An Ode To The Samsung Omnia HD

Back in 2009 while I was at Techtree handling my “mobile beats” space and busy covering the MWC, I came across this phone from Samsung. It belonged to the Omnia family which had until then only boasted of devices running Windows Mobile. This one on the other hand, for a change, ran my favorite OS – Symbian. What however struck me was not the OS – but the specs. For a 2009 device, it came with specs unheard of on phones back then. It was the first phone to do HD video recording, had an 8 megapixel camera (the only competition around was the N86). It ran Symbian^1 (then S60 V5). The hardware too was cutting edge. A 600 Mhz ARM Cortex A8 chip coupled with a PowerVR SGX graphics chip. For a Symbian phone, it had humungous amounts of RAM – 256MB to be precise.

Yes, this might sound puny when you compare it with the amount of RAM todays phones have – let me remind you again that we are talking about a 2009 phone – that too running Symbian – a platform which was infamous for its ‘slow and laggy’ phones. Anyway, this 256 MB of droolworthy RAM was exactly double the amount that Nokia’s S60 flagship – the mighty N97 had. The screen on it was awe inspiring. The 3.7 display on it was freakishly huge and was the largest display on any phone that was around back then. I was using a battered and bruised N73 back then and the moment I heard of the specs, I knew this was going to be my next phone.

It wasn’t until August 2009 that I could finally lay my hands on the Omnia HD. The phone hadn’t been launched in India and I had to get it from the Grey Market for a princely sum of Rs.28,000. This as I figured out turned out to be a good deal because the phone was launched in India with a sticker price of Rs.36,000! Mine however was the 8GB version and was an Orange UK branded device. Even though it was a new phone, the killer specs of the phone had already made it quite a popular device amongst geeks and there was an active modding community behind it trying to tweak out the last bit of juice from the processor and the graphic chip.

Sadly, right after the release of this phone Samsung decided to stop development of Symbian devices and started concentrating on the upcoming Android platform as well as its own Bada OS. This meant that the Omnia HD was left with literally no updates, no bug fixes. Simply put, Samsung had sold us a great phone that it simply refused to support.

It was around this time that I came across this forum dedicated for i8910 users. It had an active ROM cooking community where these folks used their skills to mod the Omnia HD to utilize its capabilities better. Andy, also known more popularly as HyperX was a member there and he was right from the start known as a prolific ROM cooker. Starting 2009 – until now, Andy went on to become a one man army releasing updates after updates for the “dead” phone. The firmware versions were known as HX –V. XX where the XX denotes the version number.

I have been regularly updating my phone with all these versions and until now Andy managed to release as many as 11 new, modded firmware options for the Omnia HD. Andy went on to become very popular and equally popular were his new modded firmware versions that added more features and abilities with each versions. Probably the pinnacle of Symbian geekiness was achieved when the last two versions of HX gave users to overclock the phone’s 600 Mhz processor to a dizzying 900 Mhz. Then there were folks who displayed the 3D prowess of the graphics chip on the Omnia HD by playing Quake 3 Arena.

Most Omnia HD users swear by the name HX and were still using the phone because they were of hopeful of Andy supporting the device. However, the dream run has just ended as Andy has just announced that he would no longer be cooking ROM’s for the Omnia HD – inexplicably ending the life of the phone. There would be no more HX versions for the Omnia HD. The controversial last version HX-11 was offline for a couple of months. It is now back online for all Omnia HD users to download one last time.

I would soon be moving over to Android in the next few months. But I am happy that my parting notes with Symbian would be spent with one of the best ever handsets that ever arrived for the platform. It’s ironical that a phone that I consider to be the best Symbian device ever DOES NOT happen to be a Nokia.

I surely am not selling the Omnia HD off. It would be with me as my backup phone till I manage to conk it off. I consider the phone as an example of a wasted opportunity. It was a showpiece of what Symbian could have done. Its true capabilities were never utilized. Sometimes, these wasted opportunities are the factors that make some things special, no?