Gadgetory

hey guys it's Branham in a min from pocketnow.com and this is another pocket knife throwback with the samsung omnia 2 let's get to it so previously we did a thorough back with the HTC touch diamond2 touch and aemond was and sort of still is a very important device in defining smart phone history it really brought to the forefront touch friendly interfaces that were previously characterized by stylus input the iPhone came around it changed everything it showed the world that you don't need a stylus to operate a phone we started to see a shift away from the stylus into touch friendly operation so this was about this came out in about June 2008 and then the omnia 2 came out about a year later in June 2009 then the Verizon version hit in about December 2009 which is funny to think that just about three months ago or so when it was December 2010 this device which you're gonna see feels very old had come out just one year before kind of amazing so this device was very important because it showed off the best that Samsung had to offer in the smartphone area this is before they had the Galaxy S smartphones this is before they really got into Android and so they put their best effort forward to customize this interface to do some interesting things with Windows Mobile so let's talk about the device and sort of the characteristics of it we've got an AMOLED screen here of course Samsung has been leading the pack in doing Super AMOLED Super AMOLED plus and started with the omnia here when they did the AMOLED screen which was just beautiful in comparison to the standard LCD we were seeing on other devices so the resolution is 800 down by 480 across it's a resistive touch screen of course so again if we tilt it in the light just too right you can actually see the screen press in see if we can get it there we go you can kind of see it's a little bit mushy so it's not as sensitive as a capacitive screen inside we've got an 800 megahertz processor with 256 megabytes of RAM that was actually pretty impressive and then back in 2009 the Qualcomm Snapdragon 1 gigahertz didn't make it to the scene yet and so 800 megahertz was fast for a smartphone now when we reviewed this phone we reviewed both the Verizon version here and also the European version we thought it was pretty thin but while taking it out of the box this thing is a tank in fact let's compare it to one of Samsung's thinnest devices the captivate Wow it almost seems 2 times as thick it's quite remarkable let's go around the hardware here we've got a strangely placed 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on the left side of the device got a volume up and down rocker this looks to be a dedicated ok button of course Windows Mobile allows you to program various buttons on the bottom we have a microphone on this side we have a dual action camera button with a lock button that would lock the screen plus a port for microUSB which is great Samsung Samsung start to move away from the mini USB to the microUSB also on the front we've got these buttons that are very reminiscent of the first omnia the first omnia was a huge seller that you might remember the samsung omnia and we've also got a proximity sensor and a light sensor there at the top and on the back we have this really cool red design which is was different from the European version they kind of spurts this up a little bit when they brought it to the US got a 5 megapixel camera can do 420 p video or actually 480p sort of they call it a DVD quality not really HD plus a flash which was pretty unique for a device like this if we pop off the back battery cover we will get if we can take it off here you'll see the micro SD port there so you can put some expandable memory in there so let's turn on the omnia 2 and talk about the software offering that that they offered here so when press the lock device or the lock button here we're gonna do a slide to unlock and this is one of the first windows mobile phones to do a sort of unlock mechanism like this and I'm not even sure how this works touch to unlock ok there so now now Samsung what they tried to do here is emulate Android a little bit and it's kind of funny how poorly the execution was carried out so we've got multiple home screens here and of course Windows Mobile wasn't really intended to have multiple homescreens you know we have touchflo 3d which sort of brings that idea to the table but in a totally different way Windows Mobile had the today's screen which was just a screen with information your next appointment so HTC innovated on that today's screen and so did Samsung although Samsung did sort of a poor job at it in terms of performance and here's the lockscreen again there we go so what we have here are three home screens it's really choppy to move between them and it this the phone's not even responsive it seems that there's a delay after doing everything as you can see here that has to do with probably the process or the software and the sensitivity of the screen but it was cool to see how we could actually add widgets and by the way I'm going to use my finger for all the input because the stylus that came with the omnia was a little appendage that you had to dangle off the edge of the the little lanyard loop so here we can add a variety of widgets and let's go through these NC we have the widget manager we have the time you can slide these over again this was really cool back in the day to be able to add these