Smart Phones of today

Samsung i900 OMNIA

First, the touchscreen. I?m fond of touchscreens, and the OMNIA?s touchscreen is good. It doesn?t come with a stylus (the Samsung people said it will come with a stylus, but the phone does not have a slot for one, so that?s doubtful; they did provide stylus during testing), so you have to use your fingers. The TouchWiz user interface is a Samsung custom UI for Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. The icons are large enough so that you can easily point to the right icon. What I like about the custom UI is that Opera Mobile is available as an alternative to IE Mobile. This is a great addition. More on this later. Of course, you can revert to the traditional WinMO UI.

Haptic feedback is available, but I had it turned off, as I find it annoying. Basically, the phone vibrates every time you press an icon. It is not a useless feature, but as I have said, I am annoyed by haptic feedback, and I felt it is a waste of battery.

There is a mouse pointer that is controlled by an optical touch pad below the screen. It is like having a touchpad on a phone. I find it odd, but it has its uses.

The on-screen keyboard remains a lot to be desired; people with large fingers will have to get used to it. The keys are too narrow for the thumbs. That is why I think the lack of stylus is a drawback.

It has an accelerometer on board, so that when you turn the phone, the UI changes its orientation. The orientation can be sluggish when, for example, Opera Mobile is running and showing Plurk in mobile mode, for example. But that is hardware limitation, which is understandable.

Probably one of the best features of the phone is its camera. It has a 5-megapixel camera, though the flash is just LED. It has camera functions that are not found in other camera-enabled phones. For example, you can take a panoramic shot with the phone, and you can stitch up to 8 images for a panoramic shot IN THE PHONE. There are other helpful features for taking shots, and I think some of them are quite useful.

One problem that I had found with OMNIA is that it runs out of memory that fast. For example, using Task Manager, the apps that were currently running were Main Menu and Task Manager, which consumed less than 1MB of memory combined. But when I tried launching Camera, I got the insufficient memory error message. Good luck running the Camera app while Opera Mobile is loaded.

I have not tested the multimedia capabilities of the phone – these features are not on top of my preferences for a phone, and there were no available video files for viewing.

The phone is nice when held, though it is shiny and fingerprint magnet. It does not feel flimsy, and you will not be embarrassed to be seen using it. Heck, I?d want this as a phone, though the lack of stylus and keypad would make me pause.

HTC Touch Diamond

What I like about the HTC Touch Diamond
• At the outset, HTC is already pretty well-known for producing reliable and function-rich PDA phones.
• It looks really sleek, with a glossy piano black surface and, as the tagline proclaims, is ?not too big, not too small?.
• It runs on HSDPA for Internet connectivity and is the fastest you can get on mobile phones right now. I tried it. It?s really fast.
• The interface is kinda like the iPhone. You can use your finger or the attached stylus to grab stuff on/off the screen.
• It has a graphics processor! Which means watching videos on this phone is really sweet.
• When surfing the net, you can zoom in to read passages of text and the phone automatically wraps the text for you so you don?t have to scroll left-right!! And the zooming is instantaneous, no waiting for the browser to reload the page.
• It doesn?t allow external memory but has 4GB of storage, which I think is enough.
• When you?re in a phone conversation and pull out your stylus, the phone automatically displays a notepad so you can take notes.
• It has a built-in Google Maps GPS program so you will never need to get lost again!

What I don?t like about the HTC Touch Diamond
• The interface is kinda sluggish, with a 1-2 second delay, when you navigate the touch screen with your fingers. That problem seems to be minimised when you use the stylus, though.
• HTC claims that it has an intuitive interface that mimics tasks you do daily so you won?t need to read a menu to learn how to use the phone. But I wouldn?t say it?s immediately intuitive. Like, when I wanted to scroll through the phone book to watch the nifty animation, I ended up calling some guy, instead. Then I couldn?t figure out how to stop the call and go back to the phone book.
• It?s too expensive.

TALE OF THE TAPE:

Samsung i900 Omnia

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