smartphone

Earlier today I brought you an early hands-on with the Garmin Nuvifone. But where pictures may be worth a thousand words, videos are worth more. Here’s our video of the Garmin Nuvifone in action, so you can make your own judgements on the user-interface.

My fearless booth tour guide did the voiceover, and the background is loud, but you can still make out a bunch of the features as he lays them out for you.
The Nuvifone is due out in the fourth quarter of this year, but pricing and carrier information is not yet known.

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I’m here just 85 miles north of the equator in steamy Singapore, a brief 24 hour door-to-door hop skip and jump from the United States, for the CommunicAsia conference, and I just had a hands-on with the new Samsung Omnia smartphone. The Omnia has a a 3.2-inch touchscreen display and will be hitting Singapore’s Singtel and StarHub carriers (HSDPA, GPRSH) this week, and the rest of Europe later in July, and China in August.

I can easily say the Omnia is the first full-featured Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional phone that I’ve had hands-on with that actually packs enough power under the hood to keep up with the fancy custom-UI overlay called “TouchWiz UI” that Samsung added.

On the home screen, there are about 14 widgets that run along the left side, and Samsung says more will be available. To activate a widget, like the movie player for example, you just finger-slide the widget from its toolbar out onto the mainscreen, and the program launches. Where phones like the HTC Touch struggled and navigation was a bit clunky, the Omnia, at least for the time being, is fluid and quick. Click the link below for more shots, including a spy-shot of the white version.

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