Archive for September, 2009
Omnia Pro B7610. Video 1 – Hardware Overview
Rather than do one huge video I’ve decided to split it up into manageable pieces. Today I’m posting the first of the videos which gives you an overview of the hardware along with some of my thoughts from the first weeks usage. I hope it gives you some answers and thoughts. If it brings up new questions, please add them to the comments and I’ll try and address them either here or in a separate ‘user questions’ post.
For those looking for my first impressions of the device, I’ve started to add them into a new post in the forum.
Heading back home from IDF.
I just wanted to write you guys a short note to say that my work here at Intel’s developer pragram is done and i’ll be back in the Omnia Pro seat by Tuesday of next week.
IDF was very interesting indeed. Not just for MID fans but for high-end smartphone fans too. I saw the first ever public demo of a smartphone-style device based on Intel’s Moorestown platform and the Moblin 2 OS. It really does work in devices that are smartphone-sized! We have to look towards the second-half of 2010 for the first devices but at that point, the processing power should be 2-3x what you’ll see on a Cortex A8 platform and 4-6x what we’re seeing on the Omnia Pro. Where the Omnia is taking 20 seconds or more to load a web page, a Moorestown-based device will be able to do that in about 10 seconds. We’ll also be getting hardware encoding for 720p video too, full Flash, Adobe Air and Silverlight support and at 720p quality hardware decoded video. Don’t forget that Moblin is LSB-compliant so it will be hitting the ground with hundreds of applications. 2010 will be a very interesting time for the high-end smartphone market.
In the meantime though, we have the Omnia Pro.
In two weeks i’m travelling to Amsterdam for the Maemo summit and hands-on with the N900 (and a possible review loaner) so it will be very intersting to put the 400 Euro Omnia Pro next to the 500 Euro (street prices have dropped in Germany) N900.
Expect a video overview of the Omnia Pro on Wed or Thursday next week with a review following soon after that. Thanks for your patience!
Coming up on My Omnia Pro…
There’s a lot to talk about and a lot of testing to do. Here are some of the posts i’m planning to complete very soon.
- Overview of the Omnia Pro range. Note the OmniaPRO B7330 and B7320 news from yesterday… “Within the OmniaPRO lineup, the OmniaPRO B7610 is the premium device”
- First impressions
- A video overview of the user interface
- A video overview of web browsing using Opera 9.5
- A post about the keyboard, both hard and software-based.
- A post about the media player experience including video performance testing and the connected home feature.
- Full review.
If you have any other burning desires, let me know in the comments.
One week away from the desk…
B7610 Screen Brightness thoughts.
One of my big worries about the Omnia Pro and it’s AMOLED screen was sunlight readability. As I expected, the Omnia Pro B7610 can be tough to read if you get stuck in full sunlight with a bright screen reflection…
Pic taken in full sunlight F4.0 1/125
Omnia Pro Test Videos
The Omnia Pro B7610 has VGA (640×480) video cam and a nice built-in video editor where you can sequence together clips and images with text, fades and wipe. Putting together the clip below was relatively easy, even as a first-time user. Trying to upload that to YouTube however was a royal pain in the arse. The ‘communities’ feature on the phone which links some of the applications to online services is missing any support for video. Trying to upload through Opera 9.5 was a frustrating and slow experience that I eventually aborted in favor of using a real computer.
The worst application on the Omnia Pro
This is just ridiculous. How can you release a hi-res phone focused on work and web-based activities and include such a terrible email implementation. Not only does it abuse pixel usage but it’s not using the touch-scrolling implementation found in almost every other delivered app. It has to be said that if you are a big email user, the Omnia Pro isn’t a good choice with the standard email app. Thank God that WM6.5 is coming soon.
3 email subject lines! Great use of 384,000 pixels Samsung!
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Samsung Omnia Pro Information
I track the Samsung Omnia Pro (and similar devices) over at the UMPCPortal product database. Click through to get the full specifications along with videos, images and links to other Omnia-Pro content on the net.
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