Gadgetory

hey guys it's bran a minimun from pocketnow.com and this is the first of two videos of a software tour of the samsung omnia 2 in this video we're going to go through the home screen layout which is similar in concept to the original omnia but they take it another step further so let's start off by turning on the device and we can do so with the unlock button to the right now we get this beautiful unlock screen and I wish you could be here to see how crisp these oranges are in the background and how great these blacks look so from this screen you can see your missed calls and you are new messages although I wish you could see your next appointment that would be perfect but you can't get everything so to unlock the device you tap and hold this little icon and you are taken into your first home screen now the new interface on the omnia 2 operates much like the Android interface on the g1 and the early Android devices where there are multiple home screens that you can go to and if you look up here we can kind of see that we're on one of three if we swipe to the right it moves to the next one and you can have widgets different widgets on each of the different home screens and for some reason there is a lot of GI Joe wallpaper built into the omnia I think the studio of that that makes GI Joe the movie has paint Samsung for some product placement which kind of annoys me to be honest especially since I can't figure out how to change the wallpaper on screens 2 & 3 I've even consulted the manual so that's going to take further investigation but let's go back to the the first home screen where I have changed the wallpaper to something a little bit nicer than the GI Joe wallpaper so before with the samsung omnia you are really limited in the amount of widgets that you could put on your device but since then Samsung has opened up development of the widget interface to developers so there's a whole universe of widgets now they use these widgets on their smart devices like the omnia 2 and they also use the widgets on their not their dumb phones their feature phones that you may have seen selling out there so let's go through some of these widgets and I'll show you how the selection of widgets has changed because now there are a lot of useful widgets so you know this one right here is not new it is the media player so if you have an SD card installed or you know since this has 8 gigabytes of memory you may have some music right on your device and you can play it right from your home screen if we slide this one over we have the kind of slideshow so if you have pictures of you know your family or friends and you want to kind of carousel through on your home screen you can have that happen and of course with any widget you can tap and hold to move it around anywhere on the screen but you can't fit that many widgets on one screen which is which is why it's good that there are multiple screens and we just bring it back to the tray when we're done with it sliding this widget to the right it's kind of a profile switcher so you can quickly choose if you want to vibrate or volume on or volume off going down the list we have stocks which is good this was actually present in a rom update to the the original omnia if we tap on the widget we will get in an expanded screen that shows us all of our stocks and we can actually tap on our stocks to get a chart kind of like HTC devices or even the iPhone it shows you a chart you can tap on five-day it downloads the data you can see how the stock is trending and we're gonna get out of that you know that okay so let's let's put that one back next up we have an FM radio widget so this device does an FM radio you need to connect to your headset in order to do that and uses three point five millimeters so that's good we have a great AccuWeather widget which shows you the current temperature and the conditions in whatever city you're in and we can tap on the widget to kind of get a more extended forecast and let me try that again here comes a really nice display of the weather conditions and the forecast that's coming up see what else we have here we have this one which just shows you the name of your provider right now I'm on AT&T and I'm getting 3G as you can see up there sometimes I get 3G Plus which implies HSDPA this one here will turn on and off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth I wouldn't want to waste the screen real estate by having this widget up there and we have the F for Facebook although it's not actually a Facebook application it's simply a link to the Facebook website so if I tap on that I'm taken to opera mobile nine point five I wish this was an application but unfortunately it's not it's actually a pretty cool concept to be able to have these these shortcuts to websites on your home screen I haven't found a way to do that yet for example I'd like to have a little p for pocket now or at W for Wikipedia or any website that I visit on a regular basis that would be super cool we have MySpace in YouTube and those two are the same as the Facebook widget they just link to the website just kind of kind of blocked so here we have CNN mobile and slide that over to the right this is actually a widget which shows you some news headlines and if you find a story that you want to read you tap on the story and you are taken to the full version you can get it just right here it goes so you have a CNN application and it actually doesn't take you to Opera Mobile it takes you to the CNN application which is quite nice and you can go between World News and top stories and that sort of thing so a useful application for keeping up with what's going on in the news now over here here's another widget slide it over to the right this is the calendar widget but it doesn't give us much information it simply links us to the touch calendar which is samsung skinned calendar which is actually quite nice it works kind of like it does on touchflo 3d on the newer devices or even like the iPhones calendar where you tap on a day and it shows you the appointment that you have there but there's no widget for next appointment which is a really big omission on the part of Samsung going down we have some streaming TV widgets here's an analogue clock that I added which really doesn't do very much except show you the time we're going to come back to this one that says widgets we have a Google widget which is always handy it'll allow you to open up Google Maps link to Gmail or search Google right from your screen so here's the on-screen keyboard we're going to talk more about the on-screen keyboard later but you can search for you know you know Samsung and you click on the search button and opera mobile opens and does a google search for you but you get the point exit and then we have a standard clock which is always good to know what time it is so you're not late and here's the here's the place you go if you want to add new widgets I'm gonna close this so that we get a full screen view so there are a lot of widgets that have been added I haven't found many that are too useful most of them are tip calculators or simple things like that I'd like to have a Twitter widget perhaps or maybe a full Facebook widget where I could update my facebook status there's a lot of possibilities here but let's go through some of the widgets that you can have so if we go to top recommended it's a little bit slow right now I'm over 3G actually 3G plus so it should be fast but it's not let me move this over a little bit okay so here we are and we've accuweather.com I already have that dig I don't have that quit smoking unit converter if we tap over to the right we'll get the next list of widgets calculator tech tile calculator so a lot of calculators as you can see these are the top recommended and they're all calculators I'm surprised there aren't some better quality things here tip calculator word world clock baby countdown if you're expecting so let me go back to an actual good widget and I'll show you what it's like to download one so we'll go to most downloaded and it's refreshing again this widget interface is kind of slow kind of clunky I wish it was a dedicated program so let's find something that's actually somewhat useful in here okay we'll just choose the unit converter just for the sake of demonstrating so you tap on unit converter then you're taking an opera mobile which is a step that I think they should eliminate so you download the widget directly but from here it's pretty easy actually you just double tap zoom in shows you that 77 people have downloaded this so it must not be too popular and then you click download and it actually downloads pretty fast and installs pretty much instantly so there's not much waiting after this point and here it says success install widget which really doesn't make sense but that sentence but it means that if we go back to our widgets over here we will see the converter here at the bottom so here's the widget that we've added added within a few moments although the the whole process of finding the widget is kind of cumbersome so we can you know type in a certain length and get a conversion from centimeters to you know inches so overall the widget interface on the samsung omnia 2 is much improved from where it was on the original omnia especially in terms of widget selection the whole process of getting widgets is a little bit cumbersome I wish it was easier and I also wish that they could have a widget for next appointment that's really critically important if you're a business user and you want to be able to see at a quick glance what your next appointment will be also it would be cool to have the ability to take a website URL and just place a screen full of Quick Links that would be quite cool one more suggestion I'd like to have a widget where I could put a picture of somebody and be able to click on their name and have it dial them directly or link to text message so that's pretty much it we'll be back soon with a more full tour of the whole software situation on the samsung omnia 2 samsung has done so much to change the interface on the on the omnia 2 you're going to forget that it's Windows Mobile for a lot of the time so we'll be back soon with more