Hi

Look what I just found - new Omnia:

http://www.ppcsg.com/

Don't know if this will be coming to Europe.

(I'm hoping the Touch HD will be my phone for at least a year and so I'm not looking for another phone).

Regards, D

I doubt it - it's been designed to support some Asian TV-standard

yeah, I always think that when I buy a new phone - then I'll replace it 5 months later :-) I don't think I've ever had a cell-phone for longer than 10 months - I'm just too much of a gadget-hog

Well the Touch Pro is going to hold the record for shortest (useful) life for me. Having arrived in September I'm now changing it for the HD.

By the way, I think the Omnia is not VGA resolution but WQVGA so it's not so good for viewing.

Second hand (hardly used !!) HTC Touch Pro anyone ??

I just got an email from Digitec saying my order is in and ready to collect. I asked about your order and the nice girl said if you ordered a German one they would be happy to change your order to an English one. No German ones available yet.
909 chf without a new contract.
Cheers,
Higgy Baby

Hi, thanks for the update - I gave them a ring. Unfortunately, they had shipped the only English one that was still available to their shop in Winterthur. They have no idea if they get another shipment this year. They were also unwilling to ship the one from Winterthur back to their mail-order distribution center so I canceled the order. I asked them: I've ordered and payed for one but the only one you got is sitting unclaimed in Winterthur - at the same time you'll make me wait 2 months for mine. To that they simply said "yes".



peter

Hi

Here is a site I've used in the past to find techy goodies:

http://www.toppreise.ch/index.php?search=omnia

Now, I check the price, then the online availability, finally I call the shop and confirm that they really have the product in stock.

I assume the CHF 909 Omnia is the 16Gb one?

Regards, David

909 was with no memory card but also without any contract connection / renewal discount.
It went down to 699 with a medium user discount.
The guy showed me on screen first it was 659. So I said why is it now 699?
He said well you ordered it when we had to pay the higher price. So I said I don't want to pay 40 francs extra now it's come down in price.
So he said if you want to cancel the order it's going to incur a penalty charge.
I managed to convince him to give it to me at the new lower price as I'd been a customer at Digitec before.

Then I read DAWIZ's posting while I was in the store and asked if they had any more in stock and he said what you said that it was in Winterthur. So I asked him if he could organise for it to come down to Zurich as DAWIZ had an order for it and he said it was allocated to the Winterthur stock. So it looks like I got a phone that should've been allocated to DAWIZ first (I only ordered it on Thursday). I feel guilty about that, especially after all the help. Sorry,I'll post some positve reputation.
The guy was able to be a bit flexible with me. So maybe you could explain that I got what should've been someone else's phone. Why didn't DAWIZ get an email that your order was ready to collect? It sounded like they were expecting German phones in and got a (couple of) English one(s) instead.

I would call up Digitec's head office (don't know where that is) and explain that I got one you should've been given ahead of me in the queue and they may see sense and give a management override to give the Winterthur phone (if it's not sold yet) and hopefully at the new lower price I haggled for.

I will PM my Digitec order number. Grrrrmph.

The Omnia demo phone looked a bit more fun versus business. The Teeter game is quite addictive on the HD. Quite neat switching the ring tone to mute by lying the phone down on its face.

A nice side by side comparison between the Iphone and the 3D... hmm, getting more and more tempted

Thanks for the youtube link.

One point was that TomTom 7 does not work (yet) on the HD.

I'm still using TomTom version 6 which works perfectly on my Touch Pro. So, I will try that on the HD when it arrives.

I see Clove sold all it's first delivery but one is for me (!!) and should arrive this week.

I'm interested to see if Flo3D is much better in the HD. In the Touch Pro I have dumped it and use SPB Diary as the main today screen. I may also try SecondToday to provide them both.

Ciao, D.

don't feel bad about it - I was behind you in the order cue so you were very much entitled to yours.

As it turns out: the post man just brought me the one I had ordered from ARP Datacon (and canceled after they told me it would arrive in week 52 this year...). Apparently they just ignored my cancellation (which they had confirmed to me) and sent it to me anyways. Now I'll have two - I don't want to give that one back as the one I ended up ordering instead of it hasn't arrived and I don't know when it will. Anyway, once I get it, I'll put it on sale here with a 100 Fr. discount, perhaps someone's interested in it.

I've only been able to try mine for about 30 minutes. I'll do a more detailed review but so far I can say that:

- its user interface is still slower than the iPhone's. It's frequently lagging a bit. Someone who hasn't used an iPhone probably won't even notice, though
- the keyboard is smaller than the iPhones but surprisingly, it's much more accurate. And the auto-correction can be disabled right from the keyboard!

peter

I've read that there's a special version of TomTom 7 for the HTC Touch Diamond - and that one supposedly works on the Touch HD as well

peter

Thanks Peter

The special version of TomTom is certainly one I will think about.

