Can’t Samsung Re-Launch the i8910 Omnia HD?

Bright Future?

The Sam­sung i8910 was announced at the Mobile Wold Con­gress 2009 and offi­cially launched around the world some time in May 2009. At the time it was announced, it was not short of inno­va­tion. Being the first mobile phone to boast a 3.7″ AMOLED dis­play, first Sym­bian phone with a capac­i­tive screen, first mobile phone to sup­port OpenGL ES 2.0 and the first mobile phone with HD video record­ing. Add to that an ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz proces­sor with a Hard­ware Graph­ics Accel­er­a­tor, 256MB RAM, an 8 Mega pixel cam­era and a com­pass just to men­tion a few of the high­lights. Some of these fea­tures are the same as, if not bet­ter than the fea­tures seen in mobile phones that have been launched lately. The Sony Eric­s­son Kurara for instance, set to be launched some time this year has a 3.5″ LED dis­play, S60 v5 and pretty much about the same fea­tures as the i8910. Accord­ing to an early leak(Russ­ian), the Kurara offers noth­ing that hasn’t been seen before on the i8910.

Sony Erric­son Kurara, offer­ing noth­ing new

The Omina HD has had at least a 6 month head start against this device. It has the upper hand, or does it?

Sam­sung Mobile Inno­va­tor was launched in late 2008 as:

“a new pro­gram enabling mobile soft­ware devel­op­ers to cre­ate appli­ca­tions for use across all Sam­sung S60 devices for the first time.”

It was launched just in time for the arrival of the i8910. To date, there are only 12 appli­ca­tions avail­able for down­load for the i8910 at the web­site, more than a year on. This has been attrib­uted to poor sales and lack of devel­oper inter­est as a result. Despite that, Sam­sung went on to unveil the Sam­sung i8910 Omnia HD Gold Edi­tion, a moved that puz­zled many. Inter­est­ingly, in the Gold Edi­tion launch arti­cle, GSM Arena called the phone an

“extremely pop­u­lar… multi-media monster”

The price of the phone has gone down sig­nif­i­cantly since its launch. In some regions, such as my own, you can get the device for about half the ini­tial price. From a con­sumers’ point of view, that’s very appeal­ing. It’s fea­tures are com­pa­ra­ble to newer mod­els that are on the mar­ket now, mak­ing the i8910 an eas­ily rel­e­vant smart phone.

3.7″ AMOLED dis­play — sim­i­lar to the Google Nexus One(Jan­u­ary 2010)

ARM Cor­tex A8 600MHz proces­sor — sim­i­lar to the Motorola Mile­stone(Droid)(November 2009)

8.1 Mega-pixel Cam­era with HD video record­ing capa­bil­ity– sim­i­lar to the rumored Sony Eric­s­son Kurara(to be announced)

Its ground break­ing fea­tures are the dri­ving force behind its longevity. The tech­nol­ogy though may be infe­rior to the cur­rent crop of devices, as shown in my pre­vi­ous arti­cle on the dis­plays, and other areas. The i8910 is an exam­ple of risk tak­ing and push­ing tech­nol­ogy to the lim­its. To date, it’s the only smart phone with HD video record­ing capa­bil­ity. The HD record­ing fea­ture may not be per­fect, prob­a­bly because it was ahead of its time, but it’s there, tak­ing full advan­tage of the phone’s hard­ware. The phone may fall short in the appli­ca­tions arena, but the HD video record­ing and play­back make use of most of its power, to the extent of almost fail­ing with HD video recording.

So, clearly the phone has some firm foot­ing, but if Sam­sung is to re-launch it, what would they need to do? Put Symbian^X? Not nec­es­sar­ily I think.

Symbian^4 not hap­pen­ing for the i8910

Some of the UI ele­ments of Symbian^4 have just been detailed and I have to say, I’m not really impressed. Skim­ming through the doc­u­ment, I noticed they don’t really men­tion much that’s new. An extract from the doc­u­ment released says:

User inter­face design solu­tions that exist for other oper­at­ing sys­tems are sim­i­lar in the fol­low­ing respects:

-       HTC Hero and Motorola Droid, both on Android, have a Home­screen with mov­able Home­screen wid­gets; how­ever, each has one multi-panel home­sceen page, whereas Sym­bian Foun­da­tion has inde­pen­dent unique pages

-       Palm Pre’s WebOS elim­i­nates Exit com­mands, but instead of sav­ing state and releas­ing mem­ory it keeps appli­ca­tions running

-       iPhone has a flat­tened appli­ca­tion library; how­ever, it is dis­played to the user exclu­sively as a man­u­ally orga­nized grid, whereas the Sym­bian Foun­da­tion appli­ca­tion library is an alpha-ordered list with mul­ti­ple fil­tered views.

Right… not as rev­o­lu­tion­ary as I would have liked. I was expect­ing some­thing more dar­ing, adven­tur­ous and funky like the new Sym­bian Foun­da­tion theme. I was expect­ing to be blown away with some­thing like this..

Symbian^4 as I imag­ined it

But that’s just me. In my opin­ion, Touch Wiz run­ning on the i8910 with Symbian^1 works ok for now.

Of the issues in the report, Sam­sung has only man­aged to address about 27% of the prob­lems and fea­tures sug­gested. The ~73% per­cent or so of the issues and fea­tures that are not being addressed are enough for a prod­uct relaunch. I mean killer fea­tures like a torch, threaded SMS, video edi­tor, fm trans­mit­ter, VoIP, multi-touch etc. are enough to make a whole new prod­uct. Instead of launch­ing a whole new prod­uct, they can just re-launch it. In my meet­ing with Chris, he men­tioned that the i8910 missed out on a lot of these fea­tures because they were either not yet pop­u­lar or they were not yet devel­oped. The device is capa­ble of sup­port­ing the fea­tures, it’s not the tech­nol­ogy that’s the prob­lem. The prob­lem is resources for car­ry­ing out such a project.

It is not unheard of that users have had to pay for new updates. The iPod Touch is one such exam­ple. Apple charges for new updates for the iPod Touch because they introduce

“sig­nif­i­cant enhance­ments to a device that has already been launched.”

Adding 30 or so new fea­tures, fixes and enhance­ments is a mam­moth task. iPod Touch users paid $10 for about 20 new fea­tures in the 2.0 update and another $10 for the 3.0 update. Apple unveiled new iPods/iPhones to coin­cide with these releases. Sam­sung could poten­tially use that same approach when launch­ing the i8910 Gold Edi­tion. Peo­ple who already have the device can pay a small fee, and the new devices can come with the new fea­tures on board.

Unfor­tu­nately, that’s prob­a­bly not going to hap­pen. New devices are going to come out and leave older devices like the i8910 behind even­tu­ally, that’s the way it’s always been.