A Pack of Smarties

Oct 19 update: Oh well, case closed. My parents have decided to purchase the Samsung Omnia. No, actually, it has already been purchased. Specifically, it's the 16GB model; My parents just couldn't pass up the 100 dollar for double the memory capacity prospect. They weighed the features of the respective phones and believed that the Samsung delivered the most features per dollar. Well I have to agree with them, as the Omnia has the finest camera, one of the largest built-in storage, a standard 3.5mm jack (albeit requiring an adapter) and the longest battery life. However, I just felt that the Omnia simply lacked the oomph present in most of the other phones, such as the prevalent iPhone. In fact, I was originally vouching for the Apple :)

However, truth be told, the Omnia will be going to my brother, not to me. It seems that he is the one that is in real need for a smartphone, not me. Well, for starters, he's still using the ancient D-Cube MP3 player that used to be mine a long, long time ago. That was in secondary 2, if I remember correctly. I bet my bottom dollar that most of you haven't even heard of that brand before. Well that's mainly because the company has gone into liquidation shortly after its introduction (I guess). That obsolete piece of hardware only deserves to be in one place: the recycling bin. After roughly 3 years of handling, the D-Cube has started to show its age; the 'record' button has gone faulty, the connectivity of the 3.5mm jack has degraded, and the red LED which used to twinkle from time to time has shorted out. Speaking of MP3s, my music player has changed dramatically in just 3 years. I've outgrown the measly 512MB (the D-Cube), to a 1GB Nano, and finally to a 16GB Touch that I currently possess.

So, 500 to 16,000MB will be a huge leap for my brother. Also, if that doesn't satisfy him in the long run, the Omnia has a contingency plan: it features a expandable storage capacity with a MicroSD card slot. So that doubles up to a 32GB music player with the currently limited 16GB max microSD.

Additionally, he has frequently nagged about his need for a better camera. All his b'day party photos taken with his current 3.0 mega camera phone didn't turn in the quality of images he expected. Hopefully, with a 5.0 mega model, he would be pleased. However, I doubt it; I think the Omnia would most probably perform as dreadful in low-light conditions.

Lastly, with GPS, he'll never fear getting lost in the city center of Vancouver ever again :P

The poll will still be up for a couple more days though. For those who haven't casted their vote, it would honour me by doing so. I'd sure like to know collectively, whether the Omnia was the right road to take.

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I've recently been on a hunt to find which touchscreen smartphone is best for me. Why do I need one you may ask. Well, I need a quad band phone as my tri band nokia's reception is starting to get on my nerves. There are times where the reception drops to zero in school, rendering the cell phone useless. There was one occasion in which a call was barely audible - the sound was crackling incessantly. Even rudimentary text messages took 10 seconds to transmit, whereby in Singapore, it barely took 3 seconds.

Complaints aside, I could've just gotten a basic, no-frills phone with bona fide quad band reception. But that's easier said than done. Of course, I cannot just blindly pick such a phone and call it a day. When it comes to cell phones, they have to be design oriented. I absolutely disgust phones which should rightly be called bricks and paperweights. What's outrageous is that even Samsung, my primary source for elegant looking phones, didn't carry a model that qualified for my tastes, let alone the Nokias and Sony Ericssons. The current Motorolas are not bad, but they are just too common here in Canada.

So, what's left are the models which reside in the category of smartphones. I emphasize again that these are touchscreen smartphones. Not the ones with a monstrous mechanical QWERTY keyboard on their faces (cough, Blackberry, cough). Such phones are no different that the ones I described earlier on. Out of hundreds of webpages, I managed to round up 6 models that allured me. They are as follows:

1. Samsung Omnia

2. HTC Touch Diamond

3. Apple iPhone 3G

The above three handsets are widely available today. On the other hand, I can also wait these for upcoming models:

4. HTC Touch HD

5. Nokia 5800

6. HTC G1 (if it really lives up to its hype)

And here they are in pictures (in order from left to right):