Samsung Omnia hands-on review, part 3

This is part 3 of my off-the-cuff Omnia review. Here are parts 1 and 2

The things that don't frustrate me are, thankfully, the key parts of the common round. It's fine for reading emails on the move, and once you're deep in Webland the experience is as good as any comparable device. These days, iGoogle on mobiles is impressive and you can get pleasantly distracted reading your RSS feeds, news, Gmail and other paraphernalia without really noticing you're on a phone. That's a strong pointer to the way things are moving, and a good argument that the idea of browser as a platform is the way to go. The phone side, as I said, is good and solid; although the device did crash a couple of times when messing around with multimedia.

The music player and radio are fine – there's a little periodic noise on FM reception but nowhere near enough to spoil the programming, and given the engineering challenges in making that work in a device that's busy radiating on all sorts of frequencies with all sorts of spiky signals that's a job well done. Be nice to have DAB or BBC iPlayer – there may be a way to make the latter work, but that remains on the to-do list.

The camera application is most enjoyable. The quality of the pictures is fine for a camera phone; it has proper focus, the flash is effective (and can be used as a torch, if you dig out the option deep within the Windows Mobile configuration forest), and everything is crisply responsive. The video capture option can also apply a fleet of pointlessly enjoyable real-time effects such as solarisation, sepia, negative and so on. Won't make you rich, but they're great fun at parties. And there's a bit of good usability: from the home page or wherever you can call up the photo album by dabbing at the camera shutter button; hold the button down and you're straight into the camera proper. Ideal for those moments when you see something and want to snap it straight away without digging through the phone's interface – and those are always the moments most worth capturing.

It seems churlish to spend all that time complaining about the device's shortcoming and so little saying what's good – but that has to be put into context against the expectations raised by the marketing and the potential of the hardware to do so much better. Also, the ideal phone is invisible: it provides services without getting in the way, and there's not much to say when that happens.

The iPhone is better at that than the Omnia. If I hadn't used the Apple, I'd be more charitable about the Samsung; as it is, it's impossible not to mumble "But it's easier to do things the other way" when confronted with the more baroque and impenetrable parts. However, the Omnia crashed less than the iPhone and seemed a good deal snappier on web browsing. That could be network variation: at one point this weekend on the Kentish Town Road, a place provisioned to cope with the weekday hordes but very quiet on a Sunday evening, I was getting responsiveness so sharp I had to check whether I was connected to a Wi-Fi network by mistake. My companion, poking away at his 3G iPhone, did not get that impression.

The most curious thing is, I've rather grown to like the Omnia now I've given up on the bits that don't work. Whether I'd feel that way if I'd actually shelled out for the beast in the expectation that it'd do all the things advertised is a different matter, but the sheer joy of having a decent browser on a reasonably readable screen connected via 3G around all the time is addictive. In its way, it's no worse than a PC from the early 1990s – we lived with those without going postal – but with the addition of useful amounts of Net connectivity.

That looks like the future to me: Google in your pocket. The rest is details. The people who get that key job done the best – and you'd have to give Google's own Android/Chrome/Gears/JavaScript platform at least a fighting chance – will be the people who win the market.

click for the first part of the review