Quote:
Originally Posted by jresdios
well, how did you make out, innovator?
|
Well, I had about 30 minutes with each phone at two different stores. The Verizon rep at store #1 clearly felt the Omnia was the better of the two. She led me to a private area and let me play with the Omnia first, followed by the Storm. What was clear from the start was that the Omnia's form factor is nice - smaller (albeit barely) in every dimension than the Storm. It felt very good in my hands - not bulky or heavy at all. I truly wanted to like the touchscreen, but I found it very difficult to operate. The challenge seems to be knowing when to tap, when to drag, when to "loiter", etc. About every fifth-to-sixth keypress was simply wrong - not even close to what I was trying to type. I will say the Omnia's optical mouse feature was nice. What I found interesting was the screen resolution on the Omnia hampered the otherwise excellent camera specs. Think about it - the Omnia has a 5MP camera but only a 240 x 400 screen to view it on? Storm's is 360 x 480 - a significant increase, at least to me. Pics taken at the store were "ok" but nothing to rave about. Again, it could just be the screen resolution wasn't letting me see the high quality of the pictures.
As for the Storm, it "felt" larger than the Omnia (and it is, barely). One could say it felt more "substantial" as well - about 20% heavier, says the sales rep. Again, we're talking about an ounce, so take that for what it's worth. The "click screen" frankly makes sense to me - it was easy to select whatever I wanted to type simply by pressing the screen. Hovering was automatic, and the blue highlight which shows up under my finger as I drifted across the screen to scroll doesn't select anything until you press, unlike the Omnia, which seemed to randomly select things if I hovered too long, or scrolled too slowly. Since I'm new to the BB world, I didn't have an issue with the lack of trackball or wheel that some here have suggested would be challenging to work without. For me the concept of SurePress made logical sense and was easy to adapt to. The rep at the second store was BB - biased, and made the observation that there is a version of the Omnia sold overseas with a higher resolution screen, but it won't be coming to the States. He questioned that decision, and implied that Samsung may not support this "lower-end" model the way BB will support the Storm. Again, take it with a grain of salt... Also, someone here suggested the FM radio was disabled by Verizon on the Omnia -- the rep had no knowledge one way or the other about that, but my guess is they did NOT disable it. The rep confirmed that VZNav is the GPS tool of choice for both phones. He said you can certainly go to Google maps or MapQuest, but as for turn by turn navi, it's VZN.
My takeaway from this experience is that I will order the Storm. The 5MP camera's specs are nice on paper, but I won't/don't benefit from it. My company doesn't care if I have a BB or not, and doesn't use a BES server, so I'm genuinely open to either WM or BB, but the phone itself strikes me as a better choice -- Verizon has lots of stuff for it, and nothing for the Omnia (at least not yet).
Remember, you have 30 days to trade either phone out - so get one (since the Storm is harder to locate, you might want to get that one last) and work it to death. If it works for you, then you've found your new phone; if not, trade it out and keep trying!
I hope this helps someone out there make an informed decision. If there's something I've forgotten to mention, ask it in here and i'll respond if I can.
Thanks, Innovator1