widgets and customize your home screens but now of course we have Android which lets you do that to a very full extent going down we have shortcuts new message music player being early days of being there weather bug myspace Facebook so I mean what you can do here is take them drag them and maybe even slide them to other screens you couldn't even do that actually you would have to slide over to another screen like so open up the app drawer again slide it over and and land it on the home screen so here we've got what looks to be a little gallery so you can flip through pictures and so on and so forth so this interface was kind of clunky not that usable there weren't that many good widgets and there was the promise that developers third-party developers could add their own widgets they never really did okay so let's talk more about what we have here here is the cube and this is where Samsung probably went to a conference room and said let's do something awesome with the graphics but hey if it's not usable that's okay this cube thing is indeed cool and it's shows off the the processor and the GPU well but it's totally unusable why would you ever want to use this cube in our testing of this phone we found this to be the most useless thing imaginable because no one's gonna take the time to go into this cube thing spin around a 3d looking figure just to land on one of these things randomly only to open it it might not even be the thing you want to open so again this is sort of like a task switcher if we tap on the globe it spins around and we get some shortcuts some cover flow of websites right I mean this is this is not the most efficient workflow if you're using your phone so that was the cube now if we went into the Start menu and by the way this is running windows mobile 6.5 we've got Samsung's sort of customized menu system here so again we can swipe and once again when you swipe there's a delay swipe it moves swipe it moves it's not instant like phones of today and we've got a lot of applications here let's go into the web and see what it was like they included the Opera browser because of course pocket Internet Explorer just didn't cut it and because again this is a resistive touch screen you're not gonna be able to pinch to zoom or do any of those fancy things that you can on phones of today so let's see we're gonna try to enter an address here we get swipe on the screen which is a nice keyboard a little bit difficult to use on a resistive screen because you got to apply a little bit more pressure than usual so here pocket now is going to load this has an accelerometer so we can jump into landscape eventually and so it's going to load up or over Wi-Fi right now and we'll see we'll see how it does so we're gonna stop it right there it's been about 45 seconds I cut back in on the video here and it's gonna finish loading so let's move around on the page see what scrolling is like not too bad actually we get some checker boards there it's trying to reload certain elements of the page but I mean this was pretty good web browsing for the day and although you can't really see it on the video the super-mo web screen looks pretty darn good it's not even close to a Super AMOLED the Samsung has today but compared to the LCDs of 2009 the the AMOLED was definitely something to write home about so let's go back to the main screens here and this should actually work in landscape let's see no no it doesn't work in landscape okay so let's see what happens when we press this button that should just take us to our program list and so we can against white side to side there are some things down here like the task switcher so Windows Mobile could multitask right but they wanted to add a new interface for multitasking sort of these live previews let me show you how that works if we open up another program let's say we open up Bing let's go back to this the program list alarms and let's open up something else my files okay and now we'll go back to the test switcher we should see a bunch of programs open there we go with live previews this was really cool and then you can kind of switch between your programs from there you get this animation I mean this was again really cool stuff for the day and then we can go down here to edit we can rearrange the items in the program list is very customizable very cool this is how you access settings and then you get this interesting sort of almost Motorola Xoom like honeycomb interface with the blue and sort of the fluorescent look and from here we can change all of the settings on the phone most people couldn't tell that this was legacy Windows Mobile I mean Samsung skinned this so heavily that it became unrecognizable let's see what else we have in here so we have the Microsoft Office suite File Explorer you get the point so to wrap things up Samsung is really on the cutting edge of UI design back in 2009 they were competing with HTC to try to make an awesome interface before they really had adopted Android and they they used Windows Mobile as their platform and even though Windows Mobile is relatively restricted and what you can do at the end of the day they skin the heck out of it to make it look like almost android looks today in a lot of ways which is really commendable and very interesting to see be sure to subscribe to our channel if you want to see more PocketNow throwback so give us a thumbs up if you like this video thanks for watching and that's it for now