Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the hardware tour of the highly anticipated samsung omnia 2 now this device will see a release on Verizon in the u.s. in a few months and also see release on several global carriers within the coming weeks and months as well now this particular model is a European import and it has the UMTS 1900 band which is pretty rare for a European device which means in some parts of the United States where I live fortunately you will be able to get 3G on ATT so I've been getting 3G actually HSDPA at time this which has been quite terrific to be able to have it on on this device so let's talk about the case that it comes with it's more of a pouch than it is a case it has this strange pattern on it that's not characteristic of leather or anything else you see it kind of looks like a zebra and on the back there is a hole for the speaker and let's slide it out and take a look at the device the most stunning part of the omnia 2 is the screen it uses AMOLED screen technology and what that means for you the end user is that the blacks are more black the colors are brighter and and more vivid and power consumption is a little better if you want to see a technical definition of what a AMOLED screen does check out Wikipedia but in terms of the end user it's all about color clarity and power consumption so let's zoom in onto the top here we'll take a tour around the device so this particular model has 8 gigabytes of onboard memory the omnia 2 will also come with 16 gigabytes so you can store photos and movies and and lots of documents if you do that kind of thing we have a speaker here and then we have a front-facing video camera if your carrier supports it now what you can't see behind here is a light sensor and a proximity sensor the proximity sensor is used to turn off the screen while you're on a call while you're holding it up to your face which again helps to save on the battery life so the screen is 3.7 inches diagonal it's the biggest resolution that Windows Mobile can support which is 800 down and 480 across the screen is indeed very very crisp very clear the blacks are super black the only problem with the AMOLED screen is that if you take it outside you'll notice a milky white coating appear on the screen it makes it difficult to see things the contrast is greatly reduced and I guess that's just a characteristic of AMOLED screens or perhaps it's a flaw with house samsung made there made their display let's take a look at the buttons here on the bottom which have a nice kind of brushed metal look to them if you move it around in the light we have a very large cost start and call n key here and this button in the center it's not a six way d-pad as it may look it's actually a button that launches the program switcher cube which we'll talk about later it'll also launch the program menu item and again we're going to go through that in detail coming up soon on the software to our review so zooming out a little bit we'll go to the side of the device where we have a volume rocker and what looks to be a soft reset hole here going on to the bottom we have the microphone on the other side we have an OK button which will actually close a program so it's kind of convenient if you're just tapping along like so and also a camera button the dual action camera button for the 5 megapixel camera we have a lock button here it's also the standby button and on the top we get a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack which is terrific plus the M microUSB for charging and syncing and transferring data now micro USB is not as standard as mini USB but at least it is a standard unlike Samsung's proprietary Jack's which it looks like they're not using anymore which is great now if we go over to the back we have a surface that is a total total fingerprint magnet it has a 5 megapixel camera up here in the upper left corner with actually two flashes to make it extra bright when you're taking a picture of something in a dark area if we take off the back of battery cover and we can do so with sticking our fingernail in the back here and opening it like so we reveal the SIM card slot and the battery which is 1500 milliamp hours that's a pretty big size for a device of this type without a slide-out keyboard so we'll have to get back to you on how this fares in terms of battery life so overall in terms of hardware it's clear that Samsung has made a high-end device here it feels very sturdy in hand it brings a lot of things that people ask for in a high-end device such as a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack it is FM radio GPS Wi-Fi B&G and pretty much all those wireless radios that you expect in a high-end device like this so we'll be back soon with the software tour which will actually be in two parts one part we're going to talk about the home screens because they totally changed how the home screens act and in the second software video we're going to go through all the programs because Samsung is heavily skinned Windows Mobile to the point where you actually forget that you're running windows mobile 6.1 so we'll be back soon with more on the samsung omnia 2 that's it for now