Omnia to Touch HD - good upgrade?

[Guest Cretster]

Hey guys

I've had my Omnia for quite some time now and have done a lot of messing around with it and I love it, but it has a few downsides. Notably that the GPS is very awkward to get working well (ie needs things like portsplitter/gpsgate etc to work properly) quite often. In addition the wifi is a bit weak.

Two main reasons I like the idea of swapping to a Touch HD are the 3.5mm headphone socket and the bigger, better screen, but I'd like to hear ideally that both the wifi and the GPS work and work well without a load of mucking about, as they are both features that I like to use. Also, it would be really nice if the GPS will work well still without Agps, but not sure what the deal is there. There's a trick for the Omnia that helps that but no idea about other phones....

I don't expect to have no meddling obviously as it's a winmo phone :) , as long as the features will ultimately work well.

Other questions I have are about the audio quality as an MP3 player, and how useful touchflo is compared to say SPBshell or Winterface (my two current favourites).

Appreciate any answers to these questions - thanks.

Jim

Edited January 29, 2009 by Cretster

[Guest Cretster]

Wow - 51 views & no responses. Did I say something wrong? I have had a look around to try and find threads with the answers I need, but to dig all that out could take a huge amount of searching so I was hoping to get some input.

Thanks in advance if anyone does.

[Guest spvdk]

Perhaps because not that many users have tried both? I haven't either, but I can tell you that the GPS of the HD works fine, right out of the box. It uses ephemeris data to get a quick fix. Haven't used it without, as it automatically updates whenever you connect to Active Sync. I've had no issues with the GPS.

The big screen of the HD is absolutely great. After a month of HD'ing, I've just got an iPhone in my hands again. The iPhone screen seems rather small now and I can clearly see each and every pixel. Mind you I've owned an iPhone myself just a few months back, so I am rather surprised how much the HD has spoiled me.

The sound of the HD is very nice too. Plug it into your stereo and the sound is even better than that of the iPhone IMHO.

No wifi issues whatsoever on my HD.

So, after this praisal, you may take me for a fanboy? Not so. I just sold my HD a few hours ago! The WM OS is simply too clumbsy for my taste, so I am switching back to use my N95 8GB as a work horse, and I have just bought myself another iPhone 3G 16GB as a toy. So there you have it... :)

If WM is your thing and you don't need a physical keyboard or a camera (the HD cam sucks!), I don't think you can do much better than the HTC HD.

Good luck :D

Edited January 31, 2009 by spvdk

[Guest Omnia_1]

I recently parted with Omnia replacing with HD

*Physically the HD is very appealing (once you get over the inital size) the hires LCD is beautiful

*HD GPS connects in seconds, Omnia took around 30.

*3.5mm jack is a real bonus as charging and listening to music or plugging in car MP3 and charging is possible.

*Mini USB located bottom center is very convenient for docking and using car mounts.

*Camera is lesser quality to Omnia in the ideal circumstances but acceptable for a mobile device.

*Batery life is great 2 days with very fair use (HD)

*Movies are terrible (Coreplayer) un-watchable very stagnated like viewing a slide show whereas Omnia is very smooth, in saying this I havent tried converting file types just comparing the same file on both devices.

*Softreset button is behind the back cover :) a very strange location IMO.

*Loudspeaker on Omnia is miles better than HD but Mp3 via a decent headset is just as good.

*HD UI TF3D is much nicer addition than TouchWiz and better than SPB or Winterface IMO

*Finally is the extra US$3-400 worth it, possibly, since customer service and support is better(internationally speaking), but probably not in the overall sense that you're not getting much extra for the money.

[Guest Cretster]

Thanks for the replies guys, and yes, very valid point that not so many people will have had both I guess.

Well, after seeing a thread on XDAD with a poll on the same question, 89% went with the THD so I decided that was a big enough hint.

Got a brand new one on Ebay for £370 then unlocked it easily enough with an online service.

What can I say - I really liked my Omnia and it was a great phone but the Touch HD is WAY nicer!

Have already got it reasonably well setup, and that took me ages on the Omnia to get to a point where I was happy.

Not messed much with the camera but the common consensus is that the Omnia one is quite a bit better. I can live with that though considered the rest of it is so good.

Made the right decision but I sort of miss the Omnia too....

[Guest auddie]

Thanks for the replies guys, and yes, very valid point that not so many people will have had both I guess.

Well, after seeing a thread on XDAD with a poll on the same question, 89% went with the THD so I decided that was a big enough hint.

Got a brand new one on Ebay for £370 then unlocked it easily enough with an online service.

What can I say - I really liked my Omnia and it was a great phone but the Touch HD is WAY nicer!

