Bluetooth is one of those features that can be a pretty important factor in mobile handsets. It allows you to transfer media (including pictures and music) to and from your laptop/desktop or even stream stereo music to a headset using A2DP (Advance Audio Distribution Profile). Many users now tether their cell phones to netbooks/laptops using Bluetooth, cementing just how important it can be.

However, Bluetooth doesn’t appear in every netbook/laptop/desktop. Using a USB Bluetooth dongle is one of the ways of getting Bluetooth onto your netbook and it’s a relatively inexpensive option. MobileFun, a specialist retailer of mobile accessories, kindly sent over the Atomic Pico Bluetooth USB dongle for review. This particular dongle is the smallest in the world according to its manufacturers and costs £8.95. MobileFun applies a small delivery charge on top of this depending on whether shipping is to the UK or mainland Europe. Read the rest of this entry »

Kinetic scrolling remains atop of most wish lists in terms of how one would improve the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD. Seeing how well it is implemented in the Gravity twitter application makes me yearn for this functionality even more.

Good news though, for those willing to upgrade to the latest Chinese firmware (I8910UZCII1), you will be treated to kinetic scrolling in the browser. This is because it uses the newest version of the Nokia WebKit browser (7.1.13841). Check out a video of this in action after the jump and also note that the browser also offers an auto-fullscreen mode. Let’s hope this makes it to other regional updates as soon as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

Nearly a week after Samsung released the Russian XEII1 firmware update, the company has released a new XXII1 update for Italian handsets. The similarities between both code names is not a coincidence – from what I can tell this new update (dated 7th September) is near enough identical to the Russian firmware.

I upgraded to this new firmware from IG2 yesterday and am enjoying it so far. You end up with a new 3D Task Switcher (a carousel showing opening apps) – it’s certainly not needed, but it sure looks fancy. There is also a Grid View of open apps if you prefer it to remain simple.

Other changes include a new zoom icon for the browser. You can also now zoom in/out of pictures in MediaBrowser. It’s good to know that the frustrating stop bug in the browser has also been fixed. The dial pad also sports ‘abc’, ‘def’ lettering on numbers now too.

From what I can tell, the update has made no change to the frame rate of HD video recording (you still get AAC audio though). There is also no App Store icon, despite the store launching shortly (Monday 14th September). A quick video tour of the new firmware is attached after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a number of manufacturers that provide screen protectors for various handsets and portable gadgets. One of the most well-known & trusted brands in this area is Martin Fields. The guys over at MobileFun.co.uk were kind enough to send the screen protector for us to review.

Martin Fields range of Overlay Plus screen protectors are known for the fact that it gives 99 percent UV light protection. The protectors are also washable and reusable, they use only a mild adhesive that means if you apply it wrong the first time, all is not doomed. Read the rest of this entry »

We already knew that a Samsung Application store would launch in September, now we know the exact date. According to a press release it will launch on September 14th. The storefront will first cater for users of the Omnia and i8910 HD handsets (thankfully!)

Initially the app store will hit the UK, France and Italy with a further 30 countries expected to be supported in due course. Downloads will be available over-the-air via credit card or phone bill payments.

You can find the store over at SamsungApps.com, which at the moment has a “Samsung Application Store is coming up! Please visit us again” sign. Three hundred apps are expected on launch day with a further 2,000 by the year-end, certainly sounds impressive. Gameloft, Electronic Arts, Handmark, TAITO, Paragon SW, Capcom, Com2us, Prompt, Pearson Longman, Bokan Tech and Diotek are among the providers of applications to the Samsung Application Store.

The Samsung i8910 Omnia HD smartphone has won the ‘European Camera Phone 2009-2010’ award from EISA (European Imaging and Sound Association). Apart from the camera, EISA also has awards for best music phone, business phone, smartphone and Personal Media Player.

As one of the first mobile handsets to offer HD video recording, it’s perhaps no surprise to see the i8910 winning. Especially when combined with its 8MP camera that offers a number of scene modes (including the fantastic panoramic option). However, given its capabilities as a multimedia device, you could give a sound argument for the i8910 HD winning PMP of the year too!

