Two months later and I'm STILL loving my Omnia II. I apologize for the giant lapse in posts as I've been busy with work and social life and the blog kinda faded away into the back of my mind for awhile. Needless to say in the time I've been gone I've found some neat things to share with you! Before I start though, I'd just like to say thank you to the two people who commented, love to see that people find what I write interesting. Always a bonus.
First off, to answer the comments: Allreader still works great in winmo 6.5 I've not had any issues with it myself and am currently reading "A Song for Arbonne" by Guy Gavriel Kay. So far, so good. As for your comment about divx playback, I'll be the first to admit I'm not much of a videophile, and am not sure how to go about finding out the bitrate for the videos on my phone. Max resolution though is 800x600 as thats the cap of the display itself which on a small screen is still brilliantly crisp unless standing in direct sunlight then the reflective screen is kind of lack luster...
For the other commenter I did some research as I myself have voice mail included in my bundle with bell and haven't had the need for an answering machine app and came up with iSecretary which seems to be rather full featured from what I can see Only used it once with a test call from myself but worked like a charm, not quite voice mail quality but not bad.
As for things I've found and started using a lot for myself, I've grabbed Skyfire browser, YouTubeplay, PDAcraft Paint and Windows Media Center Remote.
Skyfire so far is an awesome browser if you're on WiFi as it gives you a fully rendered webpage and pretends you're a desktop, this browser will DESTROY your data usage if you aren't careful. It has full Java and flash support (with the correct updates downloaded for winmo 6.5, easily available on a quick google search) and is amazing for browsing those pages that require you to "mouse-over" to get to certain menus. Also Skyfire supports "Save Target as" and "Save Picture As". That is a VERY useful feature to have on a mobile browser, I've not found a way to do that with either Internet Explorer or Opera, but I may just be missing something so don't hold me to those two missing that feature.
YouTubePlay is also a very useful app that I use all the time it allows you to browse and view YouTube videos quickly and easily in its own app non-Dependant on a secondary web browser like the "YouTube" app that comes shipped with the phone. It also allows for the download of said YouTube videos and can launch previously saved videos from inside itself without having to switch to your media player. Now the player itself is missing some major features like the ability to seek or rewind. As an ADDED bonus youtubeplay can extract the audio of a YouTube video as an MP3 file and save it to your phone (music videos anyone?).
PDAcraft Paint I won't bother giving a full paragraph review as its just a simple MSPaint port. But it can draw circles, use fill and spray can and all your oldies. Yay for MSPaint ports!
The last app I've downloaded, Windows Media Center Remote I've only had since yesterday morning and as of yet haven't been able to get it to work correctly but from the forums where I snagged the program people say it does indeed work once you've got it properly configured and theres reports that yes it does work with both Winmo 6.5 and the Omnia II so I'm holding out hope for it and will keep poking at it. It's supposed to be able to allow you to pause, play, rewind, skip and control volume etc of any computer running windows media center on your network, for example, my Media Center PC. I can get it to connect and it brings up my keys but crashes promptly as soon as I touch any button.
Anyways, I encourage you to KEEP COMMENTING I may take awhile to get back to you but I SWEAR I will eventually. Thanks for reading and I guess thats all for now. Now I'm off to fiddling with that remote app. Hope this works.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Nimbuzz
Ever tire of switching between ICQ, MSN, AIM, Facebook, Google Chat and umpteen other chat clients to chat with your vast swarm of adoring fans? No? Hire about switching between just a couple to chat with friends too stubborn to switch to the more popular client? If either of the above ever happen to you I have an app you'll LOVE!
Enter Nimbuzz, this app lets you simultaneously chat between close to thirty different chat programs all through one client. Once installed simply register a new account with Nimbuzz (doable from within the app) and log into each of the clients you wish for Nimbuzz to remember and your set! Next time you go to chat just log into your new Nimbuzz account and it will automatically connect to all your chat clients at once. Happy chatting.
Enter Nimbuzz, this app lets you simultaneously chat between close to thirty different chat programs all through one client. Once installed simply register a new account with Nimbuzz (doable from within the app) and log into each of the clients you wish for Nimbuzz to remember and your set! Next time you go to chat just log into your new Nimbuzz account and it will automatically connect to all your chat clients at once. Happy chatting.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Oh! Market!
It's here it's finally happened! FreewarePC released an app-store styled app! Check it out it's called "O!Market" (link and photos at bottom of page) This is one of the smoothest marketplace apps I have ever seen. Every app is free and it runs a one touch download and install engine keeping things simple. As an added bonus this thing will keep track of what you've installed and let you know if it finds any updates for them.
After playing with O!Market for awhile I've found some neat and some trivial apps, everyone’s favorite kinds.
