Camera

The Omnia 7 comes with a 5 mega-pixel camera which I haven’t really tested extensively – in specific the video feature. I would not go into details on the camera settings except to say I have taken some shots in the evening (both indoors and outdoors) with the flash off.

While the photos did not come out stunning, they are at least acceptable though I have yet to see how the photos taken in bright daylight would turn out. These photos have been uploaded to Windows Live and those interested can double click on the icon on the right to check them out. (I’m too lazy to figure out how to embed it as as slide show.)

This is where I discovered yet another thing I didn’t like about this phone – no SD card support. When the iCrap comes with at least 16GB, why there isn’t SD card support when this phone is just 8GB is baffling. Perhaps this was done to keep users with the Windows Phone platform, as it would be quite difficult to take the data elsewhere when users change their phone. (One of the reasons why I considered Apple’s business practices unethical.)

Music / Video Player

As it is basically a Zune Player, media is managed through the Zune program (which I downloaded from the Internet). I will not go into too much details on the Zune software but I suppose it works the same way iTunes work for the iCrap.

Once I got some music onto the device, I am a little surprised that the sound quality turned out as good as (if not better than) my Sony Ericsson W902 – a walkman phone. I won’t actually say it is better because the headphones are new. Anyway, the headphone jack works with standard headphones so there will be no concern with replacements or getting better ones.

As to video, I loaded some wmv files on my computer onto the player and I also installed Youtube App to view some videos. There is no doubt that the screen is superb even when it’s just a 4″. AMOLED rulez!

Wifi

Once turned on, the wifi will try to detect all the networks available. Connecting to wifi is relatively easy, as long as the wifi router broadcasts its SSID. In the case of my home network, I had to re-enable my router to broadcast its SSID before I can connect.

Unlike the Blackberry, there is no option to save a connection profile. That simply means if I had disable SSID broadcast on my wifi router, I need to re-enable it every time I use the Omnia 7 with it. This is a serious pain in the butt because even the ancient Blackberry 8320 ‘Curve’ I use automatically re-connects whenever it is in range even though SSID broadcast is off.

Browser

Now that I am done playing with the features that are mostly not web related, I’ll bypass the xBox and Office features and move on to the main avenue of accessing the Internet – the browser.

There wasn’t another browser app I can find in ‘Marketplace’, so I am stuck with the Internet Explorer that comes with the set. Those familiar with Opera Mini will find some similarities here. It is capable of tab browsing but multiple pages are organised into individual buttons for easy switching. There is no flash support and I guess everyone know that already. It does load up a webpage more or less like what I see on the PC so I have no complaints.

Loading speed actually depends on what kind of connection is used. It can sometimes get annoying slow or laggy when the 3G /GPRS signal is weak. When I connected to wifi either at work or at home, I have nothing much to complain about the speed. I even tried swiping it up and up repeatedly to see whether there are ‘artifacts’ and it scrolls pretty well even in the midst of loading a page. Since I have no iCrap or Android to make a comparison, I would just say the speed of the browser is acceptable. It sure beats the browser I had on the Blackberry ‘Storm’ even though they are built on different technologies.

Incidentally, while I was looking for a video comparing browser speed between Android, Blackberry OS6, iCrap and Windows Phone 7, I end up with this – which suggests that not all handsets running on Windows Phone 7 are equal, even when there is no significant specification differences between them.

Marketplace

Lastly, the App Store called Marketplace. There are quite a number of categories, but if anyone expecting a lot of apps will be disappointed. There is probably just about 1000 apps and even though I was told the Amazon Kindle App is available for this platform I wasn’t able to find it using the search feature. Its only bright spot maybe the availability of some Xbox titles, though that really makes no difference to me because I am not into gaming – much less on a small device like this.

Downloading and installing the free apps is quite straight forward. I had done both installation on 3G / GPRS and wifi without any difficulties. If there was I would be really upset. So far I have downloaded Adobe Acrobat Reader, Twitter, WLM and Facebook along with a the local Bus Guide App which I haven’t really tested whether the arrival times displayed are accurate.

Conclusion

There are no surprises with this phone, such as in griping the phone is a certain manner causing a drop in signal strength. In fact, where the reception is known to be bad at my cubicle, I picked up a call today and I was able to have a proper conversation with the caller for the entire duration without having to call him back on the land line. In fact, even battery life is as expected – in my case it drained out after about 8 hours of constant usage. If it is used only on a need to use basis then it can go without charging for almost one day before draining out.

