For full teardown analyses, bill of materials, and high-resolution pictures, hit up the wiki: http://www.phonewreck.com/wiki/index.php?title=Samsung_Omnia_i910

The Samsung Omnia is not a “new” device – we had one lying around and all the hype surrounding the fresh Omnia HD had us thinking we might as well break it open to see what makes it hum. The verdict? You’ll have to read on. Simply said however, this device was built for function.

At a time when everybody and their brother/sister seems to be creating an iPhone clone, the Samsung Omnia came out as a fully featured device to meet the requirements and fill the voids that exist in Apples highly acclaimed platform. Man, is this thing packed with features… Let’s see how it stacks up from a design perspective.

Samsung Omnia Review

Greats

The Samsung Omnia is a well built device but it’s no Xperia. Unlike most of the BlackBerry devices we’ve seen the chrome feature around frame of the device is actually metal – not painted plastic that scuffs and scrapes with everyday use. The battery cover and trim pieces that make up the surroundings fit within small tolerances, and there is very little give or “flexible” feeling as you use the device. The screen is resistive but doesn’t feel loose like some of the other devices we’ve seen with the same technology.

That said, you will want to use the provided stylus as most UI buttons are inherently tiny and hard to hit with a finger. More on that later.

In terms of feature set, the baby is solid. Name a function – it’s probably there. The 5MP camera and 8GB of internal storage all helps contribute to this amazing feature set.

Thankfully, Samsung has replaced some of the more arduous components of Windows Mobile with some easier to use and more powerful programs. Notably, the program launcher, browser (Opera 9.5 comes standard) and software keyboards were good selections. Samsung’s touchplayer media “centre” is also a grand improvement that ends up being a lot more finger friendly then Windows Media Player mobile.

If you’ve already taken a gander at the teardown, you’ll notice the device contains a pretty small and pretty packed PCB. One thing that Omnia really shines in when compared to other Windows Mobile Devices is its ability to easily perform tasks while surfing data or making phone-calls. Most Windows Mobile devices either don’t have this ability or really crunch when the goin’ gets tough.

So-So

Unfortunately the TouchWiz UI didn’t really tickle our fancy. The 3.2”, 240×400 screen simply isn’t big enough for all of the necessary widgets and you’ll often find yourself accidently moving the icons around the screen. Moreover, the screen seems fairly small for the overall size of the device. From an aesthetics perspective, it’s a little too tall and narrow. We found ourselves often wishing for a little bit more real-estate during typing related activities.

In another blow to the overall rating, Verizon has limited the usage of GPS within the bounds of its very own VZ Navigator software. This means that Google maps cannot determine your location – major bummer.

Another iffy sentiment is the fact that the stylus is always dangling from the phone, often scratching it up as you toss it in your pocket. The stylus is solid and feels like a high end pen in your hand, but why was there no storage built into the phone? Unfortunately it feels like a bit of an afterthought.

For typing you have a variety of options. The Samsung keyboard, Block recognizer, transcriber and more. In portrait mode, the full QWERTY is very cramped so you’re pretty much forced to use the stylus and poke out your text (similar to the way your grandpa might type). The Omnia does provide haptic feedback by means of small vibrations, but these can be slightly overwhelming and play on your nerves when things aren’t coming out the way you had expected.

The built in accelerometer also rotates the screen when you hold the phone in portrait or landscape configurations but it’s overly sensitive and can be slow to respond. When holding the phone 10 degrees from flat, it often rotates itself with slight bumps. Forget about typing a message while sitting on a bus.

The widget system is really cool, but at the moment you are limited to only Samsung’s selection of stock items. It would be nice to have some cool independently created widgets to play around with.

Gripes

What’s with the proprietary headphone/USB/Tv-out jack? It’s really cool that all of these functions are provided via a single jack, but sometimes you don’t have the specific Samsung cable handy. It’s also annoying to plug your 2.5mm headphones into an included adapter. 2.5mm? ??!!! This is like the BlackBerry of 2002!

Now that we’re on the media wagon, this thing downloads media from your PC really slow. You have an option of either ActiveSync of Mass Storage mode – neither of which don’t achieve a speed of over 3.8MB/s. ActiveSync mode is incredibly slow and barely reaches 2MB/s in its best scenario – it’s like watching paint dry. These numbers are a far cry from the BlackBerry Bold or 8900/Javelin which we’ve previously seen achieve speeds of well over 13MB/s. If you’re trying to load music in a jiffy, forget about it with the Samsung Omnia.

Conclusions

The Samsung Omnia is a solid device with a few major media hurdles holding it back from being either an iPhone or a BlackBerry. Windows Mobile inherently offers any device some difficulties in the complexities and common qualms of the platform which are hard to avoid. The Omnia has avoided this somewhat successfully by offering software alternatives out of the box.

The device is well built and the camera kicks butt, but this device “simply ain’t” your “do everything well” pocket companion…. One day, Dr. Wreck, one day…

phoneWreck Score: 7 Widgets out of 10.

Samsung Omnia Teardown

This device is well built. As such, it was a little bit tricky to take apart. Thankfully, all shielding was clip in and the device’s brains were easily revealed. Muahahahaha.

Notably, this device runs on the Qualcomm 6800A and Marvell PXA312. These devices are connected via a Cypress Dual-Port bridge and have separate Power Management Devices. Note that this PCB is impressively packed and impressively small! Another thing to point out is the presence of an SMSC USB PHY. We’ve seen these devices on a variety phones we’ve ripped apart.

Bluetooth goes to CSR and Wi-Fi to Marvell. The GPS win goes to Avago. Note the massive quintplexer!

The one thing we knew the phone had but couldn’t find was the 8GB internal memory. Where could it be? We eventually found it hiding underneath the shield covering the processor side of the PCB – very sneaky!

So there you have it! We hope this teardown helps you decide which device you want to buy! Stay tuned for more exciting stuff!

If you have any questions or comments, don’t be afraid to fire us an e-mail @ phonewreck@gmail.com, make sure and check out the wiki entry for more data!

-Dr. Wreck