My Omnia (Samsung i910) arrived late Thursday afternoon. Unfortunately, I had to attend a bond committee meeting from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. and so didn’t get a chance to play with it immediately. I spent most of the day Friday setting it up, investigating all the features, installing programs and getting used to the soft keyboard, the finger scrolling, and other multi-touch functions, and then took it with me Saturday and Sunday and used it “in the field.”

My new Omnia

I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely sure about it at first. Oh, I loved the way it looked, but … the screen rotation seemed wacky (it would either not rotate when I turned it, or rotate when I just moved it a little and didn’t want to turn it) and typing onscreen takes some getting used to after the i760’s excellent physical keyboard. But the more I used it, the better I liked it. I found the rotation sensitivity setting that fixed that problem, and I learned the nuances of scrolling and typing on the device pretty quickly. And it’s just so much prettier than the i760:

 
i760 vs. Omnia

There are three different Today Screen options: the first is the regular Windows Mobile screen (boooorrrriiiinnnngggg). The second is the Samsung Today screen, which is okay and more iPhone-like:

Samsung Today screen option

The third (although actually the default) is the Samsung Widget screen. Lots of folks don’t like it, but I do. Maybe it’s because I love the Vista sidebar and it reminds me of that.  To create my Today Screen wallpaper, I just took a picture (with the phone’s built-in camera) of my own backyard:

 
My Omnia Today Screen with widgets

You can also pull the widgets that you want out onto the main screen so they’re right there at a glance, as shown here:

Today Screen with on-screen calendar and Phonebook Favorites

Now I have everything the way I want it and I think it’s much cooler than an iPhone.

What I like most about it:

• The big screen (I always felt like too much space was wasted on the i760 by the physical number pad, which I rarely used and which could have gone to screen real estate). The colors are good and display quality for photos is great.
• The form factor: at first glance, turned off, it looks like an iPhone. It’s that thin and light. It slips into my pocket as if there were nothing there, unlike the i760 that left a big bulge. It fits nicely in my hand; I don’t feel as if I’m going to drop it as I often did with the i760 because I couldn’t get my hand all the way around it when trying to do something one handed.

 
The good old i760 looks fat and kludgey next to the Omnia

• All that storage space. Even without the micro SD card, there’s 8 GB of internal storage. And I can expand that to 24 GB with a 16 GB card. This is way more storage than I had on my “top of the line” desktop computer in 1995.
• Some of the cool extra features/programs like the flashlight (you wouldn’t think of it, but it’s actually handy to have), the Smart Converter, and the built in Phonebook program that lets me assign photos and ringtones to contacts and put my four most frequently called friends/family members on the today screen. With the i760, I had to buy a separate program (Photo Contacts Pro) to do all that, and it took up a lot of memory and took a long time to load when you rebooted the phone. It’s much easier to scroll through this phone than the regular WM Contacts.
• I like the Widget screen, the Main Menu screen and the Program launcher – these Samsung additions make it much easier to navigate and I find that I never use the Start menu.

  
Main Menu and Shortcuts screens

• The Opera mobile browser is great; it will display a whole web page or you can zoom in on the part you want. You can move the window around with your fingers or zoom in by tapping on the screen. It uses the whole screen to display the web page and doesn’t waste space on the title bar and address box:

Opera Mobile browser is great

• The web is fast on EV-DO, about as good as a typical home broadband connection (although understandably not as snappy as my FiOS connection).
• The 5 MP camera is really good – noticeably sharper than the i760 and with many more adjustable settings. Photos aren’t super saturated, but it’s easy to fix that after the fact with any basic editing software, including Vista’s built in Photo Gallery.
• The phone voice quality is very good and clear, just like the i760. The phone keypad, like the keyboard, gives tactile feedback and the keys are easy to use:

Omnia’s phone application works well

• Voice command worked like a dream, better for me than on the i760.
• Bluetooth works great. I beamed several of the files from my i760 to the Omnia.
• Everything was easier to set up, from Exchange email to wi-fi. I don’t know if that’s because I’m more experienced after using the i760 or the Omnia really is more configuration-friendly. I suspect the latter, at least to some extent.

