My phone is nice, but not as nice as I expcted.

[Guest jacobgong]

I've had my i8000 for about a month now, it's my first smartphone, and cell phone. I've never used a smartphone except the iPhone, also never used any hadheld smart device except a cheap GPS.

The phone met most of my expectations. It plays music for like days, it plays videos also for like an entire day, it sends/recieves E-mails, it had dictionary softwares, it supports multiple languages, it takes decent pictures,and obviously it makes calls.

I may sound unhappy, but I say it's one of the best choices I've ever made, buying electronics.

There are also several disapointments that I have not foreseen. The primary one is graphics performence, the i8000 feels like it has absolutly no GPU, I know it's technically incorrect in many ways, so you don't need to tell me. You can have a 3Ghz CPU but these graphics simply doesn't run well on a CPU. I mean this stuff is just no match to the iPhone, it will lag in almost any application that involves manipulating a picture.

On the other hand, the iPhone does not lag on anything, and it has multitouch that allows smooth rotation+zooming. instead of the laggy and slow single touch zoom and no rotation on the i8000.

never mind the 3D games, the i8000 lags on the Asphalt 4 that came with the device, I mena it's not that bad but it's barely reaching 30FPS. Oh yes I can tell FPS by looking at it.

The other disapointment is that it doesn't play RMVB video files. I know you can transcode and all that, I don't care, I want it to play RMVB files, it doesn't. Well it does, it just does at 10fps so it doesn't really help.

A few minor others are:

no touch focus in camera. Come on! it's just a software trick!

no auto rotation except in Opera, pictures and media player? yeah you can put an extra program to it, but no i don't want to do that.

quality and quantity of softwares is no match to other competing operating systems

all apps on iPhone has one theme, but many apps in WM have different themes and you always see the windows 98 style buttons

Resistive touch screen is great, but that thin film is a "moving part" and I'm suspisious of its reliability

Yes you can customize a lot of stuffs, but you have to do things like XML editing or registry editing. It's not hard but it's not what i would expect from a good OS

no multi-touch. yeah I know it's resitive screen and all that. but do I care what screen it is? not really. I just want the features.

I put this multi-touch in the last because single is genurally good enough, IF the device doesn't lag as much it does.

Why am I still happy about this phone? there are several reasons.

-The iPhone, yeah it's great and all that, but it has really huge problems that I cannot stand. First major problem is everyone has it, I mean everyone has it, it's a popular scenario in distopia si-fis man! just because you have a different back case doesn't give you personality! wth! The second problem is once you get used to the Omnia II screen, the iPhone screen is crap, not only you can see individual pixles, the black isn't real black and the color isn't as good. There are some other problems and I don't think I'll list all of them. For example you must keep spending money.

-The HTCs, I didn't choose them because they all kinda look stupid except the monster HD2. and the HD2 still used a LCD screen, and super expensive.

-The Nexus One, I have heard about it before I bought the Omnia II. But it looks sooooo ugly, that if it doesn't have that big screen I would suspect it being a concept phone from 2005.

-The Nokia, I'm from a Chinese background, and most of them believe Nokia makes like the best phones on the planet or something. But the only "good phone" Nokia has is that super thick brick-shaped N97 or something. Just toomany Nokia "fanboy"s.

I guess it's just part of the Chinese cualture that the most historic maker makes the best stuffs. For example many peple still believe IBM makes the most advanced supercomputers AND single chips.

PS.

There is just this video I watched from Nokia Future lab or something, that shows like the future of daily computing. The fucus is this cool glasss that the pretty blond wears to see all the newsand updates and tings.

BUT, the placed their N97 phone inthat video! I mean it's so upsetting! It's HUGE! it's like 3 times as thick as the i8000, and it's a wired tilted slide phone! that desn't look futureristic at all! futures phones should either be the classic fliper or the full screen bar phone!

Edited January 13, 2010 by jacobgong

[Guest CSMR]

I agree with you on ease of use issues. As an advanced comuter user and with the help of this forum I can set it up exactly as I want, but I suspect a normal user might run into problems requiring expert help, e.g. wi-fi issues.

I don't think gaming is a primary use for this type of device, so I don't really agree with you there. I do see the potential in smartphones that are also handheld gaming devices but they shoud be standardized, have hardware buttons, and be as strongly promoted as current devices from Nintendo, Sony.

RMVB is just an annoying format, even media players that play everything don't play RMVB. Just convert out and delete the original.

[Guest Steel Reign]

You can fix pretty much all of the speed problems by overclocking the phone, and who needs installed games when you can use the game emulators. I love playing final fantasy 7 and breath of fire Iv at 60fps.

[Guest jacobgong]

You can fix pretty much all of the speed problems by overclocking the phone, and who needs installed games when you can use the game emulators. I love playing final fantasy 7 and breath of fire Iv at 60fps.

it's true that I don't really play games, actually I don't play any games on my phone at all, because I don't find them fun.

But the graphics performance issuie extends beyond the games, it lags when I try to zoom and pan my pictures.....

yes you can overclock the phone, but that just adds more stuffs that I have to do to make my phone work. Also, even if i can overclock it to 1Ghz it's only a 25% improvement at max, and I am expecting like 5~10 times more graphics power.

Oh regarding the RMVB format, you north americans probably don't have anything to do with it, most of the english contents I download are in AVI and playable on the i8000.

But In China it is the most popular format for pirated video sharing, like movies, TV series and animes. There is just no way around it unless you convert them your self, or you wait a couple of weeks longer for MP4 releases.

Edited January 14, 2010 by jacobgong

[Guest CSMR]

My guess is that most of the photo software out there doesn't use hardware graphics acceleration at all. Even on the PC this is pretty rare, although I know FastPictureViewer and Photoshop CS4 do.

Not something of pressing concern to me as I like to resize to native res (high quality batch op in photoshop) to transfer to the O2, but I do think software should make more and more use of video acceleration.

[Guest KILLvino]

yea im chinese i know what you mean with the RMVB but just convert i guess, it doesnt take long the files are small. other things just also sound like you dont want to install or tweak the phone that much. and thats the main reason WHY winmo phones > iphones. and we can ACTUALLY multitask. i also agree on the touchfocus. i use i-nigma smart reader and it can smartfocus but the built in camera app still cant.

[Guest jacobgong]

thanks for the i-nigma thing, I have been looking for a barcode reader forever.

But it doesn't read Japanese! nor does it read Chinese.....

it either doesn't read at all, or shows me random boxes and symbols. My system has been modified to support and input these two languages.

oh, and it doesn't have proper spacing, I tried some text art codes and the spacing isn't correct so the picture is distorted or lost....

Edited January 15, 2010 by jacobgong

[Guest easton17543]

thanks for the i-nigma thing, I have been looking for a barcode reader forever.

But it doesn't read Japanese! nor does it read Chinese.....

it either doesn't read at all, or shows me random boxes and symbols. My system has been modified to support and input these two languages.

oh, and it doesn't have proper spacing, I tried some text art codes and the spacing isn't correct so the picture is distorted or lost....

Here is another barcode reader: http://www.microsoft.com/tag/. Hopefully it does what you need.

Have a good one,

Seth

[Guest jacobgong]

Here is another barcode reader: http://www.microsoft.com/tag/. Hopefully it does what you need.

Have a good one,

Seth

looks great!

but it doesn't seem to scan the QR code at all.... and the camera is connected flipped and mirrored......

Edited January 18, 2010 by jacobgong