Steve Litchfield of All About Symbian has listed his top twenty freeware applications for the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD smartphone handset. It’s quite a broad list of freeware apps and well worth checking out.

We haven’t tried all of them so far, the main apps we have used regularly are Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Fring and TweetS60. However, we quickly replaced TweetS60 with the paid-for app Gravity, which is a superb twitter application. So, which free apps are you using on your i8910 HD?

Phone widgets are becoming ever more popular on handsets. Samsung is encouraging widget support for the i8910 Omnia HD handset through a competition that we’ve discussed previously. The great thing about it, is that anyone can enter.

Whilst some of you may wonder how on earth you go about creating one, All About Symbian has created quite a handy guide. It covers the simplest form of a widget, the shortcut. You can use one as shortcut to your favourite web site or online service (like Gravity of Profimail). I haven’t tried it myself yet (I’m still working myself around the phone), but would love to hear if any of you have got this working!

Update: Enterprising forum member warpfive has created a widget for this website. Click here for more details!

Nokia Messaging is a service that allows users to set up, access and use their email including a push service. Despite operating on a number of S60 devices, Nokia only supports its own handsets for this service. However, HDBlog.it is reporting that it has managed to get Nokia Messaging v10.00.14 working on a Samsung i8910 Omnia HD handset (which of course runs on Symbian S60 5th Edition).

There is a slight caveat though, you need to install the HelloOX v1.03 hack to get Nokia Messaging to work. Then you need to sign up to the Nokia Messaging service online to create an account. The program link to download will then be sent via SMS to the handset. Once you’ve installed the program and entered the password and followed the setup instructions, you will have access to your mail including push functionality.

Judging by the pictures on the HDBlog.it site, it appeared to work flawlessly once working. Now all we need is a widget that shows emails on the homescreen as seen in the Nokia N97. Hopefully, that can’t be too far away either. Has anyone managed to get this working yet? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below.

A number of Orange Samsung i8910 Omnia HD users have been looking to try and debrand the phone, to get rid of all the Orange bloatware on the phone. Thankfully, it looks like a working solution has been found – the only negative appears to be is that it will cost you €15 to download the necessary files from share4gsm (a small price to pay considering the price of the phone though).

A site is also up and running called Debrandi8910 which details the step-by-step requirements in which to go about the debranding. Remember, this is only a debranding, it will not unlock your phone and allow it to be used on other networks. However, it will upgrade you to the latest XXIE6 firmware. Once debranded users see the following benefits:

• Phone feels faster and slicker
• Widgets that were missing are now back, including Facebook and Youtube
• BBC i-player comes pre-installed
• Support for Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Myspace pre-installed
• Anti shake setting in camera now saves ok

The main negative seems to be that the firmware flashes into the Polish language to start with, so you need to remember where to change the language. Also, remember to backup everything before rebranding. Also, this only works in Windows XP and NOT Vista. Check out the debranding video tutorial after the break.

Update: Neil W from Debrandi8910 got in touch to say that it is offering the files needed to debrand the Samsung i8910 HD for just £5. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you that are contemplating buying the Samsung i8910 Omnia HD smartphone, it is worth checking out the following promo videos. The four videos go through a number of the phones features such as adding widgets, recording video, taking various types of camera shots, blogging apps as well as GPS.

Even for those of you that have just got hold of the phone, it’s probably worth checking out, as you might come across something you weren’t aware of. You can tell that the videos have been professionally made by Samsung and give clear and concise instructions for each tutorial (as well as having accompanying text). Check out the videos after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »