Rockstar Games has announced that it will be releasing its first two games for the iPhone and iPod touch this fall, including the platform’s first Grand Theft Auto title. Beaterator is a portable music-making application that allows people of all musical backgrounds and ability to create beats and songs, featuring thousands of loops and sounds made by both well-known producer/rapper Timbaland and Rockstar. Currently available for the Nintendo DS, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars follows the story of Huang Lee, a young Triad who travels to Liberty City after the mysterious death of his father to uncover the truth behind his demise. Both games are listed as coming this fall; more exact release or pricing information has yet to be announced.

The iPod touch has always been an amazing iPod. And with its groundbreaking technologies–including a Multi-Touch screen, the accelerometer, and 3D graphics–and access to hundreds of games, iPod touch puts an amazing gaming experience in the palm of your hand. It comes in 8 GB, 16 GB, and 32 GB models with new volume controls and a built-in speaker. Play hours of music. Create a Genius Playlist of songs that go great together. Watch a movie. Surf the web. View rich HTML email. Find your location and get directions with Google Maps. Browse YouTube videos. And shop the App Store for games and applications.

Music
Music on iPod touch not only sounds amazing, it looks amazing, too.
Touch Your Music
Remember what it felt like to flip through your CD or record collection? Cover Flow brings that feeling back. Just turn iPod touch on its side and flick through your music to find the album you want to hear. Tap the cover to flip it over and display a track list. Tap again to start the music. Even view the lyrics while you’re listening.
A Musical Genius
Say you’re listening to a song you really like and want to hear other tracks that go great with it. The new Genius feature finds the songs in your library that go great together and makes a Genius Playlist for you. You can listen to the playlist right away, save it for later, or even refresh it and give it another go. Count on Genius to create a mix you wouldn’t have thought of yourself.
Fill It Up
Fill up your iPod touch with audio and video from your iTunes library. All you have to do is choose the playlists, videos, and other content you want to sync, and iTunes does the rest.

Movies and TV Shows
Movies and TV shows have never looked this good on a portable device.
Everything’s a Must-see
Carry hours of video with you, and watch it on a crisp, clear 3.5-inch widescreen color display. Need ideas? From Hollywood blockbusters to independent favorites, there’s something for everyone at the iTunes Store. Download and watch movies with a few clicks. Prefer TV shows? Buy a single episode or an entire season’s worth all at once.
In Control
While watching your video, tap the display to bring up the onscreen controls. You can play/pause, view by chapter, and adjust the volume. You also can use the new volume controls on the left side of iPod touch. Want to switch between widescreen and full screen? Simply tap the display twice.
Sync and Go
Need some entertainment for your next flight or road trip? With iTunes on your Mac or PC, you can sit at your computer and choose the movies and TV shows you want to sync to your iPod touch.

Games
With its groundbreaking technologies, iPod touch puts an amazing gaming experience in the palm of your hand.
Get in the Game
Developers all over the world are creating exciting games unlike anything you’ve ever seen on an iPod or mobile device. Many games come alive with stunning 3D graphics and immerse you in the action with the advanced technologies in iPod touch. There’s even a built-in speaker, so you can hear all the action.
Fingertip Control
Many games for iPod touch use Multi-Touch to give you precise, fingertip control over game elements. Use your finger to drag your pieces around the board in chess or dice games. Or pinch to enlarge or shrink your view, rotate your character left or right, or just tap to make a selection.
Tilt, Turn, and Go
The built-in accelerometer actually responds to your movements, so you can tilt and turn your iPod touch to control the action. It’s perfect for racing games–where your entire iPod touch acts as a steering wheel–and for tap-and-tilt games like Super Monkey Ball, in which your character rolls to your movements.
The App Store
Even if games aren’t your thing, there’s an iPod touch application for you. Thousands of applications in almost every category–entertainment, social networking, sports, photography, reference, and travel–are a tap away at the App Store.

iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store
Discover new music anywhere.
Buy on the Fly
The built-in wireless capability in iPod touch gives you access to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, where you can choose from millions of songs with a tap. Browse New Releases, What’s Hot, and Genres. Take a look at Top Songs and Top Albums. Or find exactly what you’re looking for with a quick search. Play a 30-second preview of any song, then tap once to buy it. Your music starts downloading instantly, and you can keep tabs on its progress by tapping the Downloads button.
Sync it Back
When you connect iPod touch to your computer, the music you bought on-the-go syncs to your iTunes library. If you’ve partially downloaded a song to iPod touch, your computer completes the download automatically.
iPod touch at Starbucks
If you have an iPod touch, an iPhone, or a computer with the latest version of iTunes, you get free Wi-Fi access to the iTunes Store and to Starbucks’ Now Playing content. Stroll into a participating Starbucks, and you’re connected automatically.

