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(More customer reviews)I have a love/hate relationship with my Omnia HD. I've owned it now since mid-July and have on numerous occasions thought, "this is it... I'm done with this phone... I'm going back to X." I still using the Omnia HD, though. In the end, the phone is pretty impressive. The capacitive OLED screen is a stunner, with rich contrast and fantastic detail, and the overall fit and finish of the phone is second to none. Seriously, this is one solid smart-phone. Every line feels tight, every angle feels put together just perfect. We can talk about the camera at length, but I've honestly not been too blown away by it. It takes great pictures, it takes horrible pictures, sometimes right in succession of each other. Low light is abysmal, and it has a tendency to flare and ghost purples under incandescent lighting. Outdoors, however, even in twilight, I've captured amazingly great shots that you'd be hard pressed to say came from a phone. The HD video recording doesn't work at all. Sure, it records 720p, but it frame drops way too much, and even at its best is under 24 FPS on average. You get a really jerky-stutter feel to 720p recordings. Dropping it down to either of the lower settings, however, produce great videos. If you want this to do HD video recording, you'll be disappointed, though. As is, it's a nice gimmick to show your friends, as long as you don't move the camera too much.
The ARM A8 @ 600MHz is the same CPU you'll find in all of the latest and greatest devices (from the iPhone 3G S to the Palm Pre and the Nokia N900) and it shows why. So very responsive, so very quick... at times. Herein lies the one true fault of the Omnia HD. Samsung really doesn't have the programming prowess that Nokia does on the Symbian platform. This was true with the INNOV8 and becomes doubly true on the S60v5 platform. With so much grunt under the hood, you would expect the i8910 to fly through your day to day tasks, but I find the OS only marginally better than my old N97 in many situations. The software is a mix-match of Symbian and Samsung developed applications. The music player is an in house job, and has a couple quirks. I appreciate they've tried to modernize it with visualizations and 5.1 sound output (that now works through the internal speakers and sounds pretty good), but it has an annoying stutter every time you start an internet connection. If you're listening to music and do anything over the net, you'll get a hiccup in your music playback. For a machine with this much power to be doing that (especially since it has a dedicated CPU just for telephony actions) is just ridiculous. My Nokia 9500, on its archaic hardware didn't even do that.
Other issues like a video player that has to re-sync its library every time you go into the application. A gallery that does not cache image thumbnails and rebuilds every time (usually taking several seconds or more depending on how many shots you have in there) and overall poor email integration (with none of the self configuration scripts that Nokia phones have) give you a sort of barely passable feeling to the overall software on the phone. Everything works, in some facility or another, but none of it feels as good as it should be... or as good as this phone looks or should perform. There is the main issue. As much as I love how powerful and how well built the Samsung is, I can't help but miss my E71 or Nokia 5800 when it comes to just having everything work. Sure, the Nokia devices are underpowered... but at least they get every drop out of the hardware possible. The i8910 feels like it is just spinning its wheels and really not taking advantage of the true grunt the A8 can deliver. It's a good phone... I'm using it right now... Every time I pull the sim card out within a week or so it gets put back in, but... I have to be honest, as soon as something better comes along in the hardware department, I'm jumping ship.
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