However, since I still use version 6 OK on the Touch Pro I will try it. I need it only for walking around towns and sometimes checking wild taxi drivers in foreign lands since my car has navi built in. So, I'm not desparate to get version 7. I do want a loaded navi program as I don't want to use google maps and have the frequent data transfer costs.

Enjoy the Omnia - one thing that did impress me in the short time I had one was the sound quality and the high-res camera.

Regards, David

I bought the Touch HD, not the Omnia

Very wise (so much better in my view than the Omnia).

Here are some further observations concerning the HTC Touch HD:

Pros:
- the screen is BEAUTIFUL. Absolutely perfect, never seen anything this good on a mobile device
- the web browser is awesome. It's SLIGHTLY slower (especially when scrolling) than the iPhone's but nothing to worry about, really. But it's a lot more capable, too (copy & paste, password management, a cache that actually works, search function etc.)
- the keyboard has smaller keys than the iPhone's but it's very accurate. I own the English version of the Touch HD - but there's still a German keyboard & spellchecker to choose from and auto-correction can be easily disabled
- The phone's much more customizable than the iPhone. It has a ton of additional features, comes with much more software.
- The TouchFlo interface works very well.
- The phone comes with an 8gb MicroSD card, a pouch (very thin, not much protection there - I already managed to scratch the screen protector...) and a screen protector
- The stylus that's still supplied for some reason is totally unnecessary. I used the phone excessively this morning and didn't have to grab the stylus a single time. No idea why they didn't just leave it away.
- DirectPush actually works here - on my iPhone push (and pull, for that matter) e-mail never quite worked right.
- Works well with Podcasts downloaded through iTunes (some need to be renamed - the Touch HD only accepts m4p files but iTunes sometimes uses the suffix m4v, although they're the same). I could even use my iPhone ringtones that I downloaded through the iPhone ringtone podcast, just had to rename them first.

Cons:
- The Touch HD's generally a bit slower than the iPhone. This goes for pretty much everything you do. There are short pauses when opening programs, the browser's a tad slower (of course, it displays the websites in a much higher resolution as well, so it's not really directly comparable)
- While the OS generally seems stable (much more stable than the iPhones 2.0 release), TouchFlo will occasionally restart itself. Not really a big deal
- The calendar app isn't so nice - I bought Thumbcal and now I love it.
- It doesn't come with a navigation app. You can use Google Maps, just like on the iPhone, but I've read that Tomtom Navigator 7 doesn't work yet on the Touch HD. They're working on a new release though that should become available shortly.
- e-mails aren't displayed quite as nicely as on the iPhone - but they're readable well enough.
- Needs additional software (the Missing Sync) to sync with a Mac. I own that already, so no big deal for me.

All in all I have to say: I've owned several Windows Mobile-driven phones in the past. And I also own an iPhone 3G. The WM devices I've used in the past were utter crap. Ugly user interface, slow and unstable. The iPhone is a joy to use but it's massively crippled because Apple is too stubborn to open it up well. The Touch HD is not quite as intuitive and easy to use as the iPhone and it's generally a bit slower. But it's the first device that gets pretty darn close to the iPhone in terms of usability. And it surpasses it by FAR in everything else.

peter

ok, here we go:

FS: New, unopened HTC Touch HD (English)

Thanks for the review Peter.

My phone came with no extra mamory. Just 288MB internal memory.

I had to pay extra for a memory card.
I was going to buy the 16GB card but decided to shop around. Then I went to Mobilezone and they told me that there's a problem with the 16GB card being slow. So I bought a 8GB card. Funny thing is one 16GB card costs more than two 8GB cards !?!?!?

My phone came with quite a padded puch which is a very snug fit (takes an effort to get it on).

Can you tell me if the Google maps is free and easy to install?

I went to Zurich's SihlCity Arena cinema yesterday and took photos of the old Aston Martins there on red carpets with my old Nokia N95 8GB and the HTC Touch HD. The clarity of the photos was about equal but the Nokia's picture had nicer richer colours.

I'll post any extra observations as I go along.

Cheers,
Higgy Baby

hi,

it's really odd that they don't put in the memory cards with all of them :-/

google maps is free - just open internet explorer on your touch hd (not opera) and point it to google.com/gmm - there you can download it directly to your phone. Click on the "download" link below the text - that'll give you the English version. And choose "open after download" once you clicked on it

peter

Thanks for the review Peter, coming from a fellow iPhone owner you've addressed many of my own concerns. However one thing I would like to know is how the touch screen feels? Is it a capacitance touch-screen (like the iphone) or a more traditional pressure touch screen like an iPaq? The video review did mention that you had to push a little harder to get a response so I'm guessing its the latter, especially since it has a stylus.