Home Screen
Get instant access to whatever you need on your iPod touch.
Customize Your Home Screen
Arrange the icons on your Home screen any way you want. Even move them to another Home screen. Create up to nine Home screens for quick access to the games and applications you download from the App Store and to your Safari Web Clips.
Go Home
No matter where you are on iPod touch, you can press the Home button to return to the Home screen. You can go back to what you were doing at any time.
Add Apps, Web Clips, and More
Whenever you download an application from the App Store, a new icon appears on your Home screen. And if you check the same websites every day, just create Web Clips and you can access the sites directly from your Home screen with a single tap. Not happy with how they’re organized? Reorder them any way you want by dragging them around the screen.

Safari
iPod touch features Safari, the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device.
Browse Anywhere
The iPod touch is the only iPod with 802.11b/g wireless access to the web. Whenever you’re connected via Wi-Fi, you can access your favorite websites to read news, check scores, pay bills, and go shopping.
Search and Find
iPod touch syncs your bookmarks from your PC or Mac, so you can access favorite sites quickly. It has Google and Yahoo! search built in, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for on the web.
Zoom with a View
Get a closer look at any web page by zooming in and out with a tap or a pinch of the Multi-Touch display. View websites in portrait or landscape. Rotate iPod touch 90 degrees and the website rotates, too.
Clip it.
If you check a website frequently–a favorite newspaper, blog, or sports site–why not create a Home screen icon for it? Make Web Clips with Safari, and your favorite sites are always just a tap away.

Mail
Email on iPod touch looks and works just like email on your computer.
See it All
iPod touch supports rich HTML email, so images and photos appear alongside text. And you see email attachments in their original formats, not stripped-down versions. Rotate, zoom, and pan in more than a dozen standard file and image formats, including PDF; Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; and iWork.
Access it All
Access your email from popular providers–including MobileMe, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo! Mail, Google Gmail, and AOL–and most industry-standard IMAP and POP mail systems.
Send Fast
iPod touch recognizes email addresses in different applications. If you run across an email address on a web page or a map listing, for example, just tap it; iPod touch opens a new message and addresses it for you.
Type Smart
With its built-in dictionary, the intelligent iPod touch keyboard predicts and suggests words as you type, making it fast and easy to write email.

Maps
When you’re connected via Wi-Fi, you can get directions, find local businesses, and check traffic.
Find Yourself
iPod touch finds your location using known Wi-Fi hotspots. It also finds points of interest by keyword: Search for “coffee” and iPod touch shows you every cafe nearby.
Get Directions
Just type in an address and get directions from wherever you are. View a list of turn-by-turn directions, or see a highlighted map route. You also can mark specific locations and find the best route between them.
Enjoy the View
Just like Google Maps on your computer, Maps on iPod touch lets you switch between views of Google map data, satellite images, and a hybrid of both. Multi-Touch makes the difference. Tap to zoom, pan, and change your view on the move.
See Traffic
Maps on iPod touch shows you live traffic information, indicating traffic speed along your route in easy-to-read green, red, and yellow highlights.

YouTube
Love to watch the latest YouTube videos? iPod touch gives you all the fun of the web’s best videos–pocket-size.
Share from Anywhere
Email your favorite videos to your favorite people. Tap “Share” on any YouTube video detail page, and iPod touch creates an email with the video link already in it.
Watch What You Want
Explore Featured, Most Viewed, Most Recent, and Top Rated videos. Or search for the video you want with a keyword search. Once you find what you’re looking for, bookmark it to watch later.

