Arcpad on Samsung Omnia II

[yc]

Has anyone got Arcpad working on Omnia II including connecting it to the GPS and camera?
Or any recommendations on a suitable off-the-shelf phone that works well with Arcpad 8.

Thanks
YC

[JeffBailey]

The Omnia used to freeze when de-activating the GPS so we loaded Franson to control the GPS and the unit worked well. The Omnia is very hard to see in bright sunlight so it is great as a test unit but I would prefer something with longer battery life and outdoor readable screen.

[BjørnRindstad]

For the last three months we have been testing ArcPad 8.0 sp3 on both Samsung Omnia II and HTC HD2. We had the problem with the Omnia freezing when trying to deactivate the GPS until we found out we did not have to deactivate the GPS but just exit ArcPad. The screen is lousy in bright sunshine, which is odd because AMOLED should be the ultimate screen technology. Our old IPAQ 214 (and the HD2) is much better to read under such conditions. On the other hand we find the Omnia II GPS much better than the HD2 one. Hopefully ArcPad 10 will eliminate some of the minor problems we have with these smartphones.

[StephenQuan]

Regarding the internal GPS on the Samsung Omnia (in my case the original i900):

1. Ensure to connect to the GPS Software port not the GPS Hardware port.
2. Use Franson GpsGate or similar to duplicate the port again

But, generally, I found that the A-GPS sometimes presented very inaccurate positions with (faked) high quality attributes, making it unreliable. Other times, I found the GPS to drain the power of your device so quickly, making it very inpractical. Plus, it generated so much heat in the device.

I found far better results using an alternate GPS (e.g. GlobalSat BT-368 SiRF III Bluetooth GPS) which gave a superior GPS experience but at the expense of needing to carry two devices which required to be charged separately. With the BT-368 I found the ArcPad experience was far more stable and the GPS fixes were faster and the GPS