Gadgetory

hey guys it's Branagh Minnemann from pocketnow.com and this is part 2 of the software tour of the new Samsung omnia in part 1 we took a look at the widget interface and the multiple home screens so if you didn't get a look at that I'll put a link up on the video right now so you can go back and take a look at that if you're interested so in this video we're going to take a look at the whole TouchWiz interface this is Samsung's interface that runs on top of Windows Mobile and for a few moments you're going to forget that you're using Windows Mobile because it's so deeply integrated in this video we're going to show you the major functions and the interesting things about the TouchWiz interface but when the review we're going to cover every little thing so let's turn on the device and we get this unlock screen that you've probably seen before if you saw the previous video that we did so I'm going to unlock it and then we're taken to the widget screen and we talked about this before how you can you know bring widgets onto your on to one of three different panels so let's go through a few things for the first thing I'm going to do is press this cube button right here this is not a d-pad it actually is a program launcher so what we have here is a sort of iPhone like program launcher with four different panels and you can actually add panel so one two three and four what you do is you swipe to the right to get to the next one and you can change the order and the grouping of all of these panels if you tap on the edit button down here by the way the sensitivity of the screen is quite good a lot better than a lot of the windows mobile devices of the past almost as good as the touch pro2 in the diamond - which have resistive touch screens but they're very very close to capacitive and this falls into the same category very good screen so from here we can delete certain icons by pressing that button we can add certain ones by pressing the plus button and we get the list of items and we can move them around by tapping and dragging or we can actually slide them over to other panels and we can make new panels here's the fourth one here's the fifth page and the sixth page so you really could have a lot of different screens of icons which is especially helpful if you like to group things together so I'm going to click Save there also from here you get to the cube interface which is pretty much a novelty it's really really cool-looking but it probably will slow you down if you're trying to use this as a program launcher so the idea is that you have this beautiful 3d cube and you can go to any side of it and tap and let's go to the gaming side this will actually let you jump right to a specific area and then you get this kind of cover flow like sort of touchflo 3d esque scrollable carousel where you can flick through the games and you can tap on the games and it'll open it up on the screen and this also applies to other things in the cube as well so we can go to web for example and we can flip through our internet favorites again this may not be the most productive way to get to one of your internet favorites but it is kind of nice looking let's see what else we have here we have favorite people so we can flip through a picture of our favorite contacts we have videos we already did web there's music and there's also photos and photos we'll give you a it's going to open up because I tap twice will give you the ability to flick through all of your photos kind of with a little Polaroid frame to it so a pretty neat interface I probably wouldn't use this ever because it's really slows you down and it probably uses a lot of battery life I'm more so going to stick with this launcher interface which is very customizable now also kind of cool is the task switcher which gives you a Palm Pre like way to see which programs are open since it takes several taps to get to this it's probably again not the most productive thing but it's a good way to help you visualize what programs you have open I know the cameras having trouble focusing on that right now because of the weird contrast but we can go into say the calendar and here we are now the omnia 2 doesn't have great memory management meaning if you load lots and lots of programs it's going to keep all of them in program memory unless you're exiting them with the exit command well some programs don't have the exit HTC brought the HTC task manager which actually forced programs to close when you press the X not the case on the omnia 2 so what I have been having to do is every you know every day or so after opening lots of applications I go into the test switcher I click end off and then they are out of here something else I want to show you with the test switcher but I first need to open up a program or two is a different view of the of the task switcher so here I'm going to go back into it and I'm going to click the grid and it gives me a grid instead of a sort of rotating Palm Pre like interface so just another way to view the programs that you currently have open now let's go into the settings menu which has been completely re skinned here in settings you're going to notice a lot of white text on black Samsung is really taking advantage of the fact that the AMOLED display produces very dark blacks and where you see black there are no pixels that are actually illuminated so this really saves a lot on battery so it's by design and it is also to make it look better on the screen so every setting really has this interface to it so we can go to sound settings and everything down to ring it uses the TouchWiz interface very very nice very finger friendly too let's go back and see what else we have here display and light we can change the wallpaper and here we go into the photo picker and you can choose pictures you've taken or there's a nice selection of very crisp looking pictures that look great on the AMOLED display there's something called large indicators if you tap up at the top the notification area you get kind of an HTC like well some some HTC devices will do this so that you can actually tap on certain icons and here's the volume chooser which is actually a little bit different and this