Rumours are currently circulating that the i8910 HD is now being sold with a 1GHz processor. This follows the phone’s launch in India, with a placeholder clearly highlighting the apparently upgraded processor. Whilst you could attribute this to just human error, the same 1GHZ CPU has been listed on the official Samsung India website.

The i8910 Omnia HD currently has a Texas Instruments OMAP3430 ARM chip with 600MHz clock speed. I would be surprised if this was upped to an TI OMAP3640 ARM chip that has a 1GHz clock speed. Apart from the cost considerations, the move would alienate its existing customers i.e. why not include this from the start?

Whilst some may question whether this multimedia workhorse even needs more power, I’d argue that it does. Not for most of the tasks you’ll use it for, but it would certainly come in handy for one of the phones key selling points, HD video recording. The whole debacle surrounding the AMR/AAC audio issue when recording video, stems from the high CPU stress of the current chip.

Indeed, for one of the phone’s most marketable features, you can tell that the 720p HD video recording just isn’t quite there yet. Apart from the audio issue, HD videos often drop frames, especially when panning fast objects. By sticking in a faster processor, this would hopefully eradicate these issues and enable much better audio quality with a higher sampling rate.

I’m still dubious if this will really come true, but if it does, what do current owners think of this news? The Omnia HD will be available in India for 33,990 INR ($705). We’ve included a few screenshots of the evidence after the jump.

Update: GSMArena has confirmed that the 1GHz Samsung i8910 HD was indeed a misprint on both the website & placeholder. Samsung India added the 420 MHz DSP (the sound processing chip) speed to the 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU to get to 1GHz. Read the rest of this entry »

Digia recently launched its @Web browser for S60 5th Edition mobile handsets. This (obviously) includes the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD along with other devices such as the Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97.

The i8910 HD is a wonderful handset but the browsing experience is one area that hasn’t been up to par in my opinion. The standard browser feels sluggish with pages taking a long time to render. Also, my normal mobile browser of choice, Opera, crashes often due to Java issues.

Digia’s @Web browser is said to be “fully finger touch controllable”, including full finger touch UI. It also includes direct page control with finger, multiple browser windows, url auto-complete and automatic full screen browsing.

It’s worth noting though that it uses the WebKit engine built into the S60 handset. What this means is that it uses the same rendering engine as the standard browser but simply adds an UI layer on top. Therefore, you still won’t get kinetic scrolling on your i8910. The S60 5th Edition version is currently in beta. For those wanting to give it a try, it is available to download here.

I haven’t tested it myself yet, but have heard that it can be buggy. Also, as it relies on the standard browser, some reports say that is slower. Have you tried it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

For anyone that has looked to generate a certificate key for their Samsung i8910 Omnia HD, the main method up until now has been to submit a request to the Chinese OPDA website. This can be quite problematic to navigate, especially for most westerners.

We therefore thought we’d highlight a new website recently launched called S60Certkey that promises to do the same but in a much more user friendly way and in English! You can check out the site here. It’s already seen quite significant growth since its 1st August launch with 2,850 members and counting.

Samsung is looking to address the low number of applications for its handsets by launching its Application Store in September. The Samsung App Store is already being trialled in UK & Germany but is expected to launch across Europe next month. Hopefully, this means that searching for Samsung i8910 Omnia HD apps will become easier than current methods.

To gear up for this launch, it recently launched the Application Seller Site portal. This is a channel to encourage developers to offer both Symbian and Windows-based apps for Samsung handsets. Developers can sign up for membership of the new site for $1. As they register relevant apps or content, including suggested price and target markets, their software is filtered through a back end system and then promoted for download via the app store site.

After a longer than expected wait, the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD handset has finally arrived at SOHD HQ. It has been a frustrating time watching everyone get hands-on with the phone, whilst we have sat patiently on the sidelines rearing to get involved. However, bygones are bygones and we can’t wait to get up to speed with all that the phone can do and give you our impressions.

