Questions about the phone

1. Nope, but the lens doesnt get scratched because its recessed thanks to the silver circular thing around it. It does get dusty so you will have to use a earbud to clean it every now and then.

2. Dont use Orange so cant help you therre.

3. Battery life is great and enough for 2 days of moderate to heavy use. I have never used the mp3 player so long as to tell you if it will go over 10 hours with a full charge or not, but honestly when the battery is down to its last bar I have often turned the brightess all the way up and was able to watch a full movie (90mins) and the battery still had some juice left in it.

4. There are quite a few Symbian apps out there but there is no central place for finding them (like the Apple store for iphones).

Also, if you need more info on the Omnia HD then check out the forum at http://forums.samsungi8910omnia.com/ . There is way more info there from real users than there is here 😊

Lasted me about 11.5 hours. I used the phone to listen to music while on a long flight and it lasted pretty much the whole way. It was in airplane mode and since I was mostly asleep, the display was pretty much off the whole time.

i have gone to work and come home after 8 hours with a dead phone. to be fair, this has happened to all my phones but it has always been justified. quake running in the background. music playing over bluetooth stereo. but the only thing i did with the samsung was some web browsing.

Hi - I can answer your #2 - of course, it all depends on what you want to do with your handset, but if you rule out downloading more than 15mb (30 x 15; geddit *smile*) a day i.e. 3 x 5min of mp3s, or only about a 6th of an average Phones Show .mp4 (yes, I've downloaded one episode whilst travelling, on 3g/3g+, at about 0.5-1megabyte/sec; which wasn't too shabby (in London), I watched it, then I arrived;so that was an ok experience; so many variables, but i can just report what I've done!... but I've only ever done it once since June, so downloading and watching movies... just forget it! you have to be pretty tech desperate for that, even with 3g+! *grin*

So, I just use my i8910 now and again (I am still not a fan of the handset, personal opinion), and get my message headers down, read a few webpages, if I have too, and the most I have used is about 300mb in one month. This is the way I have used it. Some months, I have had 140mb, 160mb; in July I was so annoyed with other issues with the handset (bad firmware affecting battery) I only downloaded 70mb.

There's just too many variables to how you will use it, but, force me, and I'd say it is just about reasonable. I'd prefer 1Gb usage of course, like T-mobile; but then on T-mobile the most i EVER used was 420mb in one month. With the small screen, I don't think anyone can really use more, especially with WiFi and full PCs/laptops at home... or at work at the other end of the trip...

However, after 5 months of owning the handset, if one of my mates asked me what I would recommend (I have an iPod touch 2nd gen, and another mate has a 3Gs), I'd say, have a very close look at the 3Gs and perhaps, the new HTC HD2 (just coming out). I'm sorry to everyone who reads this forum, but my opinion still is that for my use (more work-related) Symbian O/S trails WinMo and you just can't beat the slick nature of the iPhone internals to just get on, and get the job done quick.
[I'm not even looking at Android until it hits v3.0...]

In summary, as I've written before, if you want a large, crisp, AMOLED screen experience, and a great 8MP stills camera, with very decent battery life, and the best speakers I've heard on a handset as well; demo an i8910 closer.

For everything else... 3Gs or HTC HD2...

😊 Well, someone has to put a hard opinion down... eek!

Thanks very much for the replies 😊 very helpful to get some information from actual users. In the end I decided to splash out and buy the phone outright as things like the camera are very important to me, and then I also have a bit of flexibility with which contract I go for.

But it's nice to be mostly comforted about the battery life, I will be installing the Italian firmware so hopefully that will help it.