Samsung Omnia hands-on review, part 2

Tag : Samsung Battery Pack

This is part 2 of my off-the-cuff Omnia review. Here are parts 1 and 3

The underlying layers of Windows Mobile seem fine these days:itmakes a good fist of the difficult task of co-ordinating the verymany different real-time processes of a smartphone in full sail.But then there's the Windows 3.1-era interface in a 2008-vintagedevice. In particular, when you look at Apple's App Store andcompare it with the process of installing Windows applications, youmay feel like a Polynesian islander confronted with a Chinook fullof marines. 'No contest' doesn't begin to describe it.

And then there are the things that continue to frustrate me, evenafter I've been using them solidly for hours a day. There are sevendifferent input mechanisms  Block Recogniser, Letter Recogniserand Transcriber, all of which offer different sorts of handwrittencharacter recognition, two different sorts of keyboard (fat forfingers, tiny for stylus), a 'keypad' that emulates a phone keypadin text entry mode and a 'phonepad' that does the same in adifferent way. All of the above obscure different amounts of thescreen and present different answers to the compromises demanded oftrying to fit rich input onto a tiny screen via a touch device.Some have different sorts of optional predicative text. None ofthem work particularly well. Any device that has seven differentways of doing the same job is fit to be hung from the gibbet.

I could devote an entire article to this part of the Omnia. Howthere are unexpected security problems  if you use the characterrecognition input, you leave a ghostly trace of what you've writtenin the thin film of grease that inevitably builds up on the surfaceof touch phones. How there seems to be no way to summon up anyinput method in Opera at will: if the system doesn't decide youneed it, you don't get it (that single fact prevented me fromtesting out Google Docs properly). How often input fields gethidden beneath the keyboard, and how difficult it can be to sortthat out. It's a hard problem.

Bluetooth shouldn't be a hard problem, but it is. I've tried to useit with three different computers for file transfer and wirelessbridging (or tethering, as the hip young kids call it these days).No luck; and after I found myself downloading a Windows Mobileregistry editor from 2002 (still works!) to change a key thatmight, rumour had it, enable file sharing I realised that I wasback in a very familiar and mutually abusive relationship. Too oldfor that nonsense now, I muttered. I could list the miseries  thecurt, uninformative error messages, the utter lack of diagnostics,no documentation whatsoever  but I can't bear it and you don'tcare. Gave up.

Video. The Omnia is 'DivX-certified'. It doesn't come with a DivXplayer, but one is freely available. After trying to play fivedifferent DivX videos, though, I'm unsure what certification mightactually mean. One didn't play. One played in the wrong aspectratio. One, amusingly, rotated the screen so that it was always onits side, no matter how you rotated the phone. The other two playedOK for the first minute, then lapsed into jolty, staccato,unwatchable pain. I tried stopping all other applications. I trieddisabling all the radios. I tried a clean reset. I gave up.

File transfer. If you're lucky, ActiveSync works. If you're not or if you're trying to use another method, or a non-Windowsmachine, then give up. At one point, I entered a near-Zen state ofexistential nothingness over the sheer paradox of having twodevices packed to the gunnels with connectivity  Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,3G  and both speaking IP-based protocols in infinite variety, andnot being able to move a single music track between them. Eventried FTP. Didn't work. Gave up.

Battery life. Lousy. You'll get a day tops, less if you do much one four hour train trip with Google Maps running on satellite viewfor about an hour total did for mine. The battery meter isfrequently dropped from the status bar in preference for othericons  including, frequently, one that just says you're on 3G. Asthe signal strength meter also says that, this is one of thoselittle annoyances for which there is no excuse. I was also unableto find any way to set the Exchange client's polling frequency,which is one of the most effective ways to mollify the lithium iondemon. And remember to always pack the USB converter lead: youwon't be able to plug the Omnia into standard USB chargers becauseof that proprietary connector.

So how about the things that work?

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