Hands on: Samsung OmniaHD

@grg / 6:33 am PST • February 17, 2009

Oh Samsung OmniaHD, how lovely your 3.7″ AMOLED touchscreen is. Really – it’s friggin’ gorgeous. Be it the 8 megapixel camera, the 720p video recording, or the deafeningly loud stereo speakers, we love just about everything about it from a hardware standpoint – but we’re not too sure about the software.

We got to put our mitts all up on the Samsung OmniaHD for far longer than we expected Samsung to allow – read on for our impressions.

What we liked:

The 360×640 (QHD) AMOLED screen is beautiful.
The new TouchWiz allows you to gesture slide to the left or right to quickly jump to a preset screen (Applications, Photos, etc). If you want to replace either of the secondary screens, you simply go to the screen you want to swap and hold down the center key.
You can have up to 3 sets of TouchWiz widgets at any given time.
The dual speakers, one located on each side of the handset (top and bottom), are loud. We could hear it loud and clear without issue over the crowd murmur. We’ll still take a pair of headphones in nearly every situation, but it’ll be nice for dealing with roadnoise while using the speakerphone and the occasional sharing of tunes with bystanders.
TouchWiz on S60 v5 is probably our favorite implementation of it yet. Widgets were easy to drag and drop, and we had no problem flipping between panels.
720p video is a nice touch
After spending a good amount of time with the Omnia’s resistive touchscreen, the OmniaHD’s capacitive touchscreen felt great. We’re hearing of mixed experiences on this one, but we personally had no problems.

What we didn’t:

Text input is super wonky, especially in landscape mode while in the browser. It feels like you’re completely detached from the app whenever you go to a url.
In what seemed like a significant chunk of the menus, selecting an item required double clicking. This is presumably to prevent accidentally double clicks during attempted scrolls or something, but it feels very old school.
720p video is great, as we said – but even at the max setting of 24fps, the video we shot had some pretty significant blur. In all fairness, however, the lighting in the room was pretty poor – so we’ll let this one slide for now.

Check out our shots of it side-by-side with the iPhone below.

[PSGallery=3hhtlpbxve]