Samsung Announces Omnia HD and Pro in India

Samsung has just introduced two new handsets from their Omnia family in India – the Omnia HD and the Omnia Pro B7320. Although the handsets are part of the same series they are both designed to perform diverse functions for their users. The HD is designed to be a hardcore media centric mobile but not without other capabilities as well while the Windows Mobile Pro B7320 is set to rival BlackBerry’s 8520 lower ended smartphone.

Announcing the launch, Sunil Dutt, Country Head – Mobile Business, Samsung India said, “Samsung OMNIAHD exemplifies our Vision of providing premium phones for consumers who desire functionality, style, usability and entertainment in one innovative device. Samsung OMNIA series keeps the consumers at the forefront of work and play, staying connected, anytime, anywhere.”

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The HD is the world’s first full-touch handset featuring 720P HD video recording on mobile, as well as the world’s largest 9.4 cm (3.7-inch) AMOLED screen on mobile. It runs on a Symbian OS and an intuitive 3D UI at the surface with desktop widgets. With its 1GHz Processor it promises to be one quick handset. The HD’s feature set includes -

• a 16: 9 screen of QHD display with 16M colors, an Accelerometer and Proximity sensor operations
• support for HD TV via DLNA technology
• 16GB of internal memory with support for up to 32GB more via microSD cards
• Samsung’s DNSe Sound engine
• 3D games support
• GPS with A-GPS support and Route 66 GPS app on-board
• 8MP AF camera
• 3G with HSUPA and HSDPA support, EDGE/GPRS
• Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth with A2DP, USB 2.0

What seems to be missing is Samsung's proprietary gesture control feature for quick access to certain features, although it does have the etiquette setting.

“Our full touch screen handset range is garnering a strong consumer acceptance based on the large full touch screen display, stylish form factor as well as the precision and ease with which the touch applications work on the phones" said Dutt.

The second handset, the Omnia Pro B7320 has a rather compact design and quite an ergonomic QWERTY keypad. It runs on a Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system as mentioned earlier thus allowing users to easily access MS Office documents such as PowerPoint, Excel and Word as well as send and receive email and manage their appointments in Outlook while on the go. Other features include -

• a 2.4-inch TFT LCD with a 320 x 240 pixel resolution
• microSD card support for external memory
• Samsung’s DNSe Sound engine
• GPS with A-GPS support
• 3MP AF camera
• FM radio with RDS
• 3G with HSDPA support, EDGE/GPRS
• Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth with A2DP, USB 2.0

With corporate push email support users can easily stay in touch with their mails and the support for key enterprise wireless e mail solutions including Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and IBM Lotus Notes Domino, keeps them connected with their business at all times. Social networking applications like Facebook as well as instant messaging support for MSN. Google Talk and Yahoo Chat are downloadable on this phone.

The Samsung OMNIA HD is priced at Rs. 33,990 and the Samsung OMNIA Pro is priced at Rs.16,500 which makes it quite the competition for BlackBerry’s latest 8520 handset that was recently launched in the country.