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After a week with the Samsung Omnia II, what follows is a detailed rundown of every function, issues, and realizations I ran into on a daily basis. While there are finger-friendly improvements in Windows Mobile, and exciting additions to everyday applications like Swype, there were times I felt there was a disconnect between Samsung and Microsoft regarding functionality. From a hardware perspective, Samsung delivered a solid device, but the issues that arose from overlaying Windows Mobile 6.5 with the TouchWiz interface made me glad Samsung has turned to developing phones with their own operating system, Bada.

Hardware

Up front, this slim handset impresses with an bright AMOLED screen and a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash. The Omnia II launches the camera quickly via a dedicated Camera button, takes quality photos fast, and allows for versatile mobile photo-editing with the ability to tweak brightness, contrast, colors, and dimensions.

The 3.5 audio jack is a welcomed sight, and the micro USB charger had an interesting flatter, two-pronged design that secured the charger into the charging port better than my AT&T Tilt (HTC Kaiser). At first blush, I didn’t think the flatter-looking charger was micro USB at all until a reader commented that it was! What I actually fell in love with was the Mic Adapter/FM Radio Antenna. Once I connected the antenna to my earbuds and the phone’s 3.5 audio jack, I could open the FM Radio application and it would automatically scan for FM stations. In a few seconds, I could already be set up to listen to a local station and be able to add several to my favorites. Not only do I wish that more handsets had this style of FM Radio app, but that it would work as effortlessly as it does on the Omnia II. And although the dongle is light-weight, I wish the FM Radio antenna on this handset could be internal.

The center button between the Start Call and End Call/Power buttons was a little confusing at first, but a welcomed alternative to the small Start Menu button in the upper left-hand corner. I’m also a huge fan of the dedicated Lock, Volume, and Okay buttons. The Okay button’s location on the left-hand side of the phone was a little strange, compared to the front-facing location of the button on my Tilt, but still very useful when kicking an open program to run in the background.

Another surprise was how successful the screen on this phone is at repelling fingerprints out-of-the-box without a screen protector! And purely on a cosmetic level, I love the iridescent red scale pattern on the back cover of the phone! Sadly, unlike the phone’s screen, the back of the phone is a fingerprint magnet. Overall, the form-factor of this phone is attractive, functional, powerful, and thankfully light-weight. And although I wish the Omnia II didn’t have a stylus, the “X” and “OK” buttons in the far upper right-hand corner were hard to reach without it.

Interface

Samung’s TouchWiz interface clearing comes out on top in terms of making Windows Mobile 6.5 manageable to the everyday user. There should be more live-updating widgets to customize the three panels, but static shortcuts to MySpace, Opera, and other applications seem to outnumber actual widgets. Two of the most functional widgets are Smart Memo and Favorites.

Smart Memo allows a user to hand-write a quick note, like a grocery list, and automatically makes that note visible on whichever panel the widget resides. Once I pick up those milk and eggs at the store, I can trash the note directly from the widget without having to open the app.

Favorites is a time-saver, especially since TouchWiz doesn’t show newly downloaded programs on any of the Main Menu panels. After I downloaded the SkyFire browser, it was listed in the Marketplace app’s downloaded programs section but nowhere else. I had to add the Favorites widget to my desktop so I could then make a shortcut directly to the program. Another shame was that the Favorites widget is just a single app, and cannot be duplicated on more than one panel. If downloaded programs cannot be easily accessed from the Main Menu while in TouchWiz mode, then one panel would have to act as the shortcut home to all of my favorite downloaded apps. If TouchWiz is turned off, then any downloaded programs are easily accessible through the default Windows Mobile 6.5 interface.

The WeatherBug, Contacts, and Agenda were the other three stand-out widgets on this handset that are useful on a daily basis, but my third panel remained blank for the rest of the week that I used the phone. Why add shortcuts to website like MySpace or Bing when I could just as easily open a browser and go to the actual site? The redundancy on Samsung’s part was surprising.

Plus, despite the 800 MHz processor, one of the biggest cons about this phone was the huge lag every time I switched between panels. Swiping between panels would cause each widget would populate one-by-one on any given panel from left to right, so there was a waiting time to see and use all the widgets. This encouraged me to try and have all my essential widgets on the first panel for the sake of speed and accessibility. Even boosting the CPU performance through the Power settings menu could not help the lag when switching between panels.

One very original and fully-functional feature on this phone is Swype; an alternative way of typing on a touch-screen where instead of hunting-and-pecking across an on-screen keyboard, a user can draw a line from one letter to another and the phone will figure out the rest. The Omnia II had few problems in figuring out what I want to type, and when it was confused a list of suggestions would pop up on the screen. This was the feature that I was ready to dismiss in a heartbeat, but Samsung  outdid themselves with such a neat little upgrade to an otherwise standard on-screen keyboard. The same can’t be said about the Cube navigation.