Cons:

• The xt9 autocomplete feature drove me absolutely mad at first. I was ready to send the phone back until I figured out how to turn it off. Trying to type a URL in the browser’s address bar was impossible – it kept putting in something different from what I was trying to type. With it off, everything works fine (and I still get suggested words, but they’re only suggestions as they were on the i760; it doesn’t actually put the substituted word into the text as it was doing with xt9 turned on.
• The onscreen keyboard is way better than any other onscreen board I’ve ever used; the tactile feedback really does make a huge difference. That said, it can in no way compete with the i760 keyboard. I always heard about “Blackberry thumb” but I never experienced it on the i730 or i760. On the former, I never used the bottom slide-out keyboard because it made the device unbalanced. I used the tiny soft keyboard with the stylus. On the i760, I used the side-slide keyboard all the time. I could type on it all day without any strain; it’s extremely ergonomic. With the Omnia, I pretty quickly got used to the soft keyboard and figured out how to type pretty fast on it – but after a full day of using it, I woke up the next morning with a right thumb that was painful to move. In using the device one-handed, I did almost all the typing with my right thumb and it obviously was not used to that.
• I realize I’ll probably almost never use the stylus, but was it really not possible to make a way to store it in the phone as with the i760, in case you need to do a soft reset? Not a real big deal, I guess – I can usually manage to carry a paper clip. Just a tiny annoyance.
• Instead of a separate headset jack, it requires that you plug the headset adapter into the same port that’s used for the charger and the USB connector. Then you plug the headset into the adapter. That isn’t really a problem, as it’s small – but it means you can’t have the headset plugged in at the same time the charger is plugged in (for instance, to listen to music on the phone with it plugged into the car charger).
• Thus far, it seems that you can’t highlight multiple email messages to delete all at once, as you could with the i760 by dragging over them. I guess this is a tradeoff for the ability to scroll with your finger. There may be another way to do it that I haven’t figured out yet (I hope).
• You have to take the battery out to insert or remove the micro SD card. What fool designed that? Yeah, I guess most of the time you’ll just buy a big card and leave it in, but … there are times when I would pop the card out of the i760 and into a laptop (that doesn’t have BT) to transfer files rather than go to the trouble of setting up an ad hoc wi-fi network. Or I’d put the micro in the card reader on my PC when I had a large number of photos I’d taken on the phone that I wanted to copy over.
• There are no parentheses on the symbol page of the keyboard (I’m big on parenthetical asides). :)

I tried the Smart Reader for business cards and got mixed results. You take a photo of the card and the software recognizes the relevant information and puts it into format to save as a Contact. On a very standard white card with black or dark print, it did a good job of extracting the name and phone number. On a more creatively designed or multi-color card, not so much. It’s a great idea and when it works, it’s very cool.

I was surprised to find that the FM radio works great and that I actually found myself using it. Pair it with a set of Shure earphones and the sound quality is fantastic. It would be nice if you could turn the volume higher, though. I don’t really like to listen to my music super loud but someone who does is not going to be satisfied with the top volume.

At first I was annoyed that the GPS is locked and can only be used if you subscribe to Verizon’s VZNavigator service (for $9.99/month). Then I realized that I probably wouldn’t use GPS on the phone for much of anything even if I could. It’s just too small to be able to see or make selections while you’re driving. My Mio GPS unit was only $249 and it’s way more full featured than the GPS software I’ve seen for WinMobile, and is designed to be finger friendly and very viewable while driving. In just over two years, the monthly fee for VZNavigator would pay for a good dedicated GPS that does many other things, too.

The phone gets more functional as I use it more and as I get used to how it works. It already includes many of the functions that I needed third party programs to get with the i760. So far, I’ve only found the need to install three programs and only one of them costs anything:

• Magic Button: a little freeware program that makes the X on the title bar actually close the program instead of just minimizing it, to save memory. It’s the first thing I install on any Windows Mobile phone.
• CapSure: a free screen capture program for WM that I used to take the screenshots for this review.
• Spb Backup: I used Sprite on the i760 but their web site said it wasn’t supported on the Omnia (although some folks in the PDAPhoneHome forums have mentioned using it) so I went with Spb this time. It costs $29.99 but that’s a small price to pay, to not have to do all the configuration again if I should have to do a hard reset.

All in all, despite the “cons” listed above, I’m very happy with the phone and consider it the best smart phone I’ve owned.

It’s amazing when you consider the evolution of the Samsung PDA phones over the years. Here are all three of the phones I’ve had over the last five years; note how much more attractive and thin each generation has gotten:

 
From left to right: Samsung i730, i760 and Omnia (i910)