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)

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

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.