[papacat]

Well, I have had time to customize the Omnia and play with it a bit. I thought I would post my results here for others who have to face a similar choice. Here are the pros and cons in comparison to my experience with the Verizon version of the TP:

1. Reception: Omnia fares a good bit better than the TP in my area (South Carolina). I have not had an out-of-state trip yet to test it, but I have been all over SC this month and I have EV in more places, no dropped calls, and better reception inside large windowless buildings and hotels. Omnia is the clear winner here for me. Given how important this is to me, it is a big advantage for the Omnia.

2. Screen: TP crushes the Omnia on the beauty and resolution, of course. I do like the larger size screen on the Omnia, but the resolution is not good and I can see clear artifacts in some video. The on-screen keyboard is a pita, as it often obscures the box I am typing in and always eats a ton of the screen. I may need to install a 3rd-party keyboard to mitigate some of this, as I cannot stand not being able to see what I am typing. On touch-responsiveness, I have found the Omnia much better than the TP and I did tweak the settings in the TP registry for better responsiveness (and have also in the Omnia) I have fewer mis-clicks on the screen and actually need the stylus less. The optical mouse option especially makes the stylus pointless for me, as I can get even the smallest check boxes or scroll bars with the mouse. Having a mouse on the screen (especially after tweaking the mouse settings) is incredibly handy.

3. Speed: I have faster page loads, better responsiveness, and faster program load times on the Omnia. Some of this may be due to more EV and less 1x connections on the Omnia, but overall the Omnia just seems a lot snappier. Page rotations rarely have any lag. The keyboard sometimes has some lag, but not often and if I use a simpler rotation animation it is even smoother. SPB Shell is very snappy. S2U2 could be snappier, but I have not yet downsized the jpegs I am using as the screen saver in S2U2, so I think its lag issues are due to handling the randomly changing 2mb images.

4. Software: I removed the Samsung Dialer from the Omnia, which freed some ram. SPB shell, S2U2, Pandora, VZ Navigator, Visual VM, SPB Backup, all installed and are working without a hitch. Barcorama I have to use .08c, as .07 won't work for some reason. WMWifi commercial won't work, but .091 with the ics cab posted over on xda for Omnia works fine. I do wish I could lock the network, though. I did have a little weird behavior with VZNav randomly restarting itself after I had completely shut it down (sometimes with 10 or 20 minute delay and the phone being inactive). It is rare and only happens after I have used VZNav, so I can't quite get a bead on the behavior yet. Sprite backup will not connect to FTP (it turns off the radio during the backup process) but otherwise seems to work ok. I'm using SPB backup now due to some other reported bugs between Sprite and the Omnia, which make me nervous about relying on it for recovery.

5. Battery Life. Definitely better on the Omnia than the TP. An unscientific guess is I am getting half-again more usage out of a charge on the Omnia than the TP. Honestly, I would say much of the difference comes from better reception on the Omnia producing less searching for a signal. The Omnia does have a weird warning behavior where it starts saying it is running low very early on. I have had two hours web-browsing time with the device giving me warning messages the whole time before the radio finally shut off due to low power.

Other items worth mentioning are that the Omnia fits nicely into many (but not all) iPhone cases, but also requires very specific proprietary plugs for the charger, headphones, etc., as most Samsung stuff does. My u740 accessories will not work with the Omnia and I cannot use the dozen or so usb-chargers we have for bt headsets or my wife's BB, which is minor, but still a pita. To use my nice earbuds I have to use the included adapter... This is actually more of an irritation to me than it may be to others.

The feel of the Omnia in my hand is nice. Not a phone I would use easily with 1 hand, and it feels really light, but more comfortable to my hand than the TP. The lightness of it does give a perception of it being more delicate and I think a drop from wait height to a hard floor would be catastrophic. As much as I miss the hardware keyboard (which I really do) my hands have no trouble with the on-screen keyboard.

For me, this turned out to be a good switch and I will stick with the Omnia, but it is not for everyone, to be sure. My largest irritations so far with the Omnia are the on-screen keyboard covering up my inputs, that I cannot use the commercial version of wmwifi to lock down my network, and the need for proprietary accessories. The first I think I can fix, the second I think I can live with, and the third will just require I buy some extras to spread around the office, car, travel bag, home, etc., as I am prone to forget my accessories.

I would definitely not recommend this swap for everyone and losing the hard keyboard is a big loss, but for those of us having reception problems on the TP and who are locked onto VZW, I think the Omnia is a superior device.