Meet Ophelia

The more I use Ophelia, the more I fall in love with her.

There's no Sapphic tendency there, I'm talking about my new baby: Ophelia, a Samsung B7330.

Less than a week ago, my Mom accompanied me to get a new mobile phone because Odessa, my Sony Ericsson K610i, conked out of me last Friday, making me literally phoneless over the weekend. My mom took pity and agreed to buy me a phone using her credit card and I will be the one to pay the due amount every month.

I agreed, I have little choice after all.

I decided to get a Samsung B7330, more popularly known as Omnia Pro, the improved version of GT-B7320. I've been eyeing the phone since the year started so when I had the chance to ride on my Mom's credit card, I opted to get it.

For one, it's cheaper than its Nokia and Blackberry counterparts. I'm a very sensible buyer and I always buy mid-range gadgets. If I can get the same features with lesser price, why not?

I wanted to get a Sony Ericsson Xperia 2, which has a QWERTY keypad and a touchscreen. According to my last canvas, the price is close to P30,ooo. I could have bought a smaller laptop or an mp3 player and a digital camera with that amount. But that aside, I love Sony Ericsson and Xperia.

I had good experiences with Sony Ericsson since I've been using their phones since I bade goodbye to the world of Nokia. The music quality is uncomparable, the body looks sleek and sturdy, the camera is clear enough for online publishing, and the keypads are very friendly.

They cost quite much too. Odessa, I remembered, cost me more than Ophelia's. And my first Sony Ericsson phone was the priciest for lesser features.

I've never bought a Samsung phone before and I have heard of instances when the slide units get easily damaged. My long lost mp3, Sammy, is Samsung and I never had any problems with him, before he got snatched away.

I wasn't expecting much from Ophelia since I bought it for the keypad. (Carmela Fonbuena said its easier to file stories with a QWERTY keypad.) But the features did make me a very organized journalist. Haha.

Anyway, it's my first Windows-based phone. At first glance, the phone made me look like a serious business writer with tons of schedules. Since I no longer have my little red notebook, Ophelia manages my schedule well. It has Microsoft Office programs like Word, Powerpoint, Excel, OneNote, and Adobe Reader. This means I can write my stories in Word and send it off to my editor as a .doc file--no need to send it as SMS and have someone do the transcribing.

Messages are arranged on a date, time, and sender basis, just like reading emails. I have easy access to Yahoo! search, CNN, 7 social networking sites, Messenger, and the Internet. It uses the latest Windows OS (ver. 6.5), MSN-connected, and has one-click access to business matters like Money and Finance. (I feel like a serious business writer now.) The weather updates are very useful too.

The camera has a 3.2MP quality, which is enough to get photos for our site. I mean, I used Odessa for Online, which only had 2MP max and the photos were fine.

But that's just on the surface. The real fun begins once I connect Ophelia and Genesis. Included in the Getting Started Disc is a program called New PC Studio which should automatically open whenever I connect my phone to my laptop. Once connected, a lavander-ish pseudo-screen comes up and I can easily drag my files in nice (and cute) boxes. The background color changes depending on the widgets of choice: Media Manager, Organizer, or Communicator.


Communicator enables me to easily copy my Phonebook details, a relief since I've lost contacts twice already with Odessa. With the Organizer, I can easily arrange my schedule in my laptop and it will automatically be encrypted into the phone. My favorite part, the Media Manager, makes data exchange easy as everything can dragged from my computer to the phone.

There's also a Web icon at the lower part of the screen, which automatically links phone data to the web. I can instantly publish my photos in Flickr or Facebook!

If you're into the no-nonsense no-frills copying (New PC Studio takes awhile to set up), the Windows Mobile Device Center is the one you should use. It automatically uses ActiveSync for easy folder access.

The downside of using Ophelia is that it requires numerous set-ups. For one, there's no New PC Studio information on the handbook and there's no ActiveSync program in the disc. This means you have to be a little patient in figuring out how to synchronize your machines. There's also no "Eject" option so I have to close the computer programs and end some transfer-related tasks using the Task Manager.

In the sound aspect, it is not in the same league as Sony Ericsson and the headset looks rather cheap. The sound gets better with the headsets and Ayaka's Peace Loving People was a joy to hear. Another thing I don't like about Ophelia is that the volume settings in the upper left side can be toyed with even when the phone is locked.

All in all, Ophelia is a good buy. Not bad for a plastic-bodied phone.