Photos
Carry up to 25,000 of your favorite photos everywhere.
Share Photos
Show thousands of photos from the palm of your hand. Flick to scroll through thumbnails. Tap to view full screen. Rotate to see a photo in landscape. Pinch to zoom in or out. Play slideshows, complete with music and transitions. Email a photo to a friend, set it as your wallpaper, or share it in a MobileMe Gallery.
Save Photos
If you receive a great image in an email, save it to your photo library on iPod touch. Once there, it acts just like any other photo. You can set it as your wallpaper, share it on the web, or pass it on.
Sync Photos
iPod touch uses iTunes to sync photos you have in iPhoto on a Mac or Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Photoshop Album on a PC. Just choose which photos or albums to sync to your iPod touch, then you can look at them–and share them–anywhere you go.

Calendar
With iPod touch, it’s easy to make plans and stay on schedule.
Add Events
Keep your schedule at your fingertips with iPod touch. Add events to your calendar. Set a custom alert. Write a note or two. Manage multiple color-coded calendars. And do it all with just a few taps.
Stay in Sync
Connect iPod touch to your computer, and the events that you’ve created on-the-go automatically sync to Microsoft Outlook on a PC or iCal on a Mac. And all the events you’ve added on your computer sync to iPod touch.
Three Ways to View
iPod touch gives you three ways to view your calendars. List view shows you all your appointments in the coming days as a comprehensive list, which you can scroll up and down. Day view displays one day’s worth of appointments visually. And Month view offers an at-a-glance look at an entire month.

Contacts
Put names, email addresses, phone numbers, and more at your fingertips.
Make Contact
Build your contacts list on your Mac with Address Book or on your PC with Microsoft Outlook, then sync everything to your iPod touch using iTunes. You also can add contact information directly to your iPod touch from maps, web pages, and email. Next time you sync, your computer is updated, too.
Search Contacts
If you have a lot of contacts, a quick search shows you a list of matching names. Or you can scroll up and down your entire list to find the right contact. Want to send them an email? Just tap an email address and the Mail application opens automatically.
Organized by Groups
If you keep your contacts organized into groups–such as co-workers, friends, family, and so on–iPod touch will, too. And iPod touch can hold more than just names, email addresses, and phone numbers. You also can track birthdays, websites, nicknames, and notes.

Stocks, Weather, and Notes
Stay on top of it all.
Check Stocks
Stocks on iPod touch shows you performance information for any stock you choose. When you want more details about a stock’s performance, tap the Y! for instant access to Yahoo! Finance.
Get Weather
Check worldwide weather at home or away. Add the cities you want, then flick back and forth to get six-day forecasts for each. Tap the Y! to open a Yahoo! city guide that shows you what’s happening, rain or shine.
Take Notes
Forget the pen and paper. Use Notes on iPod touch to write yourself a quick note and keep important information on hand. There’s even a built-in email function that lets you send notes to yourself or others.

Calculator
iPod touch’s calculator helps you settle the restaurant bill or keep track of your budget.
Calculate Simply
When you tap the Calculator icon, iPod touch shows you a simple application with addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and memory functions. Use it just as you would a pocket calculator.
Calculate Scientifically
Your simple calculator doubles as a sophisticated scientific calculator. Just rotate it to landscape to access dozens of functions for solving complex science and math problems.

Nike + iPod
Get the most out of your workout.
Tune Your Run
iPod touch now includes built-in Nike + iPod support. Just slip the Nike + iPod Sensor (available separately) into your Nike+ shoe and start your run. The sensor communicates wirelessly with your iPod touch, tracking your time, distance, and calories burned. It even gives you voice feedback on your progress.
Tune Your Cardio Workout
This feature also works with new cardio equipment available in many fitness centers. Just look for treadmills, ellipticals, stair steppers, and stationary bikes that are Nike + iPod compatible.
Sync with Nikeplus.com
When you get back to your computer, sync your iPod touch via iTunes and transfer your exercise data to nikeplus.com, where you can track your workouts, set goals, and challenge friends.