Have already got it reasonably well setup, and that took me ages on the Omnia to get to a point where I was happy.

Not messed much with the camera but the common consensus is that the Omnia one is quite a bit better. I can live with that though considered the rest of it is so good.

Made the right decision but I sort of miss the Omnia too....

Miss a few days and this is what happens. :D

I had an Omnia for a month: Initially I expected the HD would be delayed, like SE's X1....should have known HTC is not SE, so I ordered the Omnia instead of waiting.

The Omnia is a nice device; surprisingly clear/colorful LCD considering it's half the resolution of the HD. I don't play movies on my PPC....well, I didn until I got the HD, then I was compelled to do so. Movies rendered at specific frame rates don't play too bad....I don't know how to render, ut there are a few posts over at xda developers that go into detail.

The biggest selling points for me in upgrading to the HD:

1) Screen size - perfect to replace my 3.5 inch Garmin M5 PPC/GPS

2) Standardized USB & headphone jack (as mentioned above)

3) The beauty high profile support, particularly here and xda developers, resulting in tons of custom ROMs and applications just for the WVGA screen. Great for those of us who like to tweak.

My .02 cents and maybe not worth the price. :)

[Guest sztupy]

Miss a few days and this is what happens. ;)

I had an Omnia for a month: Initially I expected the HD would be delayed, like SE's X1....should have known HTC is not SE, so I ordered the Omnia instead of waiting.

The Omnia is a nice device; surprisingly clear/colorful LCD considering it's half the resolution of the HD. I don't play movies on my PPC....well, I didn until I got the HD, then I was compelled to do so. Movies rendered at specific frame rates don't play too bad....I don't know how to render, ut there are a few posts over at xda developers that go into detail.

The biggest selling points for me in upgrading to the HD:

1) Screen size - perfect to replace my 3.5 inch Garmin M5 PPC/GPS

2) Standardized USB & headphone jack (as mentioned above)

3) The beauty high profile support, particularly here and xda developers, resulting in tons of custom ROMs and applications just for the WVGA screen. Great for those of us who like to tweak.

My .02 cents and maybe not worth the price. :)

But the touch HD still has a slower processor :D Why not get a T*omnia? :)

[Guest Cretster]

Yes it does but I have to admit it still seems to run better & smoother than my omnia.

[Guest tibor28]

Wow I am considering doing exact same thing. I love my Omnia but there are some things about it which really bother me:

-Very bad wifi, weak and unstable connection

-Screen resolution is pretty bad, pixels are clearly visible

-Almost no games and many apps dont work because of the non-standard resolution

-Have to carry an annoying 3,5jack converter

-The screen is not as responsive as I would like it to be

-Browsing the net is a pain in the *** because of the low resolution, unresponsive screen and bad wifi connection!

-No slot for stylus, i like using stylus! Especially since the screen is unresponsive and hard to control with fingers without applying a lot of pressure.

-Proprietary connector, I cant listen to music while its charging

-Slow GPS, takes 3-4 minutes to get a fix in car

-Week cellural signal, sometimes I have 1 bar in the middle of my house or even better, no signal!

-Not as much development going on for the omnia recently. I only see news and updates about HTC Touch HD!

I think I just put together a complete list of everything that is wrong with the Omnia :) Yet I love the device and there are some things that I know I would miss if I swapped it. For example the touchpad or the great camera with great settings. But overall when I look at it I think HTC Touch HD is just a better device.

Any of you guys regret swapping the omnia for HTC HD?

Edited February 9, 2009 by tibor28

[Guest gfreek]

Perhaps because not that many users have tried both? I haven't either, but I can tell you that the GPS of the HD works fine, right out of the box. It uses ephemeris data to get a quick fix. Haven't used it without, as it automatically updates whenever you connect to Active Sync. I've had no issues with the GPS.

The big screen of the HD is absolutely great. After a month of HD'ing, I've just got an iPhone in my hands again. The iPhone screen seems rather small now and I can clearly see each and every pixel. Mind you I've owned an iPhone myself just a few months back, so I am rather surprised how much the HD has spoiled me.

The sound of the HD is very nice too. Plug it into your stereo and the sound is even better than that of the iPhone IMHO.

No wifi issues whatsoever on my HD.

So, after this praisal, you may take me for a fanboy? Not so. I just sold my HD a few hours ago! The WM OS is simply too clumbsy for my taste, so I am switching back to use my N95 8GB as a work horse, and I have just bought myself another iPhone 3G 16GB as a toy. So there you have it... :(

If WM is your thing and you don't need a physical keyboard or a camera (the HD cam sucks!), I don't think you can do much better than the HTC HD.

