UPDATE: Hwan Kim, vice-president of mobile communications has issued a new statement to Reuters which says, “we have not received significant customer feedback on any signal reduction issue for the Omnia II. Based on years of experience of designing high quality phones, Samsung mobile phones employ an internal antenna design technology that optimizes reception quality for any type of hand-grip use.”

Apple had a press conference last Friday that claimed iPhone 4 is not the only one that faces antenna issues. To support its claim, Steve Jobs demonstrated few mobile phones that dropped signal when held in the hand. One such device belonged to Samsung that is known as Omnia II.

Needless to say, Samsung isn’t too happy with it and have defended the device. Samsung’s spokesperson confirmed to Korea Herald saying they “have fully conducted field tests” and there are no reception problems and won’t be any in the future too.

The antenna is located at the bottom of the Omnia 2 phone, while iPhone’s antenna is on the lower left side of the device. Our design keeps the distance between a hand and an antenna. We have fully conducted field tests before the rollout of smartphones. Reception problems have not happened so far, and there is no room for such problems to happen in the future.”

Other companies like RIM, HTC whose phones were demonstrated have also issued some statement criticizing Apple’s claim.

While iPhone in South Korea has been enjoying decent sales (about 4,000 units everyday), KT, its official operator seems to be getting less attention from local players, particularly by Samsung. KT Chairman’s Lee Suk-chae is pretty unhappy about how Samsung is providing “lax technology support on handsets” on KT as well as announcing new phones on SK Telecom.

“The Show Omnia is an illegitimate son who can’t call his father, father,” said Lee and accused Samsung for under promoting the handset that managed to sell only 40,000 units as compared to SKT’s T-Omnia II’s 470,000 units. SHOW Omnia is the only Omnia handset that features 3G WCDMA, Wi-Fi and WiBro connectivity.

KT’s desperation also comes from the fact that Samsung will launch Galaxy A (SHW-M100S) this week on SKT whereas Galaxy S, unveiled at CTIA is also expected to be launched on the same operator in June.

Source

Samsung Sweden has confirmed a free firmware update for Omnia II users. The update will be available in the latter half of May and the biggest change will be the touchscreen performance. Samsung says in addition to the revamped UI, the touch response will be much faster and intuitive. Samsung also confirmed to launch a white Omnia II and will ship all Omnia II devices pre-installed with WM 6.5.3 OS after late May.

Samsung has announced that its Omnia II smartphone has surpassed 600,000 units in South Korea. Unlike in the international market, Samsung sells different versions of Omnia II on different cellular operators like T*Omnia II (left) for SKT, SHOW Omnia (center) for KT and OZ Omnia (right) for LGT.

Samsung says Omnia II sales averaged about 100,000 units per month and the reason the phone is selling well is because users are satisfied with Omnia II’s performance and its after-sales service.

The common features found in all these phones are 3.7-inch AMOLED touchscreen display, 800MHz processor, 5MP camera, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

This feat will surely help Samsung to shift few more Omnia IIs. Recently, Franklin Page from Seattle set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest text message on a touchscreen phone. The message was “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human” and Page managed it to complete the phrase in just 35.54 seconds using Swype on Omnia II.

Omnia II that is exclusive to Verizon in US is the only Samsung device currently to come with Swype. Check out the commercial of the same below.

As promised, Samsung has now initiated to expand its Apps Store to other countries. Beginning this month, the Samsung Apps Store will be available to Omnia II (I8000) and OmniaLITE (B7300, I329) users in Singapore, Germany, Brazil & China. Users with respective devices can download the apps client on the phone and can download various apps over GPRS/EDGE, 3G or Wi-Fi connections.

Additionally, from mid-February Samsung will preload the Samsung Apps client in phones sold in Singapore and Germany or users can download Kies, a software suite to download apps on PC and install them whenever the phone is synced.

The Samsung Apps Store was previously available UK, France, Italy and South Korea.

Samsung Apps

Samsung’s Omnia II for Verizon will come with Swype text-input tech that claims to increase the typing speed auto correcting the errors. Instead of typing on a QWERTY, Swype relies on tracing the path a user uses to type and arrives at the correct letter. Check out the video below to see how it works and beat the iPhone guy pretty easily. To be fair, the guy with the iPhone did not seem as fluent as with the guy typing on Swype. Nonetheless, Swype looks promising and will hopefully be integrated in other platforms too.

Verizon’s Omnia II will launch on December 2 for $199.

Via

The leaked doc from last week turns out to be true. Samsung and Verizon have announced the impending Omnia II that will grace the stores beginning December 2.

The feature set remains the same, which means it will have a vivid 3.7-inch AMOLED resistive touchscreen display running WinMo 6.5 OS laden with TouchWiz and 3D Cube UI. There’s 5MP auto focus camera with LED flash onboard with camcorder functionality and on-device editing capability, DNSe for enhancing audio quality, out-of-the-box DivX/Xvid support, 8GB internal memory, microSD slot (up to 16GB) and pre-installed Verizon services like V CAST, VZ Navigator etc.

The Omnia II will sell for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate and 2 year agreement.

Omnia II for Verizon has been teased and sighted before and it’s good to see the wait will be over soon. An internal document has been unearthed leaking SCH-i920 or Omnia II’s launch date. According to the doc, the phone will launch at “all channels” on December 2 carrying a price tag of $199.99 (with 2-year contract and $100 mail-in-rebate. You’ll also be able to buy with a 1-year or no contract that will cost $ 269.99 and $519.99 respectively.

Features-wise, Verizon’s variant will be equipped with WinMo 6.5 onboard, lovely 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED touchscreen display, TouchWiz UI, 8GB internal memory, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5MP camera with flash and loaded with bunch of Verizon services.

Samsung is the Worldwide Olympic Partner in Wireless Communications Equipment and being the official partner have some advantages. They’ve announced the availability of Wireless Olympic Works (WOW) communications platform, an app that will provide real-time updates to users during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

Any Samsung device running Windows Mobile 6.1 or 6.5 will be able to download the new app that Samsung claims will deliver up-to-date Olympic news, schedules, results and medal standings previously available only to official staff.

WOW will be added to the Samsung Application Store soon or below are few instructions if you want to download right away.

Recently, Samsung announced Omnia II will be the official handset of the Winter Olympic games.

For more info or to download the app, click here.

Instructions:
- Visit this site
- Click on Mobile Phone
- Click on WOW
- Then click on WOW Technology
- Finally, click Download application by selecting the appropriate device