We have now taken a look at the iPhone 3G 3.0 and the Palm Pre, HTC Magic, and BlackBerry Storm. The iPhone, Pre, Magic, and Storm all have capacitive touch screens and the last one in my series with such a display is the Samsung OmniaHD.
The Samsung OmniaHD (aka i8910) is the first S60-powered capacitive touch screen device following the Nokia 5800 and N97 resistive touch screen S60 devices.
The use of capacitive displays generally makes for a better user experience, except when looking to use handwriting recognition or small stylus-optimized keyboards.
The OmniaHD is also one of only a few S60 devices made by Samsung. Let’s take a look at how the Samsung OmniaHD stacks up to the iPhone 3G running the 3.0 OS.
As I have stated a couple of times now, I laid out what we know of the iPhone 3.0 OS operating system in my first article so I won’t repost all of that content here. I will run through each section for the Samsung OmniaHD and then offer my personal thoughts on how it compares to the iPhone 3G with 3.0 OS update on the last page of this feature.
I was able to spend a bit of time with the Samsung OmniaHD at CTIA, but also find Rafe’s All About Symbian articles covering the first day with the OmniaHD, general design and hardware, camera and multimedia functionality, and GPS, web, TouchWIZ, software, and conclusions to be extremely thorough in giving your a complete roundup of the device.
Operating System - Symbian S60 5th Edition: The Symbian S60 operating system has been around for a few years and is getting a bit dated with the deep menus (have to dive in several layers to access settings throughout the device) and complex UI that can be confusing for people new to the platform, in comparison to the basic iPhone interface.
As a power user, I personally like the S60 operating system because it allows me to customize the folder structure and gives me all the power I could ask of from any mobile operating system. There are millions of S60 device owners, but I am pretty sure most people using them have no idea they have such a powerful smartphone in their possession and use the OS like they do a feature phone.
5th Edition of the S60 platform gives you a touch-based UI, but it is similar to the BlackBerry Storm in that touch is a layer added onto the existing S60 operating system so it is not highly optimized for touch like the iPhone, Palm Pre, and HTC Magic Android device.
There are some confusing elements in 5th Edition where some single taps/presses are used to select items in lists and at other times when there are lists a single tap/press opens up the item. Samsung seems to have done a bit better job of this with the TouchWIZ UI implementation to make it a more consistent behavior, especially now that the device uses a capacitive touch screen. There is no multi-touch support like what we see on the iPhone and Palm Pre, either.
There are several text entry methods in S60 5th Edition, including a full screen landscape QWERTY, mini-QWERTY, handwriting recognition, and T9 entry. I haven’t seen any other details that show the OmniaHD has a different text entry method, but I do wonder how accurate the mini-QWERTY and handwriting recognition methods will be with the capacitive display since these methods work much better with a stylus.
The OS fully supports multi-tasking and I regularly have about 5 to 10 applications running at a time on my S60 devices. It also fully supports cut, copy, and paste so no worries there. After several years of usage I have also found the S60 OS to be rock solid with very few (less than five over five years) lockups and resets of the devices I have used.