Samsung Mobile is best known for its Galaxy phones today, but the company has been in the phone game long before Google launched Android. Back in the Dawn of Samsung Galaxy post we hinted that the company's early Android devices were mid-rangers playing second fiddle to the Omnia flagships. Time to meet the failed ruling class of Samsung phones.
Samsung saw early on that the underlying OS was less important than the user experience. Most Omnias were based on Windows Mobile (later Windows Phone) and there was a Symbian entry too. Yet, they all had TouchWiz as the dominant interface, a unifying thread.
We start with the Samsung i900 Omnia. The design drew on the Samsung Armani, an early all-touchscreen attempt by the company to answer the iPhone's challenge.
The phone's ambitions were great, but the screen proved a limiting factor. A small 3.2" resistive touchscreen with not that many pixels - the resolution was 240 x 400px. Compare that to the 3.5" 320 x 480px capacitive touchscreen of the original iPhone. And the early iOS interface was significantly simpler.
Samsung i900 Omnia • Samsung Armani
TouchWiz in comparison was oh so busy. There were widgets that you can position around the screen and the results... well, judge for yourselves. The underlying Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro supported full multitasking (workable even on the 624MHz processor and 128MB of RAM), but (thankfully) you could only have one app on the screen.