For starters lets take a look at PockeTwit a twitter app that lets you post messages as well as photos and links to several micro blogging sites.
Then there’s NeoReader the hundred in one scanner program that can pick up Data Matrix, EAN, UPC, Aztec Codes you name it. It can be a little tricky to aim but is pretty quick when it works.
Waze is also a neat app that expands upon the phones GPS giving full turn by turn instructions and will actually speak street names. Just note Waze requires true GPS not AGPS that some phones use.
Then there is SonarCE. I'm not one hundred percent sure why one needs sonar on their smartphone but now you can just please remember the Omnia us NOT waterproof. Yup.
That’s about all for now thanks for reading and I look forwards to more of your comments!
Note: O!Market download at This site
Screenshots later.
After playing with O!Market for awhile I've found some neat and some trivial apps, everyone’s favorite kinds.
For starters lets take a look at PockeTwit a twitter app that lets you post messages as well as photos and links to several micro blogging sites.
Then there’s NeoReader the hundred in one scanner program that can pick up Data Matrix, EAN, UPC, Aztec Codes you name it. It can be a little tricky to aim but is pretty quick when it works.
Waze is also a neat app that expands upon the phones GPS giving full turn by turn instructions and will actually speak street names. Just note Waze requires true GPS not AGPS that some phones use.
Then there is SonarCE. I'm not one hundred percent sure why one needs sonar on their smartphone but now you can just please remember the Omnia us NOT waterproof. Yup.
That’s about all for now thanks for reading and I look forwards to more of your comments!
Note: O!Market download at This site
Screenshots later.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Change of Pace
Well faithful readers I have a quick announcement to make. This post was a lot harder to write then the last few weeks as my posts catch up to my use. I've covered multi tasking, swype, the microsoft office suite, and a bunch of other miscellaneous apps. I realized if I kept going with those large block posts I'd quickly run out of apps so I'm changing my layout into three smaller posts a week. One will review a single app and will also include a suggest an app feature where you can show me YOUR favorite apps simply by commenting. The next post will cover something neat you can do with this awesome phone that isn't directly tied to an app as well as any reviews of "Suggest-an-app". The third post each week will be similar to my current posts only fairly shorter. Hopefully this will give you readers out there more chances to read my poorly written posts as well as a direct way for you to influence what gets posted while giving me more wiggle room with how much homework I have to do all at once. So I encourage you all to post your thoughts and give ME something to read every once in a while! Thanks for reading, I'm off to do more research!
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Push button; Launch bacon
Hello again, I'm back, sorry for the late post I've been a little preoccupied as of late as I've just recently found a new game and its been eating up all my free time. If you're at all interested in PC FPS's I highly recommend trying S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Fall of Pripyat.
Now back to the regular theme of this blog! I was digging around in the settings folder of my beloved Omnia and found a wondrous feature, custom hardware buttons. Simply goto start> settings> General settings> Button> Assign a program.
I set my cube button so a tap brings up my Task Switcher, holding it brings up my Task Manager useful if shutting those pesky frozen apps that appear now and again (PocketGBA anyone?) and I also have new hardware hotkeys for my Media Player and Microsoft Word where I do most of my blogging from.
Since this discovery I've more then doubled my productivity with this phone. Having a hardware shortcut to "The Cube" menu was a waste as custom apps don't show up there anyway.
Thanks for reading and once again I encourage you to post your comments, let me know what you think.
Now back to the regular theme of this blog! I was digging around in the settings folder of my beloved Omnia and found a wondrous feature, custom hardware buttons. Simply goto start> settings> General settings> Button> Assign a program.
I set my cube button so a tap brings up my Task Switcher, holding it brings up my Task Manager useful if shutting those pesky frozen apps that appear now and again (PocketGBA anyone?) and I also have new hardware hotkeys for my Media Player and Microsoft Word where I do most of my blogging from.
Since this discovery I've more then doubled my productivity with this phone. Having a hardware shortcut to "The Cube" menu was a waste as custom apps don't show up there anyway.
Thanks for reading and once again I encourage you to post your comments, let me know what you think.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Week Two; I'm Lovin It
Well week two has gone by and I've learned a few more things about this phone. Some are pretty neat and a few are just a bit frustrating.
I'll start with the good and talk about the AMAZING camera this phone has. Originally I just thought, "Ooh, five mega pixel camera! Not too shabby," and left it at that. It's so much more then that! This baby is chalk full of useful features such as smile detection, panoramic, macro focus, and even an "Action" mode where you can point the camera at something moving like a kid playing soccer and whenever the kid happens to pop into focus the camera automatically snaps a photo. I've added a few photos at the bottom of this post showing the clarity of the above mentioned camera.
