Omnia presence

But first something generic about mobile phones...

My first one was this brick of a machine. Something as cumbersome as the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but you get the drift. I couldn’t put that thing in my pocket or else my female co-workers would think either I have a banana inside my jeans or I’m just happy to see them. The keypad was like the tablet Moses lugged down from the holy mountain. The screen displayed graphics as advanced as Pong. The ring tones and wallpapers were tragically limited. (Remember the time whenever a mobile phone rang in the LRT, you scrambled and groped away, thinking it was yours?) But that mobile was revolutionary in its day. It was the techiest thing around.

That’s the constant thing about technology. It is an ever-evolving beast.

Just think of television, for example. (Brace yourself for a lengthy dissertation.) The house that I grew up in had only a prehistoric Brand X black-and-white TV set that took all of 30 minutes to warm up before the screen comes alive. Something wrong with the picture tube, I think. Or I guess it was mainly because of archaic machinery. It was cased in an auburn wooden cabinet like Pandora’s box in the middle of the living room. Every day, I had an appointment with my “gray” playmates — Kermit, Grover, Ernie and Bert, The Count, and, occasionally, Big Bird’s imaginary furry friend. From that show I learned my ABC’s, my 123’s and endless shades of grays (which would come in handy when I started drawing with charcoal and graphite). Those were different times, Lou Reed once said. Television sets these days boast clarity and high-definition that you’d half-expect Sadako to crawl out of the tube after emerging from a well. You could do the following: Go on a hallucinatory trip with Kris in a space station orbiting around Solaris in the Tarkovsky movie. Join Whitnail and “I” in their booze-powered holiday by mistake, which ends with a soliloquy from Hamlet. In a zoo. With a wolf. And invite night horrors into your life with every Hellraiser movie ever made.

The same with computers, cars, audio equipment, and everything with wires. And mobiles, of course.

At present, Samsung’s latest technological wonder is the Samsung Omnia II i8000. (You just never know what hi-tech marvel this company will come up with next.)

Built solely for smartphone lovers, the Samsung Omnia II is a sleek and stylish touch-screen mobile phone with 3.7-inch AMOLED display for the sole purpose of crisp, vibrant images and brighter display even under daylight. Thus, rendering clearly everything under the sun, so to speak.

Think of it as a candy-bar size and a better version of its predecessor, the Omnia. This phone is jam-packed with cool features. For starters, there is the DVD-like video recording and playback: If you happen to spot Thomas Pynchon eating a cheeseburger, explaining Gravity’s Rainbow to a tramp, or something on your trip to some backwater part of America, you could record the proceedings, and upload it on YouTube. By the way, the connection standards on board include 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS coupled with 8GB of internal storage.

The Omnia II uses Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional Edition (for opening and editing those important documents — such as your capsule reviews for Erwin Romulo and Uno about books or movies that don’t exist) that boasts Microsoft’s My Phone backup service and improved Internet Explorer Mobile and Windows Marketplace for Mobile. So you could find and download apps for your device in all categories for your ever-changing needs, including entertainment, productivity, travel, etc.

Aside from its onscreen portrait and landscape QWERTY keyboard (depending on what is comfy for you to send an SMS), it includes a Transcriber to decipher touch-screen writing in print or cursive if you are too lazy to type letters one by one. (Aptly enough since “Lazy” is my nickname.) Your finger of course, is the stylus.

Dig the etiquette mode: when you are in a meeting and forget to put the phone on silent mode and comes the incendiary sound of your Mars Volta’s The Day of the Baphomets ring tone, all you have to do is put the phone facedown (with the screen touching the table) and it will mute itself.

The camera is 5-megapixels auto-focus with flash and digital zoom. The shooting modes are so cool because you can fix the white balance, ISO, and image sizes, plus the cam has an anti-shake feature as well. There’s even an onboard video editor so you can add music, text, and so forth to your recorded clips right from the phone to be shared via MMS or e-mail, even communities like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr etc.

Dig the Smart Reader: This scanner is my favorite bit — it scans business cards, documents or even translates words and images, which can be saved as contact information, notes etc.

Double-dig the TouchWiz user interface for applications. On the left side of the screen, you’ll find an expandable widget tray where you can drag and drop numerous widgets to one of three home screen panes. So, it won’t be a surprise that your life will revolve around this fine piece of machinery because multitasking has never been this easy.

But you can’t stop technology, according to George Costanza in Seinfeld. Eventually, you can put the cellular brain on the head of a pin, or (for better or for worse) have SMS and voice calls running directly via wires through your brain in some dystopic day-mare.

For now, my latest machine is this sleek, stylish mother. And I could sense Mars Volta playing any minute now.  

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The Omnia II is available at all authorized Samsung mobile phone dealers nationwide. The Omnia II retails for P29,490 for the 8GB and P31,490 for the 16GB version. The OmniaPRO B7320 retails for P14,790.