with a mammoth effort at streamlining such as been made here by Samsung these icons still take forever to display, that there be introduced a 'meta' icon system instead. A simple layering of icons might make possible virtually instantaneous loading of pages full of shortcuts. By this I mean that instead of using an LNK file to link directly to the program for launching, that the LNK files listed in the Start Menu should point to the true program LNK files, probably best resident within the installed programs' own folders. Similarly with native OS-based software - but this is already done there in most cases, with an LNK right next to the EXE related to it in \Windows. This suggested type of shortcut would point to the true one and launch it, which by turn would launch the actual EXE file. The trick would be in putting just one resource file within this new type of shortcut file, the program's custom icon. This would change the nature of the true shortcut of course, from a simple text file pointer to a file only slightly larger, containing the path to the EXE but also a small BMP icon.

Just a thought. Maybe someone at Microsoft might make use of this and within a few years we could all see Start Menu folders opening in a second or less every time. I won't hold my breath. Seems the tradition of making millions of users waste minutes per week waiting for the little 'beach ball' (or hourglass, or whatever crappy little spinny thing they decide to show us while we wait) is still very solid in Redmond. Heck, they could save countless hours with Vista and whatever comes next with the same method. Right now it still takes forever to load many of the folders in my wife's Vista notebook, just because the icon resources are so hard to find in the traditional manner. And her PC is not under-powered, any more than this wonderful Samsung device is. It's a problem Microsoft invented and they just haven't got around to swallowing their pride and fixing it.