Gadgetory

hey guys it's Branagh minimun from pocketnow.com and in this video we're going to cover the home screen interfaces on the samsung omnia pro b76 10 again this device is just like the samsung omnia 2 but it adds a nice slide-out keyboard that we've been finding to be really excellent it has a lot of surface area which is makes it really easy to type on so we're gonna start with the TouchWiz interface that we've seen before then we're gonna cover the new interface the more professional interface that Samsung has added to this device that I think is is one of the best home screen interfaces that is out there so let's start with the TouchWiz interface of course we have our list of widgets on the left side here then we can drag and we can drop them and they all do different things for example this is a photo viewer you can flick through the photos on your device and bring it back we have a music player a volume changer again we've seen all these things you can get the the weather on your home screen and it says that you know this is gonna use data charges and you press ok and it's thinking no city selected so you tap on that so these are really like mini applications so I'm gonna press press edit add location enter city name use the on-screen keyboard very good on-screen keyboard by the way if you don't want to take out the full keyboard Philadelphia by the way contrast is is fantastic on this AMOLED display it also is very good for with power consumption the device has been off the charger for well over 24 hours and it's at about 75 percent battery life which is really fantastic so we're gonna go to here and close and now we should get the weather for Philadelphia and here we go right knee right now it's in Celsius I'll have to change that but exit out and it will refresh and tell me the weather in Philadelphia and of course I can tap on that to get a full forecast let's bring this back over to the side also on here we have stocks we have Yahoo a quick way to search Google and to launch Google Maps we have a calendar widget let's bring that over which shows next appointment which is fantastic the Samsung Omni and the omnia 2 didn't have this next appointment widget which is very important because you want to be able to see where you're supposed to be in the next hour or two hours or whatever without having to drill into your your calendar application so it's great that they added that and tapping on that should take you into the samsung omnia sort of skinned schedule they call it it's really the calendar so we can close out of that bring it back to the side we also have widgets for Picasa and for Flickr we have this strange-looking smiley face which is actually just a link to Friendster so let's get out of that the device is very fast as you can see it has an 800 megahertz processor which really helps we have a link to Facebook we have a little widget here that just tells you what carrier you're using right now and as you can see I'm getting edge not 3G this doesn't have us 3G bands we're not sure if this is coming to the US and what they added with the samsung omnia 2 and this device is multiple home screens so we can swipe to the right and get a second home screen maybe you want to use this for work and another home screen over here so you get a total of 3 and you can customize the widgets for all three of these home screens and down here we have some other buttons really links that we can customize if we press upon the gear button we can add our favorite program we press the plus button it will bring up a list of programs on your device so we can add ActiveSync press ok now we have all of those there now something that's kind of annoying is that the widget placement gets all crazy when you go into landscape it doesn't organize it in a very intuitive way so right now I have images below this sort of SMS email and call history and if we flip open the keyboard things just get jumbled on the screen it looks really bad it's it's a shame that they didn't find a way to sort of deal with that a little bit easier okay so that's the widget interface let's take a look at that other interface that I talked about that I think is probably one of the best home screen interfaces that I've ever seen we're to go back into display and go to on today and we ran uncheck Samsung widget plus and go to Samsung today this is a very old-school style of arranging things on the home screen but it has a lot of functionality and a lot of customizability so let's get back so what we have here is sort of various modules that you can add and customize so I'll sort of start from the top and work my way down you can customize this I'll go through that in a second we have the time which is pretty basic we have a way to quickly search Google which is nice we have another module here for memos which is quite neat so I can tap on a memo and see what I wrote I was just drawing before this is the memo application it's quite neat actually so if we go backwards to the home screen and we tap and hold we can go to new and you can either draw something or type something if you want to say remember the milk so we can change this to text mode tap on the screen flip open the keyboard and say see remember the milk we're typing in pink text right now okay and click Save and says it has been saved and when you go back to the home screen you can see the memo that you saved which is pretty cool if you have more than four memos you can actually slide to the right now you can't see that now but you can have multiple memos probably up to 20 or so on your home screen which is really great going down the list we have tasks and this just integrates nicely with the windows mobile tasks application that some people use some people may not use we'll get out of that down here we have notifications so if we tap on the email notification we're jumped right into the messaging application and we also have a link to text message text messages in call history down a little bit further we have a link to our email inbox which is terrific it shows you the headlines are the subjects of the emails and you can flick to the right to see all of the additional headlines that you have and tapping on any one of these will actually bring up the email so you can jump right to the email that you want to see so it's a very convenient way to sort of see into your inbox down a little bit further we have favored people in the photo context and you can have multiple up to 3 so 3 times for 12 different people to quickly call tapping on any of these pictures will give you their their contact card so you can either send them a text message or call them really convenient way to dial people that you talk to on a regular basis and down here is next appointment and we can move all of this stuff around on the screen so I just clicked edit let's say I want to have a new appointment down here up at the top so I tap and hold I'll bring it up and let me try that again to get it all the way up and I bring it up and I can add and remove things from the side here so if I want to have a world clock I can click and drag it put it up here if I want to take away the memo area I drag that to the left if I want to remove search take it to the left so you really can have as much or as little as you want on this page there's also one for RSS which I found to not work really well although I wish it did because it's a really good way to keep track of websites that you like to look at and there's also one for network and there's one for settings let's see that RSS widget says so right now it's streaming from pocketnow.com and it's not really updating as much as I would have liked I'm going to go to the RSS reader and show you what it looks like so so we're here we have pocketnow.com it says please update the feed you'll probably change the setting to automatically update but out of the box it will not do that but it's pretty convenient to be able to have that capability right on your home screen without having to actually buy a plug-in that does the same functionality here we have the world clock that we just added and if we tap on that we are taken into the selected City so if we want to see the time in Mexico City I'll click done and then on the left it says Mexico City over here it's a specific US let's change that to Paris click done and this interface works very well on landscape so all of the integrity of the widgets are preserved and everything looks great on the screen they don't get jumbled like you would find in the other interface we just went through the TouchWiz interface so that's good and screen rotation speed is pretty good about a second or a second and a half now there's a bug on the side of the device that says w /l what it does if you tap and hold it is that it switches from life mode to work mode and the idea is that you can have two different home screens one for I guess the workweek and one for the weekend although there aren't that many widgets on this interface that make a lot of sense for the weekend there's no multimedia widget there's no photo viewer so it really doesn't make sense to have these two two screens and plus it takes a while to switch watch now we're going to go back to life it takes about five ten seconds and that's really a long time if you're trying to access information rather quickly so overall I think Samsung did a really good job with this new Samsung today home screen I hope they bring it out on future windows mobile devices I've never been a fan of the TouchWiz interface because I thought that the widgets were always kind of clunky and slow they took up a lot of space on a screen that already is is limited in space just by design so we're happy to see that that for the omnia pro there is this new home screen interface coming up soon we'll talk about that built-in settings and all of the programs that come with this device be sure to follow us on Twitter for more on the omnia pro b76 10 it's twitter.com slash pocket now tweets that's it for now