The camera also has the really neat feature of "Smart reader" mode where you can use it to scan in business cards or even translate a word you snap a picture of into another language! How cool is that!
I've also started using the Mobile Office suite included with the Omnia II. I've been playing with both excel and word a lot these last few days and some of the things they can do are great. Excel is just like the desktop version, charts and all. It also seems to run really smoothly with the occasional hiccup here and there while trying to scroll (they are tiny scroll bars). Word on the other hand is missing a few important features like page breaks and a few other formatting features but you can still do the basics; bold, italicize, underline, all of the align functions work, bulleting, font and color changing etc etc.
Another neat thing I've so quickly grown to love is the ability to install whatever I want! Instead of being bound to the app-store I can go to sites like Freeware Pocket PC, The Microsoft Downloads page, Smartphone Freeware, Windows Mobile 6 Software or the thousands of others like them and grab all the free games, utilities, tools and thing-a-ma-bobs I want!
So far I've installed closed to 30 programs and only one have I paid for. Of those thirty, three are definitely worth a mention. Zenonia is the first I'll mention, the only paid software I've downloaded. The game plays like a cross between Diablo II with its skill tree system and Legend of Zelda (the old school gameboy ones not the newish 3d ones) and has been absorbing MUCH of my time. O2Compass is another great app and it's also free. It gives you a compass to work with so long as your windows mobile phone has a built in digital compass (Hey, don't laugh not very many phones that have a built in compass actually have a way to view said compass out of the box), a spirit level, a flashlight app that works off your cameras "flash" LEDs, and a metal detector... the last one I'm not a hundred percent sure how it works, but it seems pretty accurate. Then theres PHM RegEdit, which is a Registry Editor, 'nuff said there.
This isn't a super phone however as even it has its bugs. Sadly this week the bug once more deals with web browsing. I've found the included opera browser crashes on anything with a large amount of images which bumps me back to using IE. Last week I mentioned despite being single touch not having to use clumsy safari seemed to balance that, I am now missing multi touch so hard. At least in opera there was a dropdown menu to do most of the things you could with multi touch just by tapping and holding on the screen for a couple seconds. This sort of exists in IE but things like selection mode and zoom can only be accessed via the menu at the bottom of screen which takes about five seconds to navigate. That time adds up when copying quotes from a website.
I almost forgot to mention that yesterday I actually had to reboot my phone as it was starting to slow down... Strange that even windows phones have that issue. For future reference however, that issue can be side-stepped via using task manager to close the inevitable avalanche of processes and keeping track of what's running in the background so the crash was kind of my fault. What can ya do?
At the end of week two I am still VERY thrilled over the Omnia and don't think I'll be thinking of changing back to an iPhone any time soon.
Notes: Below are some of the example pictures mentioned above
Lilly (fullsize)
Lilly (small)
Mimir (fullsize)
Mimir (small)
Panorama (The girl at the center was moving during the shot so shes a little blurred, that was my bad didn't give anyone a heads up about the shot)
I'll start with the good and talk about the AMAZING camera this phone has. Originally I just thought, "Ooh, five mega pixel camera! Not too shabby," and left it at that. It's so much more then that! This baby is chalk full of useful features such as smile detection, panoramic, macro focus, and even an "Action" mode where you can point the camera at something moving like a kid playing soccer and whenever the kid happens to pop into focus the camera automatically snaps a photo. I've added a few photos at the bottom of this post showing the clarity of the above mentioned camera.
The camera also has the really neat feature of "Smart reader" mode where you can use it to scan in business cards or even translate a word you snap a picture of into another language! How cool is that!
I've also started using the Mobile Office suite included with the Omnia II. I've been playing with both excel and word a lot these last few days and some of the things they can do are great. Excel is just like the desktop version, charts and all. It also seems to run really smoothly with the occasional hiccup here and there while trying to scroll (they are tiny scroll bars). Word on the other hand is missing a few important features like page breaks and a few other formatting features but you can still do the basics; bold, italicize, underline, all of the align functions work, bulleting, font and color changing etc etc.
Another neat thing I've so quickly grown to love is the ability to install whatever I want! Instead of being bound to the app-store I can go to sites like Freeware Pocket PC, The Microsoft Downloads page, Smartphone Freeware, Windows Mobile 6 Software or the thousands of others like them and grab all the free games, utilities, tools and thing-a-ma-bobs I want!