lets you change system volume and you can go over here to ring volume okay items on today well this is just the standard Windows Mobile item that lets you check and uncheck certain today screen items we have the Samsung widgets being displayed we can go to brightness problem with the brightness control you can turn on auto adjustment but the polling frequency is way too high so if I create a shadow on the top of the device it'll dim the screen instantly the polling should be less frequent so that you know a little shadow won't cause the screen to dim so I leave it on manual brightness we can change the design of the lock screen but not by too much so we can go to edit lock screen and we can change the design just a little bit we can make it a little more streamlined or a little more expanded we still don't get next appointment which is see what else anything here we're gonna go back general settings and here on the bottom you can actually turn off the Samsung TouchWiz UI so that when you press the start button you're taken into the standard windows mobile program launcher the standard settings and everything I actually recommend probably doing that because it gives you back some program memory that's being taken up by the TouchWiz interface and so we've other things in here such as wireless manager which looks just like a way to turn on and off the various wireless radios we gonna line the screen this has TV out but it doesn't allow you to do that out of the box doesn't have the cable this can play DivX video right out of the box I'll show you that in a second change the language let's go back and then we have some phone settings but this is pretty much the stuff that you get from your from your particular carrier and some security things Network memory let's go into memory and we can take a look at how much memory we're using right now and we have not that much left and we're only running a few programs I wish the omnia 2 had better memory management or at least more memory and we can go over here to the second tab which is the standard windows mobile stuff so and go into system turn on and off clear type turn on and off error reporting you know the stuff that you're used to in terms of how Windows Mobile actually looks so let me show you some video right now out of the box the omnia 2 plays a host of video file formats so I'm going to go into my storage that's the on boots onboard storage on the omnia 2 and I'm going to go down to an episode of the office and it plays it right away this is DivX and turn it over video looks beautiful on the omnia and it's so great that it plays natively many different file formats that's really a breath of fresh air of course you have play controls on the screen you can pause it turn it off that sort of thing so very nice with the video playback if we go into phone we get a nice big phone dialer right on the screen that's very very touch friendly and it's it works very well with one hand so you can be walking down the street and you type someone's name you can call them quite quickly now the messaging application has actually been skinned a little bit which is quite rare we really don't see this on windows mobile devices so if I go into my email this is Outlook mobile it's a little bit different than what you're used to and so we can go into any message whoops and read it just like we would except we do have a lot of you know white on black text here again taking advantage of the EM OLED display and likewise SMS is also skinned a little bit to be better for the for the AMOLED display now one more thing I want to show you is the on-screen keyboards because obviously the omnia 2 does not have a keyboard so the on-screen keyboards are vitally important let me show you kind of the options that you have so I'm going to actually go back in the email and I'm going to reply to that email just as a test and reply and you get two different keyboards and you saw the landscape keyboard there but you get two different keyboards let me get to the top of the message here I'm not sure why I went to the bottom anyway here we are and so we can type let me try the quick brown fox and it's got t9 turned on so so the quick brown fox so the keyboard works quite well it's very responsive it's got haptic feedback although I've actually turned that off to save a little bit on battery life in fact the whole device has haptic feedback and actually it makes a sound by default so when you tap on a button it goes click and it vibrates but again I turn that stuff off because it was annoying and because it's using battery life but let me show you the landscape keyboard which is really really awesome it's huge takes a lot of getting used to because the space bar is so small but it's quite a large keyboard which really helps to a quick and text-entry a lot so that's the keyboards the keyboards work quite well I'd say that they're on par with how they how good the iPhones on-screen keyboards are in terms of landscape and the portrait versions and one more thing the omnia 2 as CPU throttling the smack CPU speed on the omnia 2 is actually 800 megahertz which is pretty high for a mobile device now if the device were to run at 800 megahertz the whole time you'd think that the battery battery would kind of run out pretty fast but actually I've been running it at the highest CPU speed and my battery life is actually quite good I've been using it for a lot of the day today and it's about 77% so so far it looks like good battery life on the omnia 2 here in performance you can choose four levels of CPU performance by default it's on auto but I turned it on high and I'm getting really good performance I'd say on par with the touch pro2 which is one of the fastest windows and mobile devices in terms of going from screen to screen and opening programs and that sort of thing so that's pretty much it for the software on the samsung omnia 2 we're going to have a full host of screenshots and impressions pros and cons and examples of how the camera takes photos coming up in the full review on pocketnow.com so watch out for that if you want to know right when it hits follow us on twitter twitter.com slash pocket now tweets and that's it for now