Good luck B)

IMHO it's a step back but I can understand why you have gone back to N95 and iPhone 3G as WM OS is not as polished or user friendly out of the box like iPhone or symbian however had you had the patience and took some time to tweak and load some 3rd party apps I think you would have seen the true potential of WM OS especially on a device such as the HD!!

[Guest Quist09]

I'm looking to do the same thing, or at least was until news from Barcelona started coming out about the Nokia N97 and the Samsung Omnia HD. Now I'm in a bit of a quandry.

I really like my Omnia, but I wasn't at all impressed by the build quality, dongle stylus and the camera not retaining the settings and the useless flash. I've had a Nokia E61, which was great for its keyboard in a non-touch Symbian OS, an HTC Tytn, which was excellent overall, but a little clunky and slow, and a Nokia N95 8GB, which was great for its camera, but less good without a full keyboard in non-touch screen Symbian.

For me at work, I rely on push email, a Word editor that can do word counts and a good PDF viewer, and at play a good camera and web browser. I also need a decent keyboard, on screen or in hardware, for about 20 emails a day. It took me ages to get my Omnia setup the way I want and I can get by with the camera, but still really miss my N95 which just took excellent pictures all the time. The Omnia's camera settings are supposed to be a plus, but because it's a hassle to retain them, that advantage is nullified. Moreover, the flash is completely useless, at least if you have a scratch protector on the lens. With all this in mind, it seems like the Touch HD takes pictures in roughly the same quality class as the Omnia (since the settings and the flash aren't really advantages), but does everything else better than the Omnia.

But now that Nokia is finally coming out with a decent smartphone with both a touch screen and a full keyboard as well as those Carl Zeiss optics, I'm torn. Not to mention the Samsung Omnia HD, with the new screen technology and an 8 mpix camera. Downside is that both have the new Symbian OS and finding a Word editor with word counts has always been a challenge there. That and the fact that it won't be until autumn/winter 2009 for the price point on those phones to drop to a reasonable level.

On that front, it's kind of interesting that the original Omnia began dropping in price immediately after coming to market and is about 50-60% of the new price on the 2nd hand market, whereas the Touch HD has actually gone slightly up in price in my market and is still 80-90% of the new price on the 2nd hand market and almost impossible to find there. There's loads of people that bought the Omnia and then bailed, but most who buy the Touch HD seem to be holding on to it.

[Guest Quist09]

OK, so after waiting for months and not giving in to temptation, my logic got the better of me. The news of the new releases coming this summer from Nokia and Samsung would mean a longer wait than I would like for multiple unknowns and a certainty of a far greater investment in new device software. That and the fact that about half of my photos taken on a recent holiday with my Samsung Omnia were noticeably flawed with a good deal of pixelation, even in sunlight, led me to the conclusion that the Blackstone was the way to go, even if only in the interim.

I had been watching the 2nd hand market in my country for months and tried contacting the few Blackstone-owners that were willing to sell theirs, but never succeeded in getting a hold of them, presumably because the phones were sold virtually the minute they were offered on the market. So I ended up buying a new unit.

All I can say is "holy sh*t!" Whereas the Omnia does a great deal of cool things pretty well after a lot of work and with a good deal of patience, the Touch HD does almost everything it sets out to do and does it well out of the box!

I must have flashed my Omnia a good 100 times to find a set up I was satisfied with, but was never really happy with the screen being too unclear and unreadable in daylight and the camera's hit/miss results with an inability to save its settings. I still had to use GPSGate to get TomTom working somewhat OK, a hack to get my camera settings stable, my own keyboard mod to make it usable in my language, and so on ad infinitum - and still I was always squinting outside to see the screen.

I got my Touch HD two days ago. It has the localized stock Swedish ROM on it. The screen is crystal clear even in bright daylight and is far more responsive than my Omnia ever was. Installed TomTom and was up and running with no hacks and no problems. Without A-GPS, I get a fix within a minute - on the Omnia with GPSGate and A-GPS enabled it took about 2 minutes and TomTom would hack after about 15 minutes of use. I haven't had a chance to really test the camera properly, but it's not as good as the Omnia for only one reason - lag - the 3 second lag from hitting the shutter button to the picture being taken and the 3-5 second lag before you can take another picture. There's a hack to take more rapid pics at a lower res, but haven't tried yet.

Otherwise, I also managed to install a different version of Opera and flashlite and got it working without having to flash a new ROM. So far all of my software has worked without issue.

I can honestly say that I never, ever expected to be so pleased with a device so quickly and without upgrading the ROM. Right now I'm at a point with my Blackstone after two days of use that took me 2 months to reach with a great deal of work on my Omnia.

Now I've just got to sell my Omnia and my N95 to fund the whole adventure - DOUH!