Giving up on my TP -- Replacements?

[scrosler]

Originally Posted by tenthirty2

You didn't come from the Mogul, otherwise you'd be IN LOVE with the Touch Pro! I guess everything is relative, huh?

He loves the device, just cant stand the reception.


I dont know if radio upgrade to you is out of the question but I would try the sprint or telus radio posted in the upgrade forums. Those firmware upgrades may not be your piece of cake but you can give it a try.

EDIT: I did have better reception wiht the telus radio. More bars anyway. Here is the link: http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=46616

As far as the Omnia. Ummm... Let me put it this way.... Havbe you put it side by side with your TP? If not then please do so in a store. I would hate for you to get all excited about this device then find out its not what you expect. I think these people are way over hypering this device. I would rate it at best average. If I could, I would go to the XV6900. Thats a bad *** phone. I liked it so much I got when brand new before the Touch Pro came out. Sent it back on the release day for TP and then sent TP back and kept XV6900. Yeah, after looking at the screen I had to go back to the Pro.

The screen will keep you. Try the differnt radios. Try my ROM in the upgrade forum. Just dont send it back wihtout trying. Nothing better in my book.

[papacat]

Thanks for the advice. I am running the custom rom you posted, Scott, but have not otherwise tinkered with the radio. I have found the diversity of functions the device can manage wonderful, though it has been a bit finicky and required me to be a cautious and aware user. In short, it's a damned cool device but does require a great deal from the user to use it well. That's really all fine and good with me, if the reception issue wasn't going on.

I'm headed into the store to tinker with an Omnia today before I pull the trigger.

The hard part is I am home for a week and won't be on the road to test the dropped calls problem again until after my return period expires. So, it looks like I will have to make a call without being able to test the telus radio.

[Ultima]

There is a good chance the radio on your Pro will improve greatly as the carriers release updated ROMS.

I know I've said it in other threads and I will say it again. My 6800's radio performance got a TON better with the radio ROM's of today compared to the launch version. Better signal, fewer issues, BT improved greatly. I'm expecting to see the same happen to this phone as well.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who saw things improve as the radio matured. Guys?

[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.

[scrosler]

Originally Posted by 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.

Ok, as long as you tested it and know what you are getting into. The screen is my biggest concern so I wanted to make sure you saw the diff.

Good luck to you and let us know how the omnia turns out...

[papacat]

Thanks, Scott and I will report back as I get some serious usage hours onto the Omnia on reception results.

By the way, I should thank you for the work on the rom and elsewhere, as it did a lot to make my TP a better device. Between that rom, wmwifi, and spb add-ons, the TP was a nice device overall. If the Verizon version of the TP has much success I think it will be largely due to the hard work done by folks like you and the PPC community to overcome the crippling and the design flaws of HTC.

[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.