Since I am not into apps, it meets most of my expectations (except the lack of Chinese input) in terms on connectivity and basic functions. Then again, I would probably also feel happy and comfortable even if I had purchased an Android based phone or a Blackberry ‘Torch’ instead.

However, going forward the number of apps must increase. Not because I need or want them, but for the phone to find a foothold in the market and attract existing users of the Blackberry, iCrap and Android. Otherwise it will simply joint the ranks of minor players like Nokia’s Symbian Phones, or even worse those running on WebOS from Palm (now acquired by HP).

Before I end, I reiterate that Microsoft must give priority in putting the Cut & Paste feature and Chinese Input capabilities into the phone. These are features that are available in most phones. Further to that, please allow us to do something about the font size of the headers. for e.g. I certainly don’t need the ‘edit’ option to be much bigger that the name of the contact. That’s not mentioning that when I started using the phone, the font size caused me to wonder why I had to ‘edit my email account’ just to edit a contact. It took me several seconds to figure out that it actually meant editing the information of the contact stored in that email account because the word ‘contact’ was off screen as result of the large fonts.

I apologise for not providing any screenshots, because I have yet to find a method which allows me take a screen shot directly off the phone like the Blackberry, or even the iCrap. However, for those who are interested, please refer to this link. These screenshot are taken from a release candidate version of the Windows Phone 7 ROM. Though not exactly the same as production, they are quite close to the actual ones.

Recommended Read:
ZDNet: Windows Phone 7 apps hands-on (photos)

As my SingTel Mio contract is due, I decided to renew it for another 2 years since the service from Mio has been satisfactory. As part of the package, I am offered a mobile phone package. Though my Sony Ericsson W902 has served me well, I decided it is time to upgrade to one of those new touch screen smartphones since it has been almost 2 years anyway.

I have ruled out a Nokia device on Symbian, even though I didn’t have bad experiences with them except for a Communicator which went into the service center twice for a hardware failure (but that’s got nothing much to do with the ease of use or the interface). I am also an existing Blackberry user (provided by the office for work) but the 9800 ‘Torch’ is not yet available and I am not impressed with RIM’s 9300 and 9700 even though I must say they are the best Blackberry Smartphones since the 8820.

Everyone knows I dislike Apple, so the iPhone is definitely out. The main reason I disliked Apple is primarily because I find some of its business practices unethical. On top of which the fan boys are extremely annoying not to mention at times ignorant. Even if the product is really superior (and in the iPhone’s case it isn’t even true), leave me to discover whether something is great on my own and stop pushing it down my throat. Not to mention that I ain’t really interested in the apps available as I only install what I need.

So that leaves me with phones running on Android, where there is a variety for me to choose from. I have zilch experience with an Android phone and I gave up looking at the available models after awhile. Not because they aren’t good, but rather because I ain’t geeky enough to be really interested in being able to tweak the OS or install different flavors.

While I maybe wrong I also had this gut feeling that though on theory I can change between brands of phones running Android seamlessly, in reality that is hardly the case. Furthermore, the slight variations in flavors on different brands may turn Android into the Windows of mobile phones where it will become buggy and error prone because the writers of the OS just didn’t had those hardware in mind when they made the OS. Sort of like why phones running on Windows Mobile (WinMo) 6.5 and its predecessors became rejected by users.

It was then I noticed that SingTel is also offering a few devices running on Windows Phone 7 – basically a complete revamp of the much hated WinMo series. While generally it is folly to jump into version 1.0 of any device, I took the leap and bought the Samsung Omnia 7 i8700 just like the time when I got myself a Blackberry 9500 ‘Storm’ running on BBOS 4.7 (first as a loaner from a friend before I bought it). Using a device that isn’t exactly popular would free me to explore it at leisure without others laughing at my ignorance and showing off what great things they can do with the device. This is some of my findings after 5 days (I’ll not bother with the specs since that can be easily google’d.):

The Interface

SingTel delivered the handset to my office on Wednesday (27 Oct 2010) morning around 9:15am. It was shockingly early and I was actually expecting them to come around lunch. I quickly transferred the sim card over to test it out. First off, the interface is very different, since it doesn’t use an array of icons which has been a standard in many smartphones since the day of Palmtops. To describe the interface in my own words, it is like a 2-column electronic ‘Post-it’ Pad, where the user just pin whatever he likes / fancies – be it an app (which one can find more from the app-store called the ‘Marketplace’), or a contact, even a photo and music file. These will then appear as buttons (either square or rectangular) on the screen.

