Worse review ever not even close.

I’ve had my Omnia for three weeks now. I hate it. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

Samsung’s Omnia is mind numbingly user unfriendly. For example, I have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to figure out where they have hidden the controls for the side bar allowing me to remove or add widgets. (I can use the widgets already there, no problem.) I know I stumbled upon them once, but I’ll be damned if I can find them again.

Of course, a little trip to the “Help” function should solve my problem in a jiffy, right? No way. There is a grand total of two — two! — entries under Help. But that’s OK. I’ll just look it up in the pdf User Manual that I downloaded from Samsung’s site. Get ready for this: The words “sidebar” and “widget” do not appear in the manual!



That would be OK if at least, at the very least, the Omnia worked as a PHONE. Uh uh. Try using it to make a phone call to an automated system in which you have to choose options based on tapping a number on the keypad. In their infinite wisdom, Samsung has decided to have the keypad automatically freeze — and disappear!!! – some seconds after the call begins.

That means that by the time you go to punch in the number 5 (say, for customer service) the window is frozen. You have to (1) press the action key to unlock the window, (2) tap another button to bring back the keypad, and then (3) hit the number. By that time, you’re getting a message that says, “We have not received your input. Goodbye.”

It’s even worse for another automated service that requires that I enter a number within a three-second window on cue. Because I cannot hold the phone to my ear to receive the cue while also looking at the screen, I have to (4) turn on the speakerphone before going through steps 1 to 3 above. Of course, it is impossible to turn on the speakerphone before the call is engaged, meaning that those 4 steps have to be done to precision within a short time frame.

I have learned how to do all this, not because the phone’s beautiful logic has finally been revealed, but because I have become a potential gold-medal winner in the yet-to-be-admitted Olympic event of Samsung Omnia Gymnastics.



Another pain in the finger: there is no direct link to the phonebook from the ‘call’ page. You have to either close the window using that “X” that is displayed entirely into the far upper right hand corner, as far away as possible from any other button you’re likely to be working with, and hope that the page before was one with a phonebook button. Otherwise there will be more buttons to press. Wouldn’t “phonebook” be an obvious option under the call page “Menu”? Not obvious to whoever designed this gizmo.

As icing on the keypad, when I tap the icon for the camera, supposedly a hot feature on this toy, I get an error message that says, “Not enough video memory.” No, the camera is not set to video. Know how I manage to use the camera? Only by turning the phone off at the source and rebooting.

 And then, once I get into the camera, guess what? I can take videos too! So what’s this about not enough memory?!

Did I mention that I absolutely hate this phone?