Multi-Touch
iPod touch features the same revolutionary interface as iPhone.
Glide, Flick, Pinch
Built to take full advantage of the large 3.5-inch display, the Multi-Touch touchscreen interface lets you control everything using only your fingers. So you can glide through albums with Cover Flow, flick through photos and enlarge them with a pinch, zoom in and out on a section of a web page, and control game elements precisely.
How it Works
The Multi-Touch display layers a protective shield over a capacitive panel that senses your touch using electrical fields. It then transmits that information to the LCD screen below it. iPod touch software enables the flick, tap, and pinch.
Type with the Touchscreen Keyboard
iPod touch features an intelligent touchscreen keyboard perfect for browsing the web in Safari, getting directions on a map, searching for videos on YouTube, finding music on the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, or adding new contacts. It analyzes keystrokes to suggest words as you type and correct spelling errors automatically. And because it’s software based, it changes its keys to support typing in multiple languages.

Accelerometer
iPod touch responds to motion using a built-in accelerometer.
Responds to Movement
iPod touch detects when you rotate it from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display. So you immediately see the entire width of a web page, view a photo in its proper aspect ratio, or control a game using only your movements.
How it Works
The accelerometer inside iPod touch uses three elements: a silicon mass, a set of silicon springs, and an electrical current. The silicon springs measure the position of the silicon mass using the electrical current. Rotating iPod touch causes a fluctuation in the electrical current passing through the silicon springs. The accelerometer registers these fluctuations and tells iPod touch to adjust the display accordingly.
Perfect for Gaming
Accelerometer technology really shines when you play games because it immerses you in the action. It’s perfect for racing games–where your entire iPod touch acts as a steering wheel–and for tap-and-tilt games like Super Monkey Ball, in which your character responds to your every movement.

Wireless
Connect iPod touch to the Internet anywhere there’s a wireless network.
Connect Automatically
iPod touch locates nearby wireless hotspots, including protected networks. If you’ve never used a particular network, it asks you to enter a password the first time, and it remembers the password from then on. So the next time you’re within range, it connects automatically.
Surf’s Up
Now you can send email from a coffee shop. Surf the web at the airport. Shop for games from your couch. Browse, buy, and download music from the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store at select Starbucks locations or other wireless hotspots in your area.

Read Kindle Books on the iPod touch

Read Kindle books on your iPod touch.

* No Kindle required.
* Get the best reading experience available on your iPhone or iPod touch.
* No Kindle required.
* Access your Kindle books even if you don’t have your Kindle with you.
* Automatically synchronizes your last page read between devices with Amazon Whispersync.
* Adjust the text size, add bookmarks, and view the annotations you created on your Kindle.
* Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.

Shop for Books on the Kindle Store on Your iPod touch

* Buy a book from the Kindle Store, optimized for Safari, on your iPod touch or iPhone and get it auto-delivered wirelessly.
* Search and browse more than 275,000 books, including more than 107 of 112 New York Times bestsellers.
* Find New York Times bestsellers and new releases for $9.99, unless marked otherwise.
* Get free book samples; read the first chapter for free before you decide to buy.
* Books you purchase also can be read on a Kindle.
* Kindle newspapers, magazines, and blogs are not currently available on the iPod touch or iPhone.

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Many people considering the purchase of an iPod mistakenly believe that the iTunes Store is the only place where iPod users can purchase music. In reality, however, nothing could be further from the truth: Not only have users always been able to import standard audio CDs into iTunes and transfer them to the iPod, but in the past year or so a whole new range of iPod-compatible music stores have begun to pop up on the Internet. Some of these services have been around for some time for other digital music platforms, while others are relatively new entries in the world of online music sales.

Traditionally, the problem with purchasing music online has been the requirement by the recording industry for vendors to impose some form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions on downloadable content. This was intended to prevent users from easily sharing music via online services, but in reality was little more than a headache for the majority of users. The problem is that not all DRM technologies are compatible with each other, which means that you were restricted to purchasing content from online stores with a DRM scheme that supported your particular choice of media player. Since Apple did not license their FairPlay DRM to any other online vendors nor license any other DRM technologies for the iPod, the iTunes Store was pretty much the only game in town for iPod owners who wanted the convenience of purchasing music online.

However, a funny thing happened with the success of the iPod: Since the only major iPod-compatible online store was Apple’s own iTunes Store, it became popular as more and more people bought iPods, rising to become the number one online music retailer.

