First up, the phone comes preinstalled with 3 themes, the first 2 look pretty much the same to me, while the 3rd one is more cheerful in colours.

 

Besides the theme, you could also customise the standby screen. There are 3 types to choose from, namely the full page, basic idle and vertical icon bar. I prefer the vertical icon bar. Its a very neat tool, besides being able to access calendar, radio, media player, settings, there is also a shortcut menu where you could customised with your own favourite links! Very handy, as i do not need to access the menu most of the time to complete the task.

 

 
The vertical icon bar standby.

Not sure if its the same as other Symbian phone, on the Innov8, the message composer has been combined into one. So you will be brought to the same screen when you try to send sms or mms. In order to send a mms, you have to bring up the toolbar to add multimedia contents, and voila! Your message will now be sent as MMS.

 

Last but not least, look at the wealth of keys there! The 2 chrome keys could not be customised, one will launch the menu, while the other will launch the gallery. There are options to customise both soft keys and the 2 M keys flanking the clear button. This is a nice touch as it gives you 2 additional shortcuts key to launch application on top the usual ones, not to say the shortcuts available on the standby screen. On top of that, as there is an extra row, the first row of numeric keys are now much further away on the usual slider phone, this do away the issue where people with fat thumbs having trouble to press numbers.

A unique touch on the direction pad is the addition of the optical sensor in the middle. Definately would prefer this configuration over the Omnia's only optical sensor. You have a choice of using the usual way, where the optical sensor could be depress to fire the action key as per normal D-pad, or you could also use the optical sensor soley to navigate around the phone. Sharks, they should have done this for Omnia too. Navigation becomes much faster with this hybrid of optical sensor and normal direction pad.

More onto the preloaded application next time...