Tracking back through a Twitter search today I came across an interesting price drop in the UK. The Omnia Pro is now selling for 329 pounds including taxes which is excellent value for a 3.5” AMOLED WVGA smartphone with 5mp cam and 720×480 video recording.  I also found a link to a full review from PocketNow which is worth checking out.

More images over at PocketNow

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I’ve been reconsidering the Omnia Pro again today.  An encounter with an HTC Hero and a Toshiba TG01 got me thinking about large-screen ‘buddy’ devices and how they could be a problem. The Omnia is definitely on the large side but to be fair, it’s not as huge as the 4.1″ screened device I was thinking about when I wrote that article. The Hero, on the other hand, was lovely and slim and I was impressed with the on-screen keyboard. Do I really need a huge converged MID-Phone when I can get a slick, lower-end ‘buddy’ phone with a vibrant OS and application ecosystem as my 24/7 device and supplement it with a more powerful, web-focused MID?

One of the main reasons I’ve ordered the Omnia Pro is the keyboard. I plan to be twittering, tagging a microblogging like a mad thing. I’ll be using a lot of social networking software (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and others) and as with all social networking software, i’ll be needing a good browser to view the URLs that come across these networks. 50% of the ‘tweets’ I receive have URLs in them and if the browser is no good then the social networking experience suffers big-time.

So far there have been few real browser speed and accuracy tests but there’s one device out there that matches the Omnia Pro almost exactly. The Samsung Mondi SWD-M100 MID. It has the same screen resolution with the same browser on the same operating system with the same CPU – an 800Mhz ARM11 device. Fortunately the Mondi has been reviewed by a few publications already so I’ve scoured them to see if I can find some hints about browser performance.

CNET report…

We tested the Mondi using CNET’s Wi-Fi network. Most Web pages loaded in about 10 seconds, which is more than acceptable. We tried sites like Yahoo, The New York Times, CNET, and United Airlines, and waited about the same length of time for each page. Sites that are busy with heavy graphics like Wow.com took about twice as long to load, but we were quite satisfied with our browsing experience.

10 seconds for most pages is good although there’s no indication of whether these sites were mobile versions or not.

PC Mag says…

Web browsing on the Mondi works much better than on most Windows Mobile phones, thanks to the built-in Opera Mobile 9.5 browser and Flash Lite 3, which supports Flash 8 content such as YouTube videos. (It doesn’t support Hulu, which requires Flash 9.) Flash videos played jerkily, but clearly.

Pocketables says…

Nothing yet. Jenn ove at Pocketables usually does an excelent job reviewing browser usability and speed so this is one to look forward to. Will Opera 9.5 provide a speedy, complete experience or is that 800Mhz CPU there for no good reason at all?

I’ll be looking very closely at what Jenn has to say about web performance on the Mondi. If it’s looking good then I’ll keep the Omnia in my Amazon shopping cart. If not, I may be taking my money elsewhere.

I have been waiting for this issue to come up. OLED screens can be a problem in bright daylight.

I’ve seen it on an OQO 2+ device (terrible in bright sunlight) and heard from others about OLED screens in daylight. GSMArena have highlighted it as an issue in their recent preview of the Omnia Pro. [Thanks Carl for the tip] The problem is that like LCD screens, it’s a transmissive technology and you need extremely high brightness levels to fight for supremacy with the sun. Once you pump the power up on OLED you lose the power-efficiency advantage too. Especially with a screen filled with light pixels. OLED is great indoors but it’s not really suitable for a mobile device. This is an important issue to note for all potential Omnia Pro owners.

What else does GSM Arena have to say?

• Banding noticeable with the 65K colour screen
• Touchscreen sensitivity nowhere near that of a capacitive touchscreen.
• Smooth, spring-assisted keyboard mechanism.
• Excellent keyboard quality. [I’m very pleased to hear this.]
• Micro-SD card is hot-swappable
• Positive feedback about the battery life. [Again, this is good to hear.]
• Pleased with the TouchWiz UI.

“The Samsung B7610 OmniaPRO is a very good handset overall with capabilities that can easily match the HTC Touch Pro2 class-leader. In fact the faster CPU and the AMOLED screen are quite significant improvements that one can receive by choosing the Samsung over the HTC.”

GSM Arena haven’t written anything about browser speed and completeness (something many potential customers are going to be waiting to hear about before they order) and the review has been done on a pre-release sample. Despite that, it’s worth a read.

GSM Arena Omnia Pro preview.

Phone Arena were lucky enough to get some quality time with a prototype Omnia Pro and have written up their thoughts. There’s no information on browsing speed (one of my main questions,) the battery life or the quality of the keyboard but they do talk at length (and extremely positively) about the user interface. They also note that there’s a CPU speed setting. They call it ‘overclocking’ but as they didn’t test it, there’s no confirmation that it is. I suspect its more for underclocking in order to save battery life and keep the device cool!

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