It wasn’t that other stores didn’t want to sell music in an iPod-compatible format, it was that they couldn’t: the music labels were tying their hands by not allowing them to sell music without DRM, and Apple wasn’t licensing its own DRM to any other online services. Of course, this left the record labels in a relatively uncomfortable position; they could either allow the iTunes Store to continue to dominate the online music retail business, or they could decide to loosen their stranglehold on digital copy protection in order to allow other retailers to sell music to the large and lucrative iPod customer base.

The end result was that the recording industry began allowing major online retailers such as Amazon and Walmart to begin selling music in the open, DRM-free MP3 format. Since just about every digital media player on the planet supports the MP3 format, this allows these online services to reach a much wider customer base, and provides a benefit for consumers in that your music is no longer tied to a single type of media device. In short, although one is of course expected to obey applicable licensing and copyright laws, the fact is that MP3 files have no technology-based restrictions on how you can use them—they will play in just about any digital audio application on your computer or mobile device and can be freely transferred and burned to CD without limitation.

A few of the more popular sources for iPod users to purchase content online.

A Word about Audio Formats

Issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM) aside, there are three common audio formats in use by most online music services and media players.

1. MP3—Short for MPEG-1, Audio Layer 3, this is the most common format by far and supported by pretty much every digital audio player sold today. The MP3 format does not provide for any form of DRM, so chances are that if you have an MP3 file, it is not restricted in any way.
2. AAC—Short for Advanced Audio Coding, this is the preferred format used by Apple for its software and devices. Contrary to popular belief, however, this is not an Apple proprietary format, but is actually part of the MPEG-4 specification, and was originally designed to be the successor to the MP3 format. Many other modern digital audio players and even cell phones do support the AAC format, but it is not nearly as ubiquitous as the MP3 format. The AAC format can be DRM-protected, but this is only used by Apple with their FairPlay DRM on the iTunes Store. Users cannot create their own AAC DRM files, nor do any other online stores sell music in the AAC format.
3. WMA—Windows Media Audio is a format developed by Microsoft and used by Windows Media Player as well as most other digital audio players on the market. A DRM-protected version of the WMA format is still used by many other online music stores and digital media players. Apple’s software and devices do not directly support the WMA format in any manner, unprotected or not, although iTunes on Windows will offer to automatically convert unprotected WMA files into either MP3 or AAC format when you first import them into your library.

In addition to the audio format itself, a bit-rate is also frequently specified to indicate the relative quality of the music. This is expressed in kilobits per second, or “kbps” for short, and represents the amount of data stored for each second of music. Generally, a higher number represents better audio quality, although there is a point of diminishing returns for the majority of users. 128kbps is considered the minimum acceptable quality by most users, while bit-rates of 192kbps or 256kbps are considered by most to be indistinguishable from the source material even when played back on high-end equipment.

The iTunes Store

For many years, the iTunes Store was the only major legitimate online music retailer available to iPod users. Today, the majority of music purchased from the iTunes Store is still only available in a FairPlay DRM-protected AAC format that is only compatible with software and hardware made by Apple, specifically iTunes itself and the iPod, iPhone and Apple TV.

In the spring of 2007, Apple began selling tracks from certain labels in a new “iTunes Plus” format, which was a standard unprotected AAC format that could be used on any device supporting that format. In addition, while standard iTunes content is sold at a 128kbps bit-rate, iTunes Plus content is sold at a 256kbps bit-rate. Originally, iTunes Plus content sold at a slight premium over standard iTunes content, however today there is no price difference between the two types of content, and standard iTunes tracks are only sold where iTunes Plus versions are not available.

iTunes Plus tracks can be identified either by a small “Plus” symbol next to the track price, or by the words “iTunes Plus” found under the album name.

Tracks on the iTunes Store sell for $0.99 USD per track—a fixed-pricing model that Apple has been adamant about maintain even in the fact of industry pressure for variable pricing. Albums have a slightly different pricing model, however, since albums vary in number of tracks and whether or not bonus material such as videos are also included. The “normal” album price is $9.99 USD, although albums with extra content or the digital equivalent of multi-disc sets may sell for more than this. Further, Apple recently began selling albums at discount “sale” prices, and its also not uncommon to find shorter albums available for lower prices—generally if an album has less than 10 tracks on it, it sells for about the same price as buying the tracks individually.