Cube seemed to be an afterthought to a traditional navigation system, and can be accessed through a dedicated on-screen button the lower right-hand corner of the main screen. I could never see myself using Cube as a primary method of navigation, especially since TouchWiz allows for easy access to any program of my choice. Plus, Cube.exe tended to crash at any given moment and prompt me to send another dreaded Microsoft Crash Report.

While Swype impressed, the Cube navigation and widget experience on the Omnia II left much to be desired. Windows Mobile Microsoft and Samsung should have worked a little more closely together to improve the user experience on this phone.

Applications

The first app that I didn’t expect to see on this handset is Opera Mobile, yet there it was as my default browser. Thank goodness! While I’m a fan of Opera Mobile, the browser didn’t seem to have enough elbowroom to work properly and crashed a few times as it tried to load a website or wouldn’t load at all. Two crash reports were immediately sent to Microsoft, and I then downloaded the latest version of SkyFire from the Microsoft Marketplace. SkyFire runs faster on the Omnia II than Opera Mobile and has not crashed at all.

The Omnia II includes the standard Windows Mobile Office Suite with MS Word, Excel, Power Point and OneNote Mobile, along with Adobe Reader LE. Bubble Breaker, Calculator and other Windows Mobile standards made it onto this handset, but there were a few good surprises.

Smart Reader, the business and document-reading program, actually worked without a hitch! Although, I noticed that the phone had a little trouble reading or translating words on a patterned or colored background. Otherwise, Smart Reader is a quick and easy way of saving both the text and a photo of someone’s business card to Contacts.

Task Launcher is another indispensable program because either Samsung or Microsoft seem to have done away with the standard pull-down menu list of open programs, which is usually located in the upper right hand corner. Either in grid or carousel mode, the Task Launcher is extremely responsive and can selectively close any open program. My Pictures also utilizes a carousel-style of navigation when in landscape mode.

Now if only more apps would work in landscape mode! Only a select few like Opera Mobile and Messages work in landscape mode, but since Opera doesn’t seem to be stable on the Omnia II, I was restricted to browsing in portrait mode through SkyFire. Very little of Internet Explorer was updated for Windows Mobile 6.5 in terms of user experience, so I didn’t even consider it a viable browsing option. Even reading emails was tedious since HTML messages would not auto-load fully, and I would have to “Tap To Scroll” at the top of the message to scroll to the far right of an email. Microsoft needs to just throw “Tap To Scroll” out and just have emails fully load. If security within emails is the argument for “Tap To Scroll”, then a setting to auto-load full or partial email messages should be created.One thing’s for certain, the way Windows Mobile has messaging set up right now is clunky and outdated.

Syncing

While adding email accounts onto the Omnia II was relatively simple, syncing my Google contacts and calendar were not. When a Hotmail account username and password are added to this phone, contacts are automatically downloaded. When I set up my Google Gmail account with my username and password, only my emails were downloaded. I had to then configure ActiveSync to download my Google contacts and calendar separately. I hope this funky disconnect is resolved with the release of Windows Mobile 7. With cloud-sourcing as popular as it is, Microsoft needs step up their game and be friendlier to huge number of people who don’t use Windows Live for everything in their personal and professional lives.

Ringtones, photos, and video were easily transferrable when I connected the Omnia II to my PC. Windows Vista automatically installed the appropriate drivers and the handset was automatically set up as an external hard drive. I could drop any MP3 into the My Ringtones directory and it immediately showed up on the ringtones list in Sound Settings.

Phone Calls

The Phone Dialer is large, finger-friendly, and allows a user to search for any email or name by using the keypad. The bottom left-hand corner is dedicated to a button that hides the keyboard to expand the contacts search box, and the bottom right-hand corner is where the Windows Mobile Menu button lives. Making calls on the Omnia II was simple and hassle-free. There’s also the option of connecting the Mic Adapter included wit the phone, or easily syncing a Bluetooth headset for added functionality. Phone calls sound crisp in-call as well as on speaker phone, and contacts are easy to add and find.

Verdict

The Samsung Omnia II is a strong, light-weight handset with a fabulous AMOLED display that did not deplete battery life as fast as expected and a powerful 5-megapixel camera with LED flash. Applications like Smart Reader, Smart Memo, Swype, and FM Radio work flawlessly and should be included on more smartphones!

A few downsides to this device are the apparent lag to load widgets when switching from panel-to-panel, the  absence of the ability to list new programs on the Main Menu while in TouchWiz mode, and the inability to switch to landscape mode in most programs. Plus, the abundance of static shortcuts and the lack of live-updating widgets was surprising. Samsung should create more actual widgets, like Smart Memo, that reflect live activity right on the widget, rather than a static website shortcuts. Live-updating MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter widgets would have been better ideas.

Microsoft needs to allow for full HTML emails to be readily visible and get rid of that clunky “Tap To Scroll” feature, and also design their OS to exclude a stylus. Some menu options were hard to reach without the stylus, which was annoying at best. Cube navigation should have never made it onto this handset, especially since it seems to crash at any given time.

While more responsive than the HTC Fuze or HTC Pure, the Samsung Omnia II would probably be more responsive and be prone to less crashing as an Android handset than a Windows Mobile handset.