New Update for Samsung i8910 Coming Soon to Australia, Looking Pretty Good

Sam­sung Omnia HD Update

An update for the Sam­sung i8910 (Icon in Aus) I8910DXJB3 dated 12 Feb 2010 is com­ing soon to Aus­tralia. I’m already using it and it’s actu­ally pretty good. You get about 40MB free on C: drive,  web browser is bet­ter (loads pages faster), Route66 is included and bat­tery life is bet­ter. I’ve been using it the whole day; with about 20 min­utes of talk, a few min­utes gam­ing, some web-surfing and a few pic­tures taken, it hasn’t dropped a sin­gle bar. Besides that, it’s not much dif­fer­ent from other updates with kinetic scrolling.

After hav­ing used the device with these pro­gress­ing updates, I have to say I’m quite happy with the state of the device. Not that it’s per­fect, but it’s very usable, more usable than it was at launch. As far as Sam­sung mobile phones go, they have made more sig­nif­i­cant updates with this than any other smart­phone they’ve ever made. Adding kinetic scrolling through­out the user inter­face, updat­ing the graph­ics engine and updat­ing the web browser is a lot. Few mobile phone man­u­fac­tur­ers would make such a dra­matic change.

Sony Eric­s­son Vivaz

Biggest hur­dle for the Sam­sung Omnia HD is the Sym­bian OS. Not so much the core of the OS itself, that’s pretty good, but the user expe­ri­ence. The user inter­face and over­all expe­ri­ence on s60 as a whole is dated, much like Win­dows Mobile. Look­ing at the SDK for s60v5, the user expe­ri­ence remains largely unchanged on the actual devices. No mobile phone com­pany has changed the expe­ri­ence much, not even Nokia. Brand dis­tinc­tion is pretty much on the home screen and media programs(think Sam­sung i8910, Nokia n97, Sony Eric­s­son Satio, Sony Eric­s­son Vivaz) an no where else. In that regard, look­ing at how other mobile com­pa­nies have inte­grated Sym­bian on to their mobile devices, Sam­sung has gone as far as any, if not further.

We have to real­ize that when device man­u­fac­tures choose an oper­at­ing sys­tem, they start build­ing on top of that, adding trend­ing and dis­tin­guish­ing fea­tures. The expe­ri­ence on Sym­bian is not a good start, that is, com­par­ing it to some­thing like Android. Still, the Sym­bian OS is more advanced than Android which is seri­ously over-hyped. So, Sym­bian, the strength of the Sam­sung i8910 is also one of it’s great­est weaknesses.

The update that I’m using goes to show that Sam­sung is head­ing in the right direc­tion, slowly but surely. Hope the update will be rolled out to other regions soon than later.