At this point, the distinction between the iTunes and iTunes Plus content available seems to be in the hands of the record labels themselves, who make the determination on which tracks must be DRM-protected or not.

Note that the iTunes Store does sell more than just music, however. Depending on your country, you will also find music videos, audiobooks, TV shows, movies, and iPhone and iPod games and applications. The iTunes Store also serves as a gateway to subscribe to podcasts, but this is simply in the form of a podcast “directory” to simplify the process for users. Podcasts themselves are downloaded by iTunes directly from the podcaster’s own site.

The iTunes Store has the advantage of being the most convenient source of music for iTunes users since it is available from directly within the iTunes application on your computer and directly from the iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV. Further, the iTunes Store has the largest catalogue currently available internationally. Although the content availability differs between countries, the fact is that the iTunes Store now operates in over 60 different countries, making it still the only online music option for many users around the world.

Amazon MP3
Last year, Amazon became the first major retailer to begin selling music online in the unprotected standard MP3 format. Ironically, Amazon sells music only in the MP3 format, and their catalog of unprotected content is significantly more extensive than that available from iTunes itself, since ALL content is in the unprotected MP3 format.

Amazon MP3 uses a more variable pricing model, with most tracks selling between $0.79 and $0.99 USD, and in fact it’s not at all uncommon to find tracks in the same album with different prices. Normal-length albums range from $3.99 to $12.99, with compilations and multi-disc albums selling at higher prices. Track and album pricing on Amazon MP3 appears to be determined largely on factors such as release date and popularity, and is generally in-line with the prices you would the equivalent CDs selling for in most retail stores.

Like iTunes, Amazon MP3 has some tracks that are available only as part of a purchase of an entire album, however users will often find that these “album-only” tracks actually differ between the iTunes Store and the Amazon MP3 store , so if you’re looking to make a single-track purchase of a track listed as “album-only” it’s always best to shop around.

Note that Amazon MP3 does not at this time provide any content other than music. Amazon MP3 provides files in the MP3 format at 256kbps and all downloaded files include the normal artist, album, and track name tags already filled in, as well as album artwork. Music

Although individually-purchased MP3 tracks can be downloaded directly, album and other multi-track downloads from the Amazon MP3 store require the use of the Amazon MP3 Downloader application, which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The Amazon MP3 Downloader queues up your content and downloads it and can also automatically import newly-downloaded tracks into iTunes for you.

Note that at this time, Amazon MP3 is only available to users in the United States, and Amazon enforces this in much the same way that the iTunes Store does for its country-specific stores: Users may log on and use the Amazon MP3 store from any physical location, but a U.S. based credit card and billing address is required to make purchases.

A Symbian-injected followup to the so-so Windows Mobile Omnia, the HD i8910 is a specced-out slab of phone from Samsung, with a 3.7-inch AMOLED screen, 8MP camera, HD video recording and a definite thing for multimedia.

The Price: TBD, at least as far as subsidized carrier deals go. You can grab it unlocked now for about $650, but 3G may not work on your carrier.

The Verdict: The Omnia HD does everything fine, and a few things extremely well. Video playback is top notch and widely compatible, the camera is among the best I’ve ever seen on a cellphone, and the video recording can actually hang with a lot of pocket cams, like the Flip or Kodak Zi series. On all other counts the phone never falls flat, but it never really shines, either.

The Hardware: Your first impression of the Omnia HD is that it’s big, but that’s not really fair: It’s a tall device, but it’s not meaningfully larger than any of the other popular touchscreen phones on the market today—it’s just proportioned differently (see the gallery below for comparison). And for all the hardware crammed inside, it’s reasonably thin. Speaking of guts: It’s got HSDPA (on European bands), GPS, 8-16GB of internal storage with microSD expansion, and 8MP, 720p-recording camera sensor, a built-in flash bulb, a forward-facing video camera, USB connector and a 3.5mm jack. The lack of HDMI-out is semi-replaced by DLNA network streaming, though it’s not really an even trade. At any rate, it’s a healthy phone, hardware-wise.

Samsung touts the AMOLED screen over pretty much everything else, and with some good reason. It’s vibrant and sharp, but side by side with an iPod Touch, it isn’t strikingly better. The benefits of the OLED, such as they are, seem to manifest themselves more in the phone’s long-ish battery life than anything else. In terms of touch, it’s a capacitive panel, and it’s extremely responsive. Any lag or difficulties with touch controls or soft keyboard are entirely down to the software.

Cellphone cameras are generally horrible, so the Omnia HD’s camera is a rare treat. Seriously: I even trusted it to shoot a headphone review last week, and it came through impressively well. It’ll match a low-end point-and-shoot in most situations, barring low-light—the sensor can’t really handle darker situations too well, and the flash is pretty wimpy—and fast-motion scenes. Video, on the other hand, is at least pocket-cam quality. In daylight it’s razor-sharp at 720p, while in low light it’s passable. Novel-but-not-terribly-useful slo-mo and high-speed modes are thrown in for good measure. The Omnia HD doesn’t quite match up to the best-of-the-bunch Kodak Zi8, for example, but it’s amazingly close, especially for a phone. A phone, with a decent camera! How did this happen?

The Software: This is where things fall apart a little. Wherever the Omnia HD’s hardware shines—along with the kickass camera, it can handle HD video playback in plenty of codecs—the software is fine. The camera interface and media playback interfaces, music and video, are never distracting and usually do what you expect. Everything else? That’s a different story.

Samsung’s thrown the old Omnia’s TouchWiz widget UI, originally designed for Windows Mobile, onto the Symbian-powered HD. This in itself is fine, since TouchWiz has always been a decent, finger-friendly homescreen, wherever it shows up. Outside of the three main TouchWiz panels, though, is a bizarre UI stew, some from Symbian, some from Samsung, and some from the deepest bowels of design hell. For example: Scrolling! Instead of throwing menus and selecting entries, the selection follows your finger. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a terrible way to have to trudge around a menu-heavy operating system. The onscreen keyboard seems to be a Samsung special too. It’s fine—it’s spacious and rarely lags—but it’s set on a perfect grid, doesn’t come with any autocorrect and generally feels like it was designed in about an hour.

Outside of the core multimedia and homescreen areas, the phone is a fairly raw take on Symbian’s S60 5th Edition shell, which means the UI is inconsistent and difficult to tackle with fingers. Not to mention S60′s needlessly inserted extra steps all over the place. Want to enter a URL? Press a button, type your address, press another button, and press another. It doesn’t make any sense. Samsung’s given Symbian something of a makeover, but most of Matt’s complaints about the N97 software carry over to the HD. Everything—even basic calling, contact management and OS navigation—is overcomplicated and disorganized, beyond the point of a “learning curve.”

Functionally, though, it holds up fine: The browser could be easier to navigate with, but renders with WebKit, supports Flash and generally does its job. Same goes for pretty much everything else: The experience could be smoother, but you’d be hard pressed to find a task that the HD explicitly can’t handle. And if you do find a gap, remember that this is full Symbian, so you can always go app hunting. As dumb as the UI can be, don’t be fooled into thinking this is a dumbphone: It can do pretty much anything an Android or Windows Mobile phone can, and sometimes even more—it’s just that sometimes, it’s painfully awkward.

Play Your Music Everywhere You Go! A great motivator to a great workout!

There’s no question that music can pump us up. And the more pumped up we are while working out, the better results we are going to get from working out. Whether you are inspired by “Eye of the Tiger” or “Chariots of Fire” the Mobile Theme Music Sound System is the perfect accessory for your iPod or any MP3 Player. The durable case houses not only a great sound system but a compartment where you can store your favorite player. You’ll needed it when you start taking on those trails you’ve never imagined possible on your brand new mountain bike. Create a play list of your most inspiring music and elevate your workout to the next level.

The Bike stereo Amplified Speaker is the most portable yet durable sound system you can find. It easily secures around any bicycle handlebar, giving you great and inspiring sound as you power your way up the steepest of hills. Unzip the unit open and you will find a compartment for storing not just your favor media player but also maybe some trail mix or a energy bar. And nothing will beat the portability. Secure it to your handlebars with the strong Velcro straps. Secure it to the volleyball post at the beach. Secure it to the cage of your all-terrain Go Kart. Anywhere you go, the music will follow!