Omnia 2 – An Initial Review

I have been wanting a new smartphone for a while and finally decided on the Omnia 2 earlier this week.  I was very hesitant due to the mixed reviews.  But, as a long time user of Pocket PC and Windows Mobile, I decided to give it a shot, especially with the new price reduction.

I have looked at the Droid and honestly am not a fan of the industrial look or Android.  I am not the type to need a bunch of apps.  I want the phone to have lots of multimedia capabilities.

Having said all that, I do not understand all the reviews that says this phone is hard to use.  Yes, the default interface is not the best but it is easily tweakable by turning off TouchWiz or adding Mobile Shell.  I am using the standard Windows 6.5 interface now and have no problems at all.  I am waiting to see how Mobile Shell 5.0 turns out.  In a nutshell, the interface is not the best by default but is very tweakable.

The second thing that reviewers talk about is the performance and sluggishness.  Maybe it’s just me but I always use task switcher to kill apps as soon as I am done with them.  With this phone, this is a must and is no big deal to me.  The performance has been a suprise honestly.  I expected the thing to crawl and it does not. Has not come close to freezing either…

The features are awesome.  Voice recognition works great.  Swype is easy to learn.  The camera has more features than any camera that Verizon has that I can tell.  The smart reader technology works too. I am not big on surfing the web on a phone but it is faster than I thought it would be once again.  I did download Skyfire but honestly like the Opera browser better.

Windows Mobile may not be cutting edge but this phone has a great refined look to it and honestly has more features than I will probably ever need.