The first Omnia touch-phone appeared on the scene in 2008 to great acclaim. Good business features combined with an affordable price tag earned it a good reputation, and now the Omnia Pro hopes to cement that. The problem is, it doesn’t: the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system is barely different from its predecessor and the Samsung TouchWiz interface has been around for a while. Sadly, the Samsung Omnia Pro just feels dated.

 

Touch screen on the Samsung Omnia Pro

 

The original Omnia suffered from touch-screen problems, but this was back on 2008, before capacitive touch-screens took off. There’s no excuse this time, though, and the Omnia Pro sports a resistive touch-screen which fails in both responsiveness and accuracy; even the hard unlock button takes times to register.

 

There are three customisable home screens which, in theory, you should be able to swipe between, but in practice this requires two or three goes and there was a lag of about a second when navigating the UI. Using the bundled stylus gave us better performance, but the screen was still quite slow, and a stylus really shouldn’t be necessary with today’s technology.

 

TouchWiz on the Samsung Omnia Pro

 

TouchWiz, Samsung’s customisable interface, has been around for some time now and is beginning to show its age. Adding widgets to one of your homescreens is a laborious process involving long presses and drags, that just feels slow and clumsy compared with other smartphones. When you drag a widget onto a screen, it doesn’t format itself neatly so you can get overlapping icons, which just makes for a messy homescreen.

 

The variety of widgets also falls short. For example, the social networking widgets aren’t integrated – they just lead to the websites, and don’t even include Facebook. All is not lost, though: you can download apps from Windows Marketplace, although this just emphasises the shortcomings of TouchWiz.

 

Windows Mobile on the Samsung Omnia Pro

 

To put it simply, TouchWiz is a skin that covers the Windows Mobile interface. But it just doesn’t really fit. For example, in the top-left of the screen is the Windows Start icon, which brings up all programs. The hard menu key does exactly the same thing only in Samsung’s style. There doesn’t seem to be any point, although you can press the button to go back and forth between your last program and the main menu, which is useful. To switch between open apps, there’s a touch-area on the screen.

 

We do like the new Windows Mobile unlock screen, which shows your missed class, texts and emails and lets you swipe directly through to them. But most of the changes to WinMo 6.5 are purely cosmetic, and there’s not much evidence of the business features at which it supposedly excels.

 

Another nice touch is the phone dialler, which gives you the option to text a dialled number – useful when someone doesn’t pick up the phone, as you can send them a text without having to open up the messaging application.

 

Email on the Samsung Omnia Pro

 

The slide-out full QWERTY keyboard and Windows Mobile business credentials should make for excellent email functionality and actually, it’s pretty good. A useful Composer key opens up a screen on which you can write an email, text, appointment, note or search term.

 

The keyboard is tactile, with comfortable rubber keys, but there are some daft flaws. For example, to input a symbol you have to press the alt key followed by a character key. But for the question mark, one of the most commonly used punctuation marks, you have to hold the Alt key down, which leads to confusion. There’s no spellcheck at all, just a very basic auto-complete system which doesn’t recognise any contraction except for “I’m” and even then doesn’t capitalise the I.

 

The email interface is the standard Windows Mobile fare. It’s not the prettiest, but information is clearly presented and easy to read. Messages are automatically downloaded as previews only, to save on data charges, but there’s no push email for even the well-used webmail services, an odd omission considering the Samsung Omnia Pro’s positioning as a business phone.

 

Internet and camera on the Samsung Omnia Pro

 

The Omnia Pro does boast Opera Mini, in our opinion, the best mobile web browser at the moment, and your webpages load quickly: in around four seconds for mobile-optimised sites, and 10 for full pages. It also automatically auto-fits pages to the screen, and you double-tap to zoom.

 

A five-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash is a nice feature for a business-driven phone. Daylight pictures are crisp and clear, although the lens is over-sensitive to green colours, so snaps taken under fluorescent lighting develop a sickly tinge. Better colours are achieved outdoors. Lowlight photos taken without a flash have good colour but are grainy, while using the flash gives you clear, if overexposed, results.

 

The biggest problem with the camera is the snapper button, which is on the keyboard part of the phone and tended to slide away when we pressed it.

 

The verdict on the Samsung Omnia Pro

 

Windows Mobile is not well served by Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. This added to the inaccurate and unresponsive touch-screen makes the Samsung Omnia Pro frustrating to use. Messaging is okay but misses key points like push-email for webmail accounts, and internet browsing is speedy and satisfying. But with Android and BlackBerry phones moving into Samsung’s mid-range territory, it will have to try harder to make its mark.

 

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