^Once again, Omnia only has 8gb of internal storage on Verizon.
Anyhow, I had to stop by a Verizon store tonight to get a broken car charger replaced. I played with the Omnia while I was there. I was impressed. I also played with an HTC Touch Pro and have played with friends’ BB Storm.
Real quick, the touch pro sucked. 5 row keyboard is a nice idea, but the keys are barely raised. Not that great to use, which is disappointing because it could be so great. The screen should be awesome at 640x480 resolution, but it gathers smudges like nobody’s business. And that touchflo interface was just a PITA. No thanks.
The Omnia was actually really nice. Same size as an iphone, not small but nice and thin. I’m sure a lot of non-nerds will ask “how do you do that on your iphone?” when you do such advanced things as copy and paste. :cjerk: But anyhow, the widgets interface is neat but sucked. Really slow. The good news is you can turn them off. Like I said, Pocket Plus and/or Mobile Shell will be awesome on this phone. The screen is standard phone resolution (QVGA @ 240 x 400) but it was really clear and big. It does NOT have a capacitive touch screen, but it still responded better than any other touch screen phone I’ve played with, save for the iphone. The good news is that it will work if you have gloves on or want to use a stylus, which you cannot do with a capacitive touch screen. The optical mouse (read about it) actually worked really well, so I see no need for a stylus with this phone anyway. At 624 mhz it’s fast, and with pocket plus actually closing apps and a few other tweaks this thing will probably kill all other VZW phones. Hopefully you can turn off the animations when it changes screen orientation, because that was slowing it down. Oh, speaking of which it has an accelerometer so it knows which way it’s being held. The haptic feedback worked nicely (it vibrates when it recognizes a touch.) For being a touch screen keyboard it didn’t suck too bad, although I think the BB Storm gets the nod here for having bigger keys. But since it’s WinMo I’m sure you can download a better keyboard. Cootek makes a neat one. Cootek’s and the built in Omnia keyboard can switch to a BB suretype style keyboard that makes the keys bigger and typing faster, if not quite as accurate.
Oh, the screen is glass (I think.) What I mean is it’s like an iphone, it isn’t flexible like most touch screen phones are. This is part of the reason why the screen felt way more responsive than any other phone I’ve played with, save the iphone.
Bottom line is I was impressed. The BB is a great phone and the bigger keys are nice for typing, but the Omnia was impressively fast and nicely designd and I really like the WM6.1 OS. You can change anything you don’t like about the phone. I may upgrade to an Omnia myself in a couple of months when it won’t cost me an arm and a leg. It will depend on whether or not I think I can stand having a touch style keyboard.
I’m not saying go with the Omnia, I’m just saying it was really nice. If you want a better keyboard and a taste of the Blackberry koolaid then go with that. If you want a faster, thinner, highly customizable phone then the Omnia might work. If you’re like me and are skeptical of living with a touch screen style keyboard, then, um, Blackberry curve?