The Boulton Bugle

Firstly, apologies for the stock photos above, I did try to take a photo of the screen with my own digital camera but it wasn’t satisfactory enough to use and I wanted you to see the live tiles on the screen!

Courtesy of the nice folks at Three and social media agency Brando I’ve been lucky enough to be trying out a Samsung Omnia 7, one of the new Windows 7 phones for the past 2 weeks and as my trial time is almost at an end thought it was time to post my opinion of it so here we go…..

The phone itself is quite large but is very slim, a good weight (138.5g) and feels good in the hand. Upon switching on for the first time, you cannot fail to notice the frankly stunning 4 inch WVGA Super AMOLED screen, amazing, the colours truly leap out at you, it’s so bright and sharp, better than any other phone screen I’ve ever seen!  It is also incredibly responsive and requires just the very minimum of pressure.

One very tiny thing to mention is that the connection on the phone for the battery charger is protected by an easy to access slide across cover, thus stopping it from getting clogged up with dust and dirt, an idea of genius from Samsung, other handset manufacturers take note…..

As you can see from the photos, the main screen is made up of tiles, the colours of which can be customised from the Settings menu.  There is a phone tile for accessing voicemail and a clear and easy to use on screen keypad for making calls, a People tile for your contacts (these can also be synchronised with web e-mail and Facebook contacts) and also features a What’s New section which can be set up with your Facebook News Feed and various others for Internet Explorer, Calendar, Photo Sharing, Photos, Music & Videos and the Marketplace.  Additional tiles can be quickly and easily added if required.

A tile I particularly liked was one called ‘Now’, this features up-to-date weather data from AccuWeather.com (with beautiful weather symbols) for a place of your choice (although was slightly disappointed not to find my town, Hastings, even though it does feature in the AccuWeather Android app), News Headlines from Reuters and Stocks and Shares from Yahoo! Finance, all are fully customisable - a useful feature.

As you’d expect being a Microsoft product, full and excellent mobile versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint are available for viewing and creating documents.

The phone’s GPS is fast and accurate at determining your location although for the first couple of occasions after turning the phone on it did think I was the other side of the county in Haywards Heath but after that was 100% accurate.

Setting up e-mail is a breeze with Windows Phone 7, all you need to know is your e-mail address and password and the phone does the rest, syncing your messages and contacts into the ‘People’ tile on the main screen.  Once required e-mail accounts are set-up separate tiles for each are shown on the homescreen which update in real-time each time a new e-mail is received.  There is also a mobile version of Outlook which can also be used.

The app store on WP7 is called ‘Marketplace’ and for such a new operating system has a very impressive selection of free and paid games and apps already.  I decided to try :

Facebook

Seesmic

Twitter

Foursquare

and also downloaded the Absolute Radio, WeatherBug, and YouVersion Bible apps, all are excellent and integrate well.  Have to say though that, for Twitter, I preferred Seesmic over the official Twitter app.  It was, however, a little annoying that, unlike Android, you can’t have Seesmic or Twitter running in the background and set to check for new tweets at a pre-determined interval which would have been handy, but this is a minor gripe and should not detract from otherwise great apps.

An area where this phone really shines is photo and video - it features a 5MP camera with 4x digital zoom, auto focus and anti-shake and takes sharp and crisp photos even indoors under artificial light.  You can also record full HD 720p video with a frame rate of 24fps.  The photos I took and the video I recorded were of the highest quality and definitely good enough for this phone to replace your normal digital camera and camcorder.

The phone’s inbuilt web browser is the mobile edition of Internet Explorer which is extremely fast at loading and rendering web pages and features ‘pinch to zoom’ for larger sites.  Thanks to already mentioned stunning screen on the Omnia 7, websites look fantastic.

Lastly, the music player is provided by Microsoft’s Zune and can be synchronised with your music on your PC (or songs and albums can be purchased and downloaded from Marketplace) and also features an FM radio and podcast player.

To sum up, this is the first ever Windows phone I’ve ever tried and was massively impressed, it’s totally unlike any other mobile operating system I’ve ever used before, with a great UI and user-friendliness (have never had to refer to the user manual once!) but let down by the fact you can’t multi-task or have apps running in the background which would have been useful for something like Twitter.  Up till now I’ve been firmly an Android fan and still am, but am a definite Windows Phone 7 fan now as well, so much so that am actually seriously considering shelling out for a sim-free Windows Phone 7 next year, although will probably stick with Android as, for me, it still has the edge and you can play Angry Birds!  :-))

My grateful thanks once again to Three and Brando for the loan of the Omnia 7, I had a blast with it!