I've now been using my new Samsung Omnia 7 (which I bought to replace an iPhone 3GS) for over a day now. So here's what I think of it:
Hardware wise, it feels very well made. The unit feels solid in hand and there isn't any creak or flex anywhere I can see. The metal back feels really nice in hand and gives it a true feeling of quality. All of the buttons are usable and there isn't any doubt as to whether you've pressed something as there was on my previous Samsung phone. The one flaw I can see is that it's a little TOO easy to press the touch-sensitive buttons (Back and Search) on the front of the device, but the fact that it actually has these is a huge bonus over iPhone. The frustrating thing for Apple must be that they can't now engineer a hardware back button into their phones, as it would make any software incompatible with the previous devices.
The screen is amazing. I've compared it with my iPhone 3GS and it's simply no contest. I've also compared it with a friend's iPhone 4, and while his is a higher resolution, I actually find text is much easier to read on my phone and the colours on mine are also much, much more vibrant.
One of the reasons for this is the Windows Phone 7 OS itself. It's almost like they looked at the benefits of making things as stark a contrast as possible (white text on a black background or vice-versa) and then designed the entire thing around that. It's awesome. The blacks on my phone are extremely black, so when the phone is on and I'm looking at something like my phone book, it's almost as if the white text is etched there and the rest of the screen is off. It's just so insanely vibrant.
The rest of the Windows 7 OS has also impressed me. The keyboard is at least as good as iPhone (I don't have any of the problems getting it to register keys that I did on my Android HTC Desire) and I certainly like the word suggestions thing better than the offering in iPhone. The whole thing is extremely slick - everything has a nice animation, but unlike iPhone, none of the animations feel too long or forced. I really, really like that they've tried something different here and it's paid off. The scrolling from side to side thing is awesome, and all the things I've read on Apple fansites about it being crazy for them to "cut off" text on the right side of the screen now seems totally ridiculous. The UI looks great, and I'd actually go as far as saying that in many areas it has iOS beat.
I've had two things stand out for me that really made me like the OS so far. The first is that you can choose exactly what appears on the home screen and then the rest of the applications are listed in alphabetical order in a menu you access by swiping to the right on the home screen. It's great because I always know where to find an application now, and it does all the sorting for me but also gives me the bonus that I can have my most used things where I need them.
The other thing that has made me smile are the "live tiles" on the homepage. I've got one there for my alarm clock, and when the alarm is set it shows that it is set and it shows what time it is set for. This is always on my home screen, so I no longer need to launch the application to check if I've set the alarm for the correct time as I did on iPhone. I'm really excited about what developers might do with this in future.
I also like that when I get a notification, it doesn't interrupt everything I'm doing. It simply slides in from the top of the phone, shows me the contents of the SMS or whatever and then slides away again. So much more useful than seeing my game or video pause or quit just because I got an SMS.
Internet Explorer is very fast at rendering pages, and responds extremely smoothly once you're on the page. Again this is a step up for me from the default Android browser, and at least on a par with the performance of the iPhone browser. I absolutely love having a dedicated Xbox Live application on my phone and it was a great feeling to unlock my first achievement in a Windows Phone game. I've also enjoyed using Microsoft Office - particularly OneNote. I like knowing that the notes I make are being automatically saved to the cloud.
Disappointments so far have to include the Facebook application being completely broken (crashing, locking up etc) and the web browser not having the same support from web developers as iPhone's does. The user agent isn't taken into account by many sites, so one of my most visited, BBC.co.uk, sends me to the desktop home page when on iPhone I'd get diverted to the mobile site automatically. There are also a number of iPhone-specific sites that don't work in the browser, but I'm assuming that this is because it's based on code from IE7 and IE8 and once the IE9 update comes in a few months everything should be fully supported as it is in the desktop version of IE9.
Overall though, this is a great phone. I love that everything is different to iPhone. I didn't want to buy iPhone 4 because frankly, I'm bored of that OS and I'm bored of the flaws it has. I wanted a change and so far I'm not regretting getting this phone one bit, especially as it was £160 cheaper than iPhone 4.
