In this installment, we are going to cover the software and operating system aspects of the new Samsung i8910 HD. If you haven’t read the first parts of this review on the hardware, part 1 of the hardware review is here, and part 2 of the hardware review is here. To start off with, here’s the firmware version on the review unit I received from Samsung:
As you can see, it is firmware version IG2. This is an official firmware for Malaysia; the latest firmware as of the date of this post is version II2 – as you can see, Samsung has released at least two iterations of the firmware since the firmware version on the review unit. More on this later.
One of the major issues with the i8910 HD’s closest competitor – the Nokia N97 – has been the N97’s pitiful free memory as well as its small RAM, which resulted in slow, unpredictable or worse, a hung operating system when too many applications were opened. Being a multitasking platform, applications can be opened and left open while the user opens other applications, as long as the memory is available to service these open applications. Out of the box, there is no easy way to check the disk space available on the various drives on the phone, nor its free RAM, so I had to install a freeware application called Y-Tasks from drjukka, a renowned Symbian developer. Here’s what Y-Tasks had to say:
Apart from the pre-loaded applications, I only installed drjukka’s Y-Browser (a file manager), Y-Tasks (to better and easily manage running tasks/processes as well as viewing system memory), and smartphoneware’s Best Screensnap (a screenshot software), all of which were installed to “mass memory”, aka the “E drive“. As you can see, there is still a large amount of space left on the C drive, where a user should not install any applications anyway. Free RAM is a massive 144Mb out of a total of 247Mb.
Upon turning on the phone, you will be greeted by a screen looking like the below (I’ve added some widgets to the “homescreen”, otherwise it will look rather plain and boring). Widgets are either live applications that can pull in “live” content from the internet, or simply shortcuts to another application or webpage/website. The user can tap on the right pointing arrow on the left of the screen to open a widget drawer, from where the user can drag widgets for use out on to the homescreen. Three homescreens are supported, which the “active” homescreen highlighted as in the screenshot below. Once the user is done customising the homescreen, tapping the padlock icon will lock the widgets’ position on the screen and the widget drawer will be closed.
At the bottom of the screen, there are four buttons for quick access to the dialer/telephone function, contacts, messaging and menu screen. While in the menu screen, the buttons change to options (for managing the menu screen such as moving application icons around, removing applications, etc), dialer/telephone, contacts and exit/back buttons.
To either side of the active homescreen (the user can choose which homescreen to be active, depending on his/her “mood” or time of day – eg. there can be a homescreen for work hours and another for leisure time) is a photocontacts screen, where the user can quickly see his/her favourite contacts who have been assigned photos. To the right is the “menu screen” – see the screenshots below.
The following screenshots show the applications within some of the application folders you see in the “menu screen” screenshot above. The Samsung LBS (“location based services”), Media, Gallery, Office, RealPlayer, Applications, Tools and Settings icons all open another screen. The title of the screen on the top left will tell the user which sub-menu he/she is in.
Personal Information Management Applications
Contacts
When the contacts application is launched, two tabs will appear at the top of the screen – one to show individual contacts, the other, groups. At the bottom are three icons – highlighting a contact’s name and tapping the “call” icon will call the contact; tapping the “message” icon will open an SMS window and the last icon is to add a new contact. Groups can be assigned their own unique ringtones.
Individual contacts can be assigned default numbers (if a contact has more than one number), and can be assigned a speed dial location from 2-10 (1 is reserved for voicemail). Unfortunately, there is no voice dialling. Contacts can be assigned unique ringtones, which will override the ringtone assigned to a group if they belong to a group.
Creating a new contact card brings up the usual screen with a plethora of data you can assign to a contact. You can add additional “fields of data” if the default ones are insufficient, and labels for each “data field” can be edited.
Unlike the newer smartphones using Android, for example, there is no integration between the contacts application and social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter.
Calendar
Strangely, the calendar application lives under the “Office” tab and not out on the main menu screen. When launched, it will show a default monthly view. For each day highlighted in the calendar, the application will show a short preview of the day’s items below the calendar. At the bottom are three icons – tapping the leftmost “view” icon cycles between the month, week, day and “to-dos”. The centre icon creates a new meeting entry, while the rightmost creates a to-do item. You can send calendar and to-do items from the phone to your computer via Bluetooth if both support the PIM service, as well as sending a calendar and to-do item via SMS with the details attached as a “.vcs” file. Calendar items can have alarms assigned to them.
