Samsung i900 blog - part one

As we have promised we continue the testing of the i900 prototype we received from Samsung.

I'll first talk about the phone's exterior and the use of materials, as from this point of view the handset can be considered as being final. Judging beauty is a completely subjective thing, it's sure that I like the colors and the use of materials very much, they are completely okay. On the front there is a 3.2" touchscreen, which has an aspect ratio of 16:9 and a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels. Probably most of you now have a question mark above your heads (you know, like the ones in the cartoons), I was in the same situation, so my first question I had for Samsung was regarding the resolution of Omnia: why isn't it higher? There is no official answer yet, but we think that its due to energy saving. Anyhow, this is a very important matter too, and the 624 MHz CPU probably eats a lot of energy. The battery in the prototype is a 1440 mAh one, but all up-to-date news tell the same.

The display is a high quality one, although it ius very pixelated for someone who is used to VGA resolution. Brightness is ok, but it's still a bit hard to read in bright sunlight, there is still room for imporvements in this matter. The phone gives vibrating feedback for tapping, it does so even for keypresses: I liked this very much, I was much more confident when playing around with the software - this feature can of course be disabled.

I have strayed off a bit from the topic, so let's get back to the use of materials. There is a shiny part around the display, on the bottom there are the call handling buttons and a button that works as a d-pad and a mouse too - I'll write in more detail about how to use this in the next post in the topic. The frame of the fron is silvery and is a real fingerprint collector. This part looks as if it were made of metal, just like the keys, but neither are, they are in fact plastic, but a high quality one. The back is also brushed, but not metal, I think that this is a bit lower quality than the front parts. The sides of the handset are black, on the top right part there is a button that launches the Samsung menu, while in the bottom part there are the volume control keys and the camera's exposure key. There is nothing on the bottom, while on the left we can see the connector for the data cable/headset, on the top the wristband's hook is placed. The power button is on top - this unfortunately has not been tailored for my finger, it is very small, but - as I have observed about three minutes ago - it can shine in many colors, nice.

Thanks to the software that came out yesterday, the phone got much faster, although there are some parts that are problematic, but if development goes on so fast than in two weeks time there will be no problems with it. Just for the sake of curiosity I ran a pocket PC Mark, and i wanted to run VsBenchmark too, but it hung and exited with the error message you can see at the bottom of this page.

The Dhrystone CPU test is no big deal, but Whetstone is more realistic, anyway I think that there will be better results later. The mark for the memory is quite good (we could say its exceptional), but what is really shocking is the speed of the file system: it got 339.89 marks. I can't really remember which has been the largest number ever in this test, but I think it was around 110-120 points, but I'm sure that no device managed to achieve a score higher than 150 marks. The graphical test also had good results, but I think this could be even better. Next week, when the new ROM will arrive, we'll see if the engineers managed to improve stuff, while next time I'll write about the unique menu system and text entry.