One can re-organise their positions by dragging. When too many things are pinned, then one would have to swipe up and down very often to get to what is needed. My advice is to keep it short and access everything else by swiping to the menu on the right.

Sending an sms or email is relatively easy using the on-screen keyboard, though I am quite unhappy that it can’t do a simple cut and paste. Why Microsoft is making the same mistake the iPhone iCrap 1.0 made is beyond me. It also doesn’t make sense not to have East Asian language input such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This is rather puzzling because I can receive an sms in these languages and it will display properly. (In fact, even Thai displays properly on this device). I hope an East Asian language input pack (or a version of the OS that caters to East Asian users) is in the works. Once it is available it should be released for the phone as soon as possible if this phone intends to find a niche for itself in Asia. Unfortunately from what I have gathered, it seems unlikely this is going to happen anytime soon.

Making a call it also easy. One can either select a contact from the list and call or enter a number for the on-screen number pad. When a call is received once has the choice to either answer or ignore it, and I would prefer the on-screen buttons to be colored (green – answer, red – ignore) so that it is easier to identify which one to press. While that is only cosmetic and it doesn’t really make a difference even if it is not done, it does remove the perception that the interface appears unfinished.

It does however, give me the feeling that it had used the iPhone as a reference device (or perhaps even took some ideas form that of Palm’s WebOS) in its design. An ex-colleague who has played with an iPhone before played around with the Internet Explorer on the phone and his comment was that everything else from tapping the screen and the pinch-and-zoom is ‘completely the same’ with the iPhone. (I will talk about the browser on a later post.)

Phone Security

This is easily enabled under the ‘lock and wallpaper’ under settings. From here the screen time-out (to conserve energy), wallpaper and a 4-digit pass-code to unlock the phone can be set. In my opinion, the security is almost non-existent because a brute force code cracker would probably just take a few mini-seconds (ms) to break it. On top of which, I certainly hope it doesn’t fall prey to the same vulnerability that plague the iPhone. If there is going to be an OS upgrade or patch coming soon, offer users a choice to select a pass-code with more complexity – such as a alpha-numeric password which the Blackberry offers.

Ringtones & Alerts

This is one of the things I didn’t like the most about this phone. I am limited in choices to the ringtones & alerts that comes with the phone and I cannot select an MP3 I have loaded into the device to serve this purpose. This is ridiculous because even on some of the simple phones I am able to choose a sound or alert of my choice. There seems to be a divide between the Zune player function and that of the phone function. In my opinion, priority should be put into fixing this right away.

Contacts Organisation

The primary function of the phone is to make phone calls so I have to start populating the contacts list. For some odd reasons I configured it to login to my Facebook account first, and it started to pull in the news feed (which updates only when I touch the ‘People’ button) and populate the contacts with my Facebook friends – complete with their profile photos. Note, this isn’t the same as the Facebook App (downloaded separately) which has more functionalities.

While this is nice, it is hardly impressive. That’s not mentioning that I hated the font size of the options (which I felt is too big and ugly and it makes a mockery of my eyesight) and after almost a week later I have not found the option to make the fonts smaller.

I soon added my Windows Live Mail (or Hotmail) account and it pulls in the new mails and contacts too. This isn’t a push mail device so I set it to download at 30 minute intervals. If I am expecting a mail, there is a refresh option which allows me to download on demand. But it became very messy because of the duplicate contacts. While the phone did automatically ‘link’ some obvious contacts with those on Facebook, I had to go through the rest of them to clean up the mess and this is where I encountered my first annoyance. As some of my friends has created multiple Windows Live Messenger (WLM) accounts previously (and I had not bothered to clean them out), I am always prompted with a message that informs me I can’t link two WLM contacts when I tried to link them.

My advice here is, organise contacts in the Hotmail account first before setting up the account in the phone. Otherwise a lot of time is wasted deleting unwanted or defunct contacts and linking them. The phone also automatically suggest linking with those with similar names and email addresses, this process is hardly seamless. However it is pretty neat once it is done – I can now sms, email, make a call or even send Facebook messages just from the ‘People’ button alone. In this aspect it sort of lives up to Microsoft’s ads that a user can spend less time on the phone while doing more.

At this point of time I have also set up my Gmail account on the phone, but I have taken care not to sync the contacts with the phone to avoid the need to clean up my contacts list again. On top of which I also have my Yahoo mail account set up and thankfully it doesn’t sync the contacts.

To be continued…