As I'm a forgetful person, I rely heavily on the built-in calendar, a.k.a organiser, of my phone to keep of my stuff. The calendar on the Soul, though simple, definately is not short on features.
There are total of 5 different categories for the events, namely appointment, anniversary, holiday, important and private. Each has its own representation on the cal (as shown on the picture from left to right). No worries on different events falling on the same day, the phone takes care of that by marking different corners to represent each category, and a different colour for the font for a holiday. One could readily have a quick glance on what's coming up, without having to open up the daily view.
The usual stuff are also present such as recussive events and event alarms. The calendar also allows me to import birthdays stored in the contact! This does save me some job on transferring the birthdays to the calendar manually. Another nice addtion is the lunar calendar at the bottom of the screen, comes handy for those religous events.
Another major revamp from old Samsung's calendar is the delete function. What so special about it? You could delete events based on a period of time, instead of the usual per event deletion. There are basically 5 different options. You could delete events on a single day, a period of days, a selected month, any events before a certain date, or basically delete all. In my opinion, the most useful feature would be deleting all events before the specified date. This has been the most important feature but has been missed out in majority of the calendars, this is even so for desktop calendars! All calendars' developers out there, this is a must-have feature! Why do i want to keep all my past events, at least provide some way to for the events to delete automatically or have this feature implemented such that users could delete all the previous events at one go!
Navigation through the calendar haven't been much a problem. There are few shortcut keys implemented for scrolling through the calendar;
-Direction keys : usual mechanism of scrolling through the days
-Up key : press the up key a few times, and the month would be highlighted, and you could scroll through the months
-Volume keys : simply for scrolling through the months
-Clear key: basically delete all the events on the selected day
-numpad: pressing any numbers bring up a prompt, you could jump straight to the day you want :)
This is a really neat calendar that suits all my needs. There is however one shortfall. On older models, there is an option to display the calendar on the standby screen, but has since left out in the new Samsung phones. Anyhow, the cal is nicely implemented for the majority of the normal users.
When i first saw the lens, i couldn't expect much from such a camera. However, as i checkout the photos taken by the camera, i was amazed by its quality. Despite the small lens, the camera onboard could really take great photos. The color reproduction is good, contrast and details are there. In addtion, the antishake feature sure does it job well as I am able to take sharp and clear photos while on the move.
Checkout some of the photos taken by the Soul
a panaromic shot taken by Soul :D
A few videos taken by the phone as well
Customising the ringer for SMS seems to be quite a chore, following are a few methods that i have discovered for customising SMS and call ringtones.
method #1: Copy the mp3 or your choice of music file to My Device\My Documents. Any mp3 there could be set as ringtone for SMS, call, etc. Basically any event could be customised with the music file placed here.
method #2: Copy the file to My Storage. You will have to keep the file on the root folder of the16GB storage space. Similar to method 1, any files placed here could be set to any events.
method #3: Place the file in My Device\My Documents\My Ringtones. Files are can be set as caller ringtone only.
method #4: From any folder, just right click on the audio file (tap and hold), select Set As Ringtone. The system will copy the file to the folder mentioned in method 3 and set it as the caller ringtone.
Samsung Omnia Resources
Here's a few links where Omnia Users (or some say Omnian??) share their experience and help each other
Users' Thread
http://www.ppcsg.com/index.php?showtopic=100429 (This thread is fast moving, already onto its 5th thread)
http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=2010641
Pictures Thread
http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?p=31297549
Applications n Games
http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=2012649
Very bias review of Samsung Omnia
Okay, today's Today has published a review of the Samsung Omnia. Its a rather bias and unjustified review, here's the pdf download from their website (http://www.box.net/shared/0rhgw834s4)
Quoted from Today (11 July 2008):
Motion-sensing accelerometers change the screen orientation between the portrait and landscape modes when the phone is rotated. Note: The accelerometers are very sensitive — the slightest movement will rotate the display orientation. It’s annoying and eats up unnecessary power, especially when each change is accompanied by a slight vibration. We recommend that you set the sensitivity level to the lowest (it helps a little) or practise the art of holding the Omnia rigidly.The most inaccurate part of the review is of the accelerometer. First, setting the sensitivity level to the lowest does help alot. You will need to hold the phone in horizontal or vertical position before the screen will rotate. If she still finds that too sensitive, i'm not sure at what angle then should the phone orientate the screen.
Second point, the vibration could be off! The editor must have missed the option, the checkbox is just right under where the sensitivity level is.
