Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimum from pocketnow.com and in this video we're going to take a look at the really cool and interesting features of the samsung omnia i 900 samsung has done a lot with this device to make it different than any other windows mobile phone on the market right now okay so let's get started Samsung has included this new widget based today's screen and these widgets can be moved around and you can add more widgets through the panel on the side here you can also kind of flick your finger and scroll through them if you want to hide the widgets you press this arrow button and they go away let me take you through some of these widgets up here at the top we have time zones so we can see time and you know eastern US and Pacific us going to the next one we have FM radio control but you have to have your headphones connected this ones can be to have it's your profile switcher if you want to change it to vibrate or have the volume off we also have a analog clock and you can actually overlap widgets on top of other ones so that's kind of kind of cool here we have a calendar but unfortunately the calendar doesn't show you your next appointment as does the standard Windows Mobile today's screen so the only way to tell what your next appointment is is actually by clicking on the calendar which will open up your full calendar application I wish there was another way to see the next calendar going down the list we have a photo looks like I have a voicemail and dismiss that your photo viewer so you can flip through any photos that you have on your device and there's only one on my omnia right now so I'm going to bring it back to the side going down the list we have a link to the games menu which is kind of silly because it only comes with two games and that's it the standard Windows Mobile games and finally on the bottom here well there's actually one more I'll show you after this this just shows you your current operator I'm using this on AT&T and this one is play controls for the mp3 player and I'm going to go through that further in detail in a little bit and this is the notification widget which is probably the most useful of all these widgets it tells you if you have a new text message or a missed call or new email and if you have more than one sort of notification to be displayed you can toggle between them through these buttons here and if you want to you know accept the notification and make it go back to default you press the X and it tells you you have no notifications the notifications with this I now if you have a keen eye you've probably noticed this arrow on the screen this is another way that you can interact with your device actually with one hand what you do is you slide your finger around on this optical joystick and the mouse moves around on the screen I find this to be a good way to navigate the device and to keep some smudges off of the screen since it's so fingerprint prone so I really enjoy using that and you're going to be seeing me use that a lot through this demonstration if you don't want to use the optical joystick you can turn off the mouse pointer now in the bottom right corner here we have Samsung's application launcher which lets you launch applications and programs that you may be using on a regular basis or if you want to add your own shortcuts you go to the next menu here where it says shortcuts and you can go to edit and you can click and drag these icons around to kind of configure them to the way that you want them to look so that may be useful to you maybe not it's good to have though so I'm gonna click OK and go back to the Today screen ok now I'm going to go into the Start menu and I'm going to pick the phone up and use the joystick to get to that now the omnia has an accelerometer like the touch diamond but unlike the touch diamond you can use the accelerometers functionality in a lot of different screens pretty much anywhere in the operating system so if I turn it over you get this little animation right and you can actually turn it to the other way too now this animation is indeed a little bit annoying but what it does is it buys the device a little bit of time because as you know to rotate the screen in Windows Mobile takes a few seconds so I'm going to leave it on portrait for now there we are and you can actually set the sensitivity of the accelerometer I'll show you that in a little bit so let's look at the programs there's a lot of programs included on here I'm not going to go through all of them I'll cover everything in the review something that I've noticed that's really annoying is that you can't flick scroll the programs this is supposed to be a very touch friendly device and you have to use the scroll bar throughout the operating system are in in most of the operating system if you want to get through a list that's unfortunate so let's take a look at some of these applications we've camera the camera interface is fantastic I'll talk about that in the review we have FM radio we have this program called Google launcher which is kind of pointless it's it's basically google's homepage so if i search for something right now it'll take me to google.com and pocket internet explorer it gives you a link to mail Gmail so if you use Gmail a lot that may be a quicker way to get there going down the list we have an RSS reader a podcast player streaming player which will allow you to view YouTube video videos on the omnia so you can go to my YouTube calm we have TV out viewer and unfortunately the version of the Samsung omnia that I got did not come with a adapter to use the TV out functionality word is that future models especially if it comes to the US will include that adapter we have this thing here called the touch player which is pretty neat so you can play songs you have a kind of touch friendly interface that actually lets you flick scroll this is one of the few places in the in the omnia where you can flick scroll and what's neat about the touch player is that it integrates with this if if I'm playing a song can I pause it and I want to go do something else and then I want to play the song again without going into the touch player watch this okay I just flicked my finger