Notes
This simple note taking application can send notes via Bluetooth to a computer (which will be stored in .txt format) that supports the PIM profile or SMS. Additionally, notes can be synchronised with the PC Studio software (Samsung’s software for data synchronisation for the i8910 HD).
Messaging
The messaging application merges the SMS and email messages into one application. Mailboxes are defined within the messaging application. ”Inbox” is for SMS and Bluetooth messages, while “Mailbox” will show email accounts configured on the phone. The standard folders of sent, draft, sent, etc are all present. The SMS application comes with 10 templates for the most common messages, with the option to add more. There is an email setup wizard to help the user set up new email accounts.
Web browser
The browser supports a rather impressive array of settings and features. A bookmark manager, popup blocker and “download manager” are present. The “download manager” is smart enough to recognise the type of file downloaded from the internet and will store them in the right folders, for example, pictures will be stored under the “images” folder. The browser also supports web feeds, aka RSS feeds and can import OPML, ie. feed information files, so that you can export the feeds you subscribed to in Google Reader as an OPML file, import them into the phone, and instantly subscribe to the same feeds on the phone as you do in Google Reader.
Sadly, on this firmware, tapping the “Stop” icon when the browser is in the midst of loading any webpage is guaranteed to crash the browser. If I recall correctly, this has been fixed as of firmware IG4.
Sadly, there is no text reflow feature when you zoom in or out on a webpage. Text reflow is a very desirable feature where the phone resizes the text to fit on a page width so the user does not have to scroll left and right when reading a webpage, especially useful in landscape mode view. To zoom in/out, tap and hold on the screen and slide up to zoom in, slide down to zoom out without taking the finger off the screen.
The scrolling in the browser is not as smooth as the iPhone or the HTC Hero running Android. Oftentimes, there is a lag, especially when loading a large webpage for the scrolling action to be registered by the phone; all the more surprising considering the i8910 HD has a large RAM – I suspect this is again, due to the underlying Symbian operating system.
The YouTube website loaded up fine, and videos are played in a separate video player, not within the browser window.
Media browser, music player, and video player
The media browser operates only in landscape mode. It supports kinetic scrolling as well as accelerometer scrolling – tilt the phone left to scroll left and right to scroll righwards. The browser will show all media formats from pictures, to videos, to music. Tapping on each type of media will launch the application for viewing it, and in the case of pictures, an application with very basic editing capabilities, although I don’t know how useful this will be! See below for screenshots.
The music player is a fairly standard one supporting playlists, visualisations, album art, playback options such as repeating and shuffling. It also supports sounds effects such as “5.1 channel”, various equaliser settings and sound effects such as “bass enhancement”, etc.
The video player and Real player are capable of supporting video formats such as AVI (DivX) and MP4, and is one of the greatest features of this phone. I copied a video file into the phone – in AVI format encoded using the DivX codec. The video played flawlessly without the need for any conversions as is commonly the case with other phones. Very handy, especially when you need to travel, and have no time to do video conversions – just copy the movie files into the phone, and watch it on the go! The video player is from ArcSoft Inc, version 1.0.0.88. The Real player is also capable of playing back AVI files. Unfortunately, the one video file encoded using the Real media format which I downloaded off the internet wouldn’t play, not even in Real player, which is a shame indeed – otherwise it would have made the i8910 HD the undisputable king of multimedia phones.
Dictionary
The dictionary application is based on Collins dictionary content. There are a number of dictionaries included, including English to some European languages such as French and Italian, and English to Chinese. Very useful. The user can save new words to a “wordbook” for easy reference later.
Clock
This is a standard clock/alarm application which can also show the time for selected cities around the world. Alarms can be put on snooze mode when they sound.
Converter
This application converts currencies as well as common measurement units. Unfortunately, there’s no option for the user to download the most current foreign exchange currency rates from the internet – this has to be entered manually, with the base currency having a value of 1, and all other currencies converted based on this currency base.
File manager
This application is like Windows Explorer on Windows – it allows the user to browse the contents of the phone’s memory (C drive), “mass memory” (E drive) as well as any memory card inserted into the phone. In addition, the user can perform backups of the phone using this application. What is backed up can be configured by the user, and the backup can be automatically scheduled.
