[papacat]

I went into the store here and played with an Omnia for about 20 minutes. I must say that I was rightly impressed. Across the board it was much faster and more responsive than my TP. I had my TP out and the Omnia out and both were running EVDO connections and both were confirmed as not connected to any wifi. The Omnia loaded web pages 3-4 times faster than the TP. It loaded apps about twice as fast as the TP. I was loading very rare and content-specific pages from my employer's website deep down inside their site, so I am 100% confident nothing was cached on either device. The Omnia just crushed the TP at web page loading speeds.

The screen resolution difference is incredibly noticeable and the Omnia is really ugly in Opera on whole-page view (zoomed out) but zoomed in the difference is minimal or negligible. On video playback I am sure the difference is significant and if a gorgeous screen was a priority the Omnia would fail badly. Still, it isn't bad, it just can't even remotely compare to the TP's screen quality.

Signal strength is awfully hard to compare under these conditions and given that the number of bars showing doesn't tell one much, I won't try to guess. Both held EVDO just fine, so no info on that from me.

The onscreen keyboard is fine. It's suboptimal but given how poor I find the hardware keyboard on the Verizon TP, I think it is acceptable. The "haptic" feedback is a joke, but whatever. The TP hardware kb (at least on vzw) is not very easy to use without looking and even after 2 weeks I am slow and error-prone on it (nothing like the ease of a BlackBerry keyboard). I played with a Sprint TP and that kb is a little better but something about the flatness and smoothness of the keys plus the width of the keyboard seems to slow my thumb-typing. So, in the end I think the Omnia keyboard won't be too much of a step down from the TP.

Now, the stylus issue was worrying me some but two things have made me less concerned about that. First, I know I can nab a case with a slot for the stylus, so problem kind of solved. However, even better I have to say is the mouse controlled by the optical scroll wheel. Even with the stylus and zoomed in on the TP the web links are sometimes less than responsive and same is true of the touchscreen on the Omnia, but if I used the Omnia's optical scroll wheel mouse I can handle web content incredibly well even when the links are tightly packed columns of data options in an online database.

I've made the decision to swap over to an Omnia and try it out. Once I have it in hand I will give it a good radio reception test in a couple of buildings that cause my TP problems and on my next road trip in a couple weeks. I'll report back on how those tests go. I am hoping reception is acceptable and no more dropped calls once the TP goes away and the Omnia comes in.