Multimedia
The camera on the back has a resolution of 5 megapixels, it has autofocus and a LED flash. Image quality is rather good, noise level and noise filtering are okay, but the software tends to overexpose the images (with about 0.5-1 EV). It is an average one amongst similar handsets – mostly due to this overexposing –, but you can read about this in more detail in our 5 megapixel comparative review.
There are lots of settings, we can access practically everything we might need. Sensitivity can be set only between ISO 50 and ISO 200 unfortunately, but noise level is reduced even on the highest setting. Night mode is terrible, if we enable it the software will automatically use ISO 50 and +3 saturation, which might be good for something, but not for taking night pictures. If we try to take photos this way we'll get such underexposed pieces of crap like the next to the last test image. In AUTO mode we'll get pretty good results – bottom row middle image. I'm a bit sad about this as I have mentioned Samsung on many occasions that this is not good, but they didn't believe me.
The default headset and its 3.5 mm converter/extension
The headset looks quite... dumb, to tell the truth. But since its made of two parts (an extension with a 3.5 mm connector and the headset itself), we can use our own. Sound quality is not bad, by the way, but it looks so stupid that I wouldn't use it. Music quality is average in handsfree.
Let's take a look at the music player. It makes a pretty strong iPhone impression after launch, which is okay, as Apple's phone has a really fine and user friendly player. We can filter tracks by album, artist and genre and we can use playlists. I think the album view is much weaker than the cover-flow of the great competitor, firstly because the artist is not displayed under the covers (just the album title) and second there is no scrolling, so we can browse them one by one – this is already problematic at twenty albums and absolutely unusable above one hundred. The list of all tracks is also lame as they are not in an alphabetic order, so this is also useless.
There are other unpleasant surprises at music playback. For example the lack of a normal equalizer. There is one, but it can be used only when a headset is plugged in and we can't create custom presets, we can only use the default ones, which are the following: wide, dynamic, club, surround, rock, pop, dance, live, bass. The volume control is even worse, as we can set volume in five (yes that's 5) steps. It's not such a big problem with a headset as there is a control on the extension cord too (although that has a short range too), so we just have to set max volume in the software and don't tamper with it anymore. I think a ten- or even better a twenty-step scale would be a minimum. Of course we can enlarge this scale to twenty-five by using system volume (5 x 5), but I think it's obvious that this is not the best choice. Max volume could be a bit louder, but I think this is the max due to the “poor user shouldn't get deaf” laws. We can seek tracks with the slider, but it's not completely dynamic, there are only steps over here too. Another problem is that we can control the music player from the Today screen only if we use the Widget view.
On the whole I think there would have been room for improvements at the music player, and without these we can't say that Omnia is exceptional in musical terms, “average” would be a better word to describe it. Of course part of these problems can be solved with a third party software, for example MortPlayer is a rather easy to use player, but it doesn't have such a spectacular interface.
The same thing is true for movies. The software is not bad, it supports part of DivX and XviD content, but unfortunately some codecs make it go crazy. This could be easily fixed by installing TCPMP, but unfortunately that doesn't launch on Omnia. Before I would forget: there is an FM radio, it's just like the other software, it's very easy to use, and there's no problem with sound quality either, thanks to the long headset.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