Zip
This is like the WinZip software on Windows – a compression software. The application can open and extract compressed ZIP files, as well as creating new compressed ZIP files. Users search for ZIP files located on the phone using a file manager like interface on the Zip application.
Quickoffice
The QuickOffice software pre-loaded on the phone is firstly, old-ish (the most current version is version 6!), and secondly, view only. That means to edit Microsoft Office documents, the user needs to purchase a separate license for this purpose. It should not surprise you therefore that the version of QuickOffice bundled with the i8910 HD cannot open Microsoft Office 97 format files.
Here are screenshots of the QuickOffice application opening Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents respectively in portrait mode. These were sample random documents I downloaded from the internet.
Adobe PDF
The version of Adobe Reader bundled with the i8910 HD is version 2.5.385. Unfortunately, there is no text reflow when you zoom in or out, so the user still has to pan left and right when zooming in. Coupled with the fact that the user cannot go into fullscreen mode, ie. the buttons are always visible either to the bottom of the screen in portrait mode, or to the right in landscape mode, makes the PDF reader not very useful. The experience on Symbian fares very poorly comapared to the PDF reader experience on the HTC Hero that I just reviewed. Trust me – you will not be reading a lot of PDF documents on the i8910 HD! The PDF reader also does not have a wealth of options available – see the last screenshot below to see what I mean!
Smart reader
This is a business card scanner which tries to convert a snapped photo of a business card into contact information so that the user does not have to enter the information manually. The user positions the business card within a frame on the screen, and the application can either take a snapshot of the card automatically once it has detected a business card, or the user can use the camera button to focus on, and snap a photo of a business card. Once snapped, the phone will automatically try to perform character recognition on the image and convert the image into readable and editable text. The user then has the option of further editing the contact information before saving it to the phone’s contacts application.
I tried snapping my business card and the application managed to recognise the text on the card and converted it for me. Very neat. Obviously the results will differ depending on the design of the card.
Other standard applications include a calculator and a photo contacts application where you can assign photos to your favourite contacts and have them available on a separate homescreen for easy dialling. Under the “Tools” menu, there is an application called “IM” for instant messaging, but this requires access to an instant messaging server on your cellular operator, and I do not think any of the 4 operators in Malaysia offer such a service (this is different from MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, in case you’re wondering).
There are also applications within the “Tools” folder to call mlbox, to call voicemail, although I do not understand the inclusion of this, since speed-dial number 1 is normally defaulted to the voicemail number anyway. There is also a Log application which shows the user recent call logs, data usage logs, and SMS messaging logs.
The Podcast application allows the user to subscribe to, and manage their favourite (audio) podcasts. The Communities applications is just a list of shortcuts for the user to upload content easier to the web – websites such as YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, Facebook, Friendster and Myspace are supported. Clicking on an item in the list brings up a web browser window which loads the website. So, this application is simply a glorified links application! A Smart Search application searches the content in the phone and displays it to the user – the user can search from a combination of searching the contacts, call log, videos or images.
The RoadSync application is essentially a (Nokia’s) Mail for Exchange equivalent on the Samsung – it allows the user to set up Microsoft Exchange support for email accounts synchronisation. I could not get to test this – on the review unit, the application keeps reporting a 501 error and refuses to connect me to my GMail account for push email. I suspect this could be an issue with the RoadSync software not supporting Google Sync.
In the “Games” folder, there is only one miserable game pre-loaded – Asphalt 4 from Gameloft. Needless to say, gaming on the Symbian platform can never be compared to the iPhone platform!
In the Samsung LBS (location based services) folder, there is a suite of gypsii “location aware” social networking applications (PlaceMe, SpaceMe, ExploreMe) designed to help the user connect with his/her friends on the gypsii network.
Finally, the “Gallery” application shows all types of media stored on the phone, categorised by “pictures and videos”, “songs”, “sound clips” and “other media”.
That concludes the software review part of the review series on the Samsung i8910 HD. Stay tuned for the final part – conclusions and recommendations, which should be up very soon!
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Well, it had to happen sooner or later. When you run out of new products to launch, the next best thing is to adorn an already well received product with some bling. In this case, it’s the i8910 HD, aka Omnia HD, Samsung’s Symbian flagship phone. This is all the more surprising because Samsung has traditionally focused more on Windows Mobile rather than Symbian (although that’s about to change with the announcement of its own bada operating system, more details of which will be available very soon).
