We now continue our blog, and say a thanks for the positive feedback and the questions you sent! I would first like to react to these questions.

In the image viewer zooming in/out the images can be done by magic and with virtual buttons too. The latter one excludes the possibility of making a mistake, while the first one works like scrolling on a notebook's touchpad: we have to stroke our finger on the right side of the screen for zooming. By the way, this works anywhere on the phone, we can even zoom SMS messages! I would like to discuss video playback of movies optimized for computer viewing in a later entry, as I'm not sure that it's a good idea to discuss this at the current software version. I would also like to leave GPS and navigation for a later time, but I'll have a few words about positioning. If we download the current position of the satellites from the net (file size is not more than a couple of kB) then the phone determines our position in a minute, while this process takes a couple of minutes if we don't have this file, so it's completely average. Let's have a look at the phone's physical properties: 112 x 56 x 12.5 mm, and it weighs 127 grams. The plexi that covers the display is made of a hard plastic, it doesn't seem vulnerable at all, it looks rather resistant. I'll also discuss stuff related to internet and WiFi in a later post, as the Opera Mobile 9.5 on the phone deserves a separate story. I didn't get a headset or a stylus with the phone, the latter doesn't really have any room in the case, so it's an external accessory.

And now let's talk about the main topic of this post, the menu system. Before anything else, here's a video which probably demonstrates the speed of the phone quite well, and there are some really spectacular things in it - like the screen rotation animation.

At the beginning of the video we can see the Today screen, which has widgets, just like F480. These are on hand fast, much faster then on F480, but on the other hand animations are still stuttery sometimes. Screen rotation isn't: the phone has a built-in gyroscope to sense how are we currently holding it, and it adjusts the screen according to this. The stick mouse works nice, this was the favorite feature on Omnia of many of my friends.

Samsung's proprietary menu system can be accessed with the soft key on the right. This is exactly like on F480, but it's a thousand times faster. At these parts, as opposed to the Start menu, the scrolling routine works, but, as you can see it on the video, its speed and efficiency are still far from perfect. The manufacturer, however, is working on this, it has evolved a lot compared to the previous version, so we should be optimistic! The menu has 12 icons, Omnia uses a 3 x 4 layout in portrait view and 6 x 2 in landscape.

The virtual keyboard is "iPhone-like", meaning that it has QWERTY layout and can be used with fingers perfectly. Besides the full keyboard there are two other views, you can take a look at all of them on the pictures below. Entering accented letters is a bit difficult currently, but the algorithm is good, we can enter words at a proer speed and certainty.