I would like to start the seventh part of our article series with a great news: Samsung decided to let me tell everyone the phone's launch date, even though the exact day is not yet known. It is sure, however, that the handset is coming next month, August, to Hungary, so if anyone would like to get one from here then feel free to do so! The expected price is still confidential, but I hope no one will kick my ass if I say that it will surprisingly cheap...

The default headset and the 3.5 mm converter/lengthner

And now let's see the part that is the most important for many of you: music playback. I have been having the default headset at me for a while; this is made of two parts: a 3.5 mm converter, which has a record button, a microphone and a volume control jog dial - this makes it a headset -, and the earpiece, which has a 3.5 mm jack connector. We might know this from the manufacturer's MP3 players, for example K5 has one like this. I will be sincere: it didn't impress me very much. It looks very dumb, it fell out of my war, it has an assymmetric design and it doesn't have a very good sound quality. I think iPhone's headset was much better in sound fidelty, while the one with i900 is better in bass. Thanks to the 3.5 mm lengthner and stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP) we are not really bound to use this one, we can choose any other headset, but I would still have been much happier if they could ship a better one with the phone. When connecting the lenghtner with the headset we get an almost 2 meter long cable, which is a bit too much in my opinion.

Let's take a look at the music player software. After launch I had a strong iPhone-feeling and of course there is no problem with that as Apple's phone has a refined and user-friendly player. We can sort music by album, artist and genre and we can use playlists too. I think the album view is much weaker than the cover flow in the great opponent, first because there is no artist name displayed under the album cover, there is only an album title and second there is no scrolling, so we can browse them one by one - this is problematic at twenty albums and unusable above one hundred.

There are some other unpleasant surprises greeting us during playback. For example the lack of a normal equalizer. There is one, but we can use it only when there is a headset plugged in and we can't defind custom settings, there are only the default ones to choose from, which are the following: wide, dynamic, club, surround, rock, pop, dance, live, bass. The volume control is even worse, as we can set sound volume in five (5) steps. This is not such a great problem when using a headset, as there is a jog dial on the lengthner too, so it's enough to set max volume in the software and then don't touch it again. I think it would still be a minimum to include a ten, or even better a twenty steps scale. Of course this scale can be extended to twenty-five, using the system volume setting (5 x 5), but this is obviously not the best solution. We can seek the tracks using the slider, but this isn't completely dynamic, there are steps over here too. Another problem is that we can control the music player from the Today screen only when using the Widgets view.

On the whole I think that there would be a lot to improve on the music player, but I don't think this will be done, due to the close deadline. Knowing these we really can't say that Omnia would be advanced in musical terms, "average" would be the best term to describe it.

That's all for now, the next post (expect it in a couple of days) will discuss the Opera browser that you have been eagerly asking of and navigation.