Here's a video of the accelerometer in action with the highest and lowest setting.
As for battery life, i managed to get 3-4 days out of one full charge, do find it much better than the other phones.
On and off, the editor has been comparing the phone with iphone. The best part being the subtitle,
This 16GB touchscreen phone is a beauty, but alas, it’s still no iPhoneAlas, this is not an iPhone from the start. To give the editor benefit of doubt, maybe she has gotten a faulty set or she is pressing for time.
Anyway, the article has sparked some minor commotion in some of the forums also. Following is one of the forumer's reply to the editor
Dear Ariel,
Regarding the mentioned article, I would like to point out a couple of things.
Giving a product review is supposed to be unbiased and neutral. From your title as a online and technology editor, I would imagine that you should have knowledge that being a journalist, you should not put your personal likings in the article itself and affect the reader. Readers read reviews to find out how good or bad a product is, and sometimes use it to determine whether or not they should purchase the product. I find your review is totally useless in this aspect.
Right at the start of the article, I already came across the line "This 16GB touchscreen phone is a beauty, but alas, it’s still no iPhone", giving me the impression that you might already prefer the iphone over the reviewed product.
Secondly, if you wish to compare products, please do so in a correct manner. Compare a Windows Mobile phone with a Windows Mobile phone, not a phone running Mac OS. Even if you want to compare different OS, how come you are not comparing phones running Symbian or Linux, or even the up and coming Android?
Thirdly, I am suspecting whether you have used the phone long enough to publish a review on it? There are certain pieces of information from the article that seems to suggest that you have not really used the phone for long. Information like the motion sensing accelerometer sensitivity, and the battery life is so inaccurate, that it leads me to believe that either you did not properly try out the phone for a few days to know the functionalities and features, or simply you have no idea how to operate a
Windows Mobile based phone.
As you may suspect, I am a current user of the SGH i900 Omnia, but I am definitely not biased towards it. It has its faults and flaws, but I certainly don't think that it is as worthless as you make it out to be. In short, I feel that this article to be extremely biased and should not have been published. I am very disappointed by the level of journalism project by the Today paper, as the article sounds like a well written piece from Apple fanboy bashing up a rival product.
Please review this article again and let me know if I have wrongly interpreted your intentions.
Best regards,XXX
Hack, why do I have to pay to watch video streaming when there is free WIFI around. Finally gotten my streaming player to work with WIFI, after some testing.
Now i could watch Youtube for free 
To configure the streaming player to make use of WIFI by default,
go to menu > options.
Choose 'The Internet' for the Connect via drop down list.
Next, take note of the port range, and the transport protocol. The default values should be 6970 to 32000 and automatic transport. These are the port numbers and protocol you must enabled in your wireless router. Make sure the numbers match, otherwise the player will not be able to receive the video stream!
P.S. You do not need the whole range of ports for streaming, basically i have reduced it to 6970 - 6975. Have not experience any lag on the streaming so far.
Wahaha, just collected my Samsung Soul this morning. Yea, you heard me, i collected not purchased. I was selected to test drive the Soul for a period of 2 weeks. It would be nice if i could keep the set for free :P
Anyhow, for the next couple of days, i would be experiencing the magical touch :D
Enough said, onto the photos...
The magical touch！
I was captivated the moment i saw the Soul.
The full accessories, minus the micro SD card.
Thanks Samsung for the trial set!
There are 3 tabs on the home screen, namely home, phonebook and settings.
To switch around these tabs, just tab on the respective icon.
Below are more options that you could do at each tab;
Home
- Tap on the icon to bring up the main menu
- Tap and hold on the clock to show up the option menu. Inside the option menu, you have 2 different style of clock to choose from, and whether to display world time.
-Pressing the Cancel key will bring up the home tab also!
Phonebook
- Tap on the empty slot to add an entry.
- Tap on the phonebook icon, the negative icon will show up, and you could remove entries from the list.
- To replace an entry, you would hav to remove it before you could add.
- There are a total of 27 quickdial slots!
Setting
-Tap on the Setting icon to unlock the page.
-Tap on any of the 9 icons to toggle the setting after you have unlock.
-To lock the page, tap on any of the tabs.
-Flight mode turn off WIFI, Bluetooth, and Phone
To launch the task manager,
-press and hold the menu button (top right button)
-swip the finger from the samsung logo upwards.
One handy feature of the task manager is that, if the touch player is minised, the task manager will show the player controls when it is brought up. So you could control your playback without having to launch the player, neat!