It’s worth noting that some sites have suggested that the UK sim-free units should now be available. However, our unit, along with all of the other Ambassador’s ones, are the Italian versions. The box is in English but it boots up initially in Italian and also has a European charger. I don’t know whether this means that the proper UK units are still delayed or not, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been no hiding from the fact that the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD has not been as widely available as one would expect at this stage. Remember, this is a handset that was released in the UK around the middle of May. Here we are, two months later and sim-free handsets are still hard to come by (well in the UK at least).

There may be a valid reason for this. According to GSMArena, the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD will effectively get a re-launch on 1st August selling for €540. They go on to say that mass production was stopped shortly after the soft launch “for some i-dotting and t-crossing to take place”.

Now exactly what that means is anyone’s guess. Could Samsung have taken the phone back to the drawing board for some (minor) internal changes? Or are the changes all related to firmware? We recently saw the IG2 firmware release that has enabled AAC audio when using video recording. That particular firmware is currently localised to the Italian market, but maybe Samsung are including a version of this to ship in all handsets?

At this moment in time, one can only guess what exactly Samsung wanted to fix before the handset received wider availability. However, it is interesting that some of the major mobile phone websites out there (like GSMArena and All About Symbian) refuse to publish reviews until they get hands-on with final sim-free i8910 HD handsets.

We received an email from Samsung PR yesterday apologising for the delay in sending out handsets to Omnia HD Ambassadors. They attributed the delay to the following: “The delay has occurred because of an update to the software being used, and Samsung want to ensure that you have the newest software during your use of the handset.” This is likely to mean that the bug squashing is related to software rather than hardware changes. After all, how much of an uproar from the early adopters would there be, if newer versions of the phone had some ‘enhanced’ features. Anyway, there’s not too long to find out now. We should be getting our handset within the next couple of weeks (fingers crossed!)

Thanks box360!

Cypress has announced that it is the company behind the 3.7-inch capacitive AMOLED display of the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD. According to the press release, “Samsung selected the TrueTouch solution based on its fast response time, gesture support and character recognition capabilities that enable the I8910’s outstanding multimedia player and fast internet browsing.” Given the wide acclaim the screen has garnered, it seems like Cypress has done a pretty good job.

Cypress’ role in the i8910 doesn’t end there. The handset also uses the Cypress MoBL dual-port as an interconnect between the application and baseband processors. This enables data to be exchanged efficiently with each subsystem being self-contained.

This is the firmware fix that everyone’s been waiting for. Samsung Italy has announced that a new firmware update has been released that enables AAC audio when video recording. The I8910XXIG2 update promises to replace the poor quality AMR audio with AAC when video recording at 720p HD resolutions. Whilst the AAC-fix is only included for HD video recording, hopefully the lower resolutions (D1, VGA) will get the same fix in future firmware updates. The update also adds a couple of games (Poker and Brain Challenge).

Before you all rush off to update your firmware, it’s worth noting that you will need Italian firmware on your phone before attempting the update. You will also need PC Studio 7 and you need to make sure that the sim-card is inside the phone when attempting the upgrade.

We haven’t seen an official changelog yet, but will keep you updated as soon as we do. There’s no news when other regions will get the update, but hopefully it can’t be too far away. There are already a number of YouTube videos from Italian users who are giving examples of the new audio fix. Check out one such example after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you looking to purchase a sim-free i8910 Omnia HD in the UK, you may want to head over to Pixmania. They are selling the handset for a bargain-tastic price of just £399 excluding delivery, by far the cheapest price I’ve seen it. The i8910 HD is currently in stock on their website.

As a guide, Play.com has the handset listed for £529.99 whilst Expansys are pricing it at £599.99. However, you’d better hurry as the deal will only last until 11pm Monday 6th July, judging by the timer that’s running on the product page.

I’ve personally not used Pixmania before and have heard mixed reviews about their service. The listing points to the phone running Windows Mobile 6.1, so it’s not the most up to date product page. Also, the phone may not be official UK specification as often Pixmania sources some stock from within mainland Europe. However, for that price, it’s surely worth considering.

Thanks andyd!