So far I've installed closed to 30 programs and only one have I paid for. Of those thirty, three are definitely worth a mention. Zenonia is the first I'll mention, the only paid software I've downloaded. The game plays like a cross between Diablo II with its skill tree system and Legend of Zelda (the old school gameboy ones not the newish 3d ones) and has been absorbing MUCH of my time. O2Compass is another great app and it's also free. It gives you a compass to work with so long as your windows mobile phone has a built in digital compass (Hey, don't laugh not very many phones that have a built in compass actually have a way to view said compass out of the box), a spirit level, a flashlight app that works off your cameras "flash" LEDs, and a metal detector... the last one I'm not a hundred percent sure how it works, but it seems pretty accurate. Then theres PHM RegEdit, which is a Registry Editor, 'nuff said there.
This isn't a super phone however as even it has its bugs. Sadly this week the bug once more deals with web browsing. I've found the included opera browser crashes on anything with a large amount of images which bumps me back to using IE. Last week I mentioned despite being single touch not having to use clumsy safari seemed to balance that, I am now missing multi touch so hard. At least in opera there was a dropdown menu to do most of the things you could with multi touch just by tapping and holding on the screen for a couple seconds. This sort of exists in IE but things like selection mode and zoom can only be accessed via the menu at the bottom of screen which takes about five seconds to navigate. That time adds up when copying quotes from a website.
I almost forgot to mention that yesterday I actually had to reboot my phone as it was starting to slow down... Strange that even windows phones have that issue. For future reference however, that issue can be side-stepped via using task manager to close the inevitable avalanche of processes and keeping track of what's running in the background so the crash was kind of my fault. What can ya do?
At the end of week two I am still VERY thrilled over the Omnia and don't think I'll be thinking of changing back to an iPhone any time soon.
Notes: Below are some of the example pictures mentioned above
Lilly (fullsize)
Lilly (small)
Mimir (fullsize)
Mimir (small)
Panorama (The girl at the center was moving during the shot so shes a little blurred, that was my bad didn't give anyone a heads up about the shot)
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Week One; "So Far So Neat"
I have now had my new Omnia II a full week and thus far is been pretty bloody sweet. I've been watching full movies and TV shows on the high resolution screen on my way into work each day and at no point did I have to worry about converting it into itunes!
My next big source of happyness is the ability to multi task, and I don't just mean listening to tunes whilst typing a text. I finally have the ability to MINIMIZE! Right now for example I am on MSN with someone in one window, typing this in another, while offspring is playing in my ears.
The third major happy I have with this phone is ease of obtaining software. It aint no app store but I have access to the microsoft marketplace as well as a HUGE host of websites that host WM files some of which are damn near awesome for example the swype text program. Now my phone isn't with verizon so it didn't ship with this piece of heaven so I had to*cough*do something to fix that.... that app makes typing a breeze. This whole entry was done through my phone via swype and without it I probably never would have even attempted it, I know I would never of dreamed of blogging via my old phone.
Now on to the cons. First off, this website is SO not mobile friendly. It doesn't seem to want to scroll down as I type but that has nothing to do about the phone or windows mobile. Okay, so far at the end of week one the only complaints about either the phone or WM6.5 was the lack of native voice command and multi touch. Voice is fixed quickly by buying voicecommand from market place. Single touch is just a bit more clumsy then multi touch for web browsing but at least I can choose between using internet explorer, firefox and opera.
Notes: (http://www.swypeinc.com) for more info about swype
My next big source of happyness is the ability to multi task, and I don't just mean listening to tunes whilst typing a text. I finally have the ability to MINIMIZE! Right now for example I am on MSN with someone in one window, typing this in another, while offspring is playing in my ears.
The third major happy I have with this phone is ease of obtaining software. It aint no app store but I have access to the microsoft marketplace as well as a HUGE host of websites that host WM files some of which are damn near awesome for example the swype text program. Now my phone isn't with verizon so it didn't ship with this piece of heaven so I had to*cough*do something to fix that.... that app makes typing a breeze. This whole entry was done through my phone via swype and without it I probably never would have even attempted it, I know I would never of dreamed of blogging via my old phone.
Now on to the cons. First off, this website is SO not mobile friendly. It doesn't seem to want to scroll down as I type but that has nothing to do about the phone or windows mobile. Okay, so far at the end of week one the only complaints about either the phone or WM6.5 was the lack of native voice command and multi touch. Voice is fixed quickly by buying voicecommand from market place. Single touch is just a bit more clumsy then multi touch for web browsing but at least I can choose between using internet explorer, firefox and opera.
Notes: (http://www.swypeinc.com) for more info about swype
Hey guys I just got a great idea! I'll make a blog!
Hello future valued readers, welcome to my blog. I recently decided to take the plunge and switched from the iphone to the Omnia II running windows mobile 6.5 and this blog is here to document my adventure. I apologize in advance for my poor writing skills.
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