Monday 25 May 2009

Mobistar and the Samsung I900 Omnia

I had some real difficulty trying to set up the Mobistar 3G connection on my Samsung Omnia. The instructions you get when you jump through the hoops at the Mobistar customer zone didn't work at all for me. Which I found strange, because the site managed to set up my old phone automatically by just sending one SMS. Not so in the case of the Omnia though, all configuration has to be done manually. I guess that's progress or something...

Luckily Google came to the rescue once again, and I found this nice PDF-file which clearly explains how to connect my phone to Orange World. Strangely enough, the document is even hosted on the Mobistar website itself, so why they didn't just link to this instead of their text-based customer help site is beyond me. Although, the URL seems to indicate that the file is hosted on the Mobistar Business website. I guess it isn't meant for us mere mortal private customers.

Anyway, I followed the document and everything is working perfectly now.

The search for a new mobile phone

People that know me, also know that I'm a fan of gadgets. If I see something particularly neat or flashy, I'm always tempted to jump on the bandwagon and buy that new gizmo right then and there. Well, I'm not as bad as some other people I know, but still... Luckily I don't usually make the jump to actually opening up my wallet all that often.

The same goes for mobiles phones, really. Whenever I see the latest cell, I'm always in awe and ready to dash to the stores, always nearly seduced by the newest hot features. But it rarely happens that I actually replace my phone, my previous one lasted more than three years and my current, trusty old Nokia 6230 celebrated its fourth anniversary about half a year ago.

Recently though, mostly because a colleague showed me the possibilities of his new iPhone, I decided to make jump on the smartphone train. Now, because I'm not a fan of the mainstream and I profusely resent this whole Apple fad (no offense to any of you iPhone owners), I started looking at some alternatives. The first phone to catch my eye was the HTC Touch Diamond. I like the looks of the device and HTC has a reputation for making quality phones. However, after reading some reviews, a lot of them compared it to the Samsung I900 Omnia, which was the clear winner in all comparisons.

Now Samsung has always had a rather shaky reputation in my eyes, mostly because the products they used to sell on the European markets were perceived to be cheap and of lower quality than the ones made by their European competitors. I don't know if there's any truth to this, maybe it was all snobism on our part. Anyway, I think a lot has changed since then, and nowadays Samsung has a very good reputation. I recently bought a Samsung TV and a Samsung monitor and I have absolutely no complaints about either product.

So after some more investigation and lots of googling, I decided to shell out my hard-earned dough and got myself a new Samsung Omnia. I can't deny the iPhone's user interface is a lot more user-friendly than poor old Windows Mobile 6.1. But since Samsung is launching a couple of Android-based phones later this year, I secretly hope someone will be able to make Android work on my Omnia. Until then, WM will have to do I guess.

And for all you iPhone fans out there, here's a little clip from The Simpsons ;)