Seven days with the Samsung Omnia 7 Windows Phone 7
One of the perks of working in software is occasional access to sweet, new hardware. I’ve befriended the super-busy Mobile team at the office, and asked to borrow one of their spare Windows Phone devices. Craig handed me a Samsung Omnia 7 and asked me not to destroy it. I had been wary of the Windows mobile experience having used Windows-based Palm devices (not great compared to their PalmOS counterparts), but had been prepped by blog posts that this Windows Phone 7 experience would be totally different.
Short story: the hype stands up – the user experience of this phone is excellent. There are small issues that I’ll go into in detail including frustrations with the hardware design, but ultimately the overall package is slick, functional, and at times even beautiful.
The Hardware
The physical hardware of the phone is a generally great. The phone has a large, bright, and easy to read screen, a single recessed button, very few creases and edges that collect dirt or grime. No MicroSD card slot, but lots of RAM. Normal (3.5mm) headphone jack that took my iPhone mic’ed headphones just fine. The light vibration you get when you touch the dedicated “back” and “search” areas reminds you that this device is very touch sensitive. VERY touch sensitive. In my first day or two of usage I pocket-dialed, Facebook’ed, mapped about half of my contact list – until I learned to lock the device every time I wasn’t explicitly performing an action (with the dedicated “lock” button).
The lack of physical keyboard made my transition from a Blackberry Bold difficult for typing-heavy tasks like email, though the live spelling correction works great. The orientation sensing works well (smooth and predictable), so I learned to type my emails with the phone laying horizontally, with just a few lines of my reply visible outside the on-screen keyboard.
Compared to my Bold, the reception was weak. I dropped out of 3G far more often than I’m used to. The point here is that Blackberry devices have great reception, more so than the Samsung having poor reception. Same goes with the battery life. On a full-night charge I got 8-10 hours of normal usage including WiFi internet and calling at a business-user level. Apparently that’s endemic for these large touchscreen devices. Definitely not a showstopper, but news to me.
Search Button 
Lastly, the dedicated search button got in the way far more often than I found it useful. For example when I was holding the phone with two hands when taking pictures with the Samsung’s excellent camera, I would accidentally press the search button and jump out of the Camera app into Bing Search. Oh man, that happened about four times before I started digging through Settings to try to re-map (or at least disable) the search button. No luck. This is my least favourite feature of this phone, and I would gladly do away with it (or at least have it recessed so the click has to be more deliberate).
The Software
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