from the bottom to the top and I get play controls for the mp3 player let me do that again so I can I can play the song and also I get this task switcher which is kind of like the windows alt tab menu so I can switch between a program and go right to file explorer for example so that's pretty useful and also from this task menu you can end all tasks if you want to get back some of your speed on your device now because pocket internet explorer is still horrible even in windows mobile 6.1 which lets you zoom out on webpages samsung has included a full version of opera 9.5 the acclaimed browser that people are saying is better than mobile safari on the iphone so i'm not going to really show you a demonstration of opera mobile right now but it works really well in the omnia and of course it works with the accelerometer so you can flip around to landscape at any time the device also comes with Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote 2007 so you can view all that those documents on the phone now I want to go into the settings menu because there's some interesting things in there that I want to show you ok now in the settings menu we have this thing called vibe tones and what it will do if you turn it on is every time you hit a button you'll get a little vibration some LG devices on Verizon I know have this they try to give you a little bit of tactile feedback but I think it's really a silly waste of battery life the vibration is slightly delayed it really doesn't give me the sense that I'm actually touching a button I think it's a novelty but you may think it to be different you may find some use from the vibration mode we have a menu for DivX here this is the first Windows mobile device that is DivX certified we also have themes Samsung lets you customize the device with a few different color choices which is good because a lot of devices don't let you go beyond the standard green and red and blue so we can flip down the list get a purple or a grey and it'll show you a little preview and you can hit OK up here everything will turn gray obviously so let's move on to system we've got some things in here I want to talk about we have settings for the finger Mouse so you can either have it turned on or if you turn it off this becomes just a standard d-pad down here and you can do you know up down right and left you can also adjust the sensitivity of the finger Mouse right now I have it set on fast so that you know I don't have to stroke my finger that many times on the sensor to get it to move around the screen so that is that we have enhanced GPS which is the a GPS which will download information so that you can get a quicker GPS fix I found the omnia to get a GPX fix in 10 to 15 seconds in Google Maps now here we have some settings for the motion sensor so we can set the sensitivity of how easily a tilt of the device will make it flip into the other screen orientate so right now I have it set almost too low because when I'm moving around sometimes I tend to shake the device and I don't want it to flip into landscape and then it has a cool feature called etiquette etiquette pause which is like on the HTC diamond when you get a call in and you want to silence the call you can flip over the phone and it stops ringing let me show you an example of that now I'm going to call my phone and you should hear it ring in a second okay that goes turn over the phone and I turn it back over pretty neat huh it's a pretty cool feature that makes a mix it makes a big difference especially when you're out at a bar or out at a restaurant and you want to flip it over so that you know the phone doesn't keep ringing off the hook so let's move on to memory so here we have right now 46 megabytes of free program memory let me zoom in a little bit more so you can see that and storage we have 36 point 5 megabytes now if you're wondering where all the 16 gigabytes of storage is shown you have to go to the storage card tab down here which shows you that in my storage it almost acts as its own storage card we have free 15 thousand megabytes which is 15 gigabytes and of course if you have a storage card inserted into the device if you want additional storage it'll show up here as well ok now I want to show you the keyboard options on the Omni let me zoom out a little bit I'm going to go into office and then I'll open up word new and this is the first keyboard it's a shirt type keyboard is found on the t-mobile shadow on the blackberry pearl and it works pretty well so I'm going to type the quick brown fox and I haven't had much practice with this quick brown fox and it has word completion so it does pretty well and like the iPhone you can slide your finger around on the keys and it only registers the key when you release your finger so let me kind of delete all that and show you the other keyboard the next one is the full QWERTY keyboard and each key is kind of tall so it gives you a lot of space to work with so I'm again I'm going to do the quick brown fox see how I did and I'd almost got it close enough finally we have a t9 style pad it's called the phone pad these buttons are quite large so those with large fingers would probably prefer using this and if you can get that and focus here at the quick brown so it did pretty well in accuracy for this one so overall I think Samsung did a pretty good job with the omnia eye 900 I like how you can use the device with one hand with the optical joystick here it has a good sense of control and accuracy I like how you can use the accelerometer in in more than just one place in the operating system and you know the widget interface is kind of interesting I wish Samsung had included some more useful widgets for example stocks or weather or even a calendar plugin and let you see your next appointment I'm probably going to revert back to the standard Windows Mobile today's screen because this really serves no purpose for me having these lots of different ways to tell the time so that is it for the Samsung omnia I'm going to cover everything info on the pocketnow.com review coming up in a few days we'll do benchmarks on the device take pictures of every angle and show you every piece of software that this comes with that's it for now