ForcaTech Blog

You are probably tired of hearing about the Omnia 2 considering all of these posts but here it goes.

With the–rumored–leaked release date of the August 23rd Omnia 2 release to Verizon just around the corner I decided to stop by a local Verizon retail store and sniff around.

Before walking in I really had my doubts considering we have heard nothing about the release of the device and Verizon is still keeping its mouth shut. As I walked up to the store I was almost positive that the Omnia 2 was not going to be here in the next few days.

I walked in and was immediately asked for my name and why I came in that day. I said my contract was about to run out and I was hoping to find something that would keep me from switching to the iPhone in the next month or two. The guy set the clipboard down and began to help me right away. He first walked up to the Storm and I shot him down. He hasn’t been reading my blog.

He walked me over to the first gen Omnia and the HTC Ozone and their other devices and I wasn’t impressed with any.

I asked him about the Omnia 2. I told him I had gotten to see some GSM versions of it and heard that Verizon would be getting one as well.

His words to me were, “Yes we are! I was very impressed with the phone myself but haven’t heard an official release date. However our biggest phone releases are in the 4th quarter so I would expect it this year.”

Booo! I was really hoping he would leak us some information that we weren’t already 90% sure of. Only a few more days to go and I doubt that we will be seeing the Omnia 2 any time in the next few weeks. Our only hope is that Verizon is trying to keep it a big secret to blast everyone into staying/switching to Verizon. I highly doubt this as it would have been smarter to advertise for it months ago when the Pre and iPhone 3GS were being released. I know of many who have left Verizon for the Pre as well as the 3GS.

That is probably what this fellow in The-Middle-Of-No-Where, Chad, Africa thought as he looked up to the sky just as the Google Satellites took a snap shot of him. And with good reason apparently. This is one of the areas of the world that allow you to super zoom in with Google Maps. To see this location for yourself visit Google Maps here.

Why this location is candidate for being super zoom-in-able I have no idea. Not very interesting if you ask me.

This reminds me of a video I saw of a picture taken by satellite. It started as a picture of the whole globe and slowly zoomed in to the US, then to a State, then to a City, then to a street, then to a bus and then into the bus so close that you could read the heading of the newspaper a man was reading.

Does anyone know where I can find this video? If I ever find it then it will be up here.

Those of you who are avid Pandora users have no doubt had all of your hopes and dreams crushed recently. Pandora is now forcing Pandora One down your throat heavily advertising for their paid subscription service Pandora One. While I agree it is a little more than annoying that we Pandora members, who have been listening to the site since it first started up, are now limited to 40 hours a month; however, I can understand that they have their own costs to cover.

In the past you were also able to just go to pandora and listen without an account. Now you have to register and login to listen to music so that they can track your every move limit everyone to 40 hours.

I thought I would beat the system and create another account when I initially ran out of my 40 hours, but no dice. Pandora not only limits your account but also limits each computer.

You will notice a new drop down when you first sign up for Pandora One. One of the cool features of upgrading is the slim “Pandora Mini”. Its basically just takes everything off the web page except for the center area where the music is.

As soon as you get to 30-35 hours you will begin to notice a bar at the top of the screen warning you that you are about to run out of sweet, free listening time. Once you hit 40 hours BOOM. You’re done.

If you want to continue listening you have to pay $0.99 for the next month or $36/year to upgrade to Pandora One.

With Pandora One you also get a slim yet spiffy Pandora desktop application that allows you to listen to Pandora without a need to use your browser at all. This, in and of itself, is really cool. If you have a firefox update, accidentally close your whole browser instead of that one tab or have no reason to have a browser window open you can still listen to your  music uninterrupted. Whenever the next song comes on there is a little overlay that pops up in the top right corner of your screen to let you see the Artist, Song, Album, and Album cover.

You also get high quality streaming audio. Instead of the 128Kbps default you have the option of listening to 192Kbps instead. We tested this feature out on some $10 cheap desktop speakers and also on a higher end setup and on both we could tell a quality difference when switching between the two. It obviously wasn’t as noticeable with the cheaper speakers so if you don’t have a nice audio set up this wouldn’t be a selling point for Pandora One.

When you upgrade you also have the option to apply custom skins to your in-browser Pandora. Which is cool, but again, not a selling point.

Some other perks that are worth the money–if you listen to 40hrs+ of Pandora each month–is that you have unlimited listening and no audio or visual ads. Your idle time out before it asks “are you still there?” is bumped up from 2 hours to 5 hours. As long as you skip a song, rate a song or click on anything else on the Pandora site you won’t timeout and will have uninterrupted music.

Honestly, there aren’t a ton of features available for Pandora One but if you are someone who listens to Pandora often then I say it is worth it. The desktop application is pretty slim but allows you to add new stations, select the one you want to listen to, rate, skip and adjust volume. The real selling point with Pandora One is if you run our of your 40 free hours. All of the other features are nice, but just perks to having the unlimited music and no ads.

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[UPDATE]: Users have been reporting that when using any build of Windows Mobile 6.5 they experience a time out after a few songs. No word as to what exactly is causing this–and we don’t have any other details and haven’t verified–but we have contacted Pandora support to see if they are aware and have started doing any kind of troubleshooting. This is definitely something wrong with WinMo 6.5 specifically since users who experience this problem can move back to 6.1 and the issue is resolved. It would be a smart move by Pandora to look into this and set a goal to get a work around  for their App finished around or before the unknown 6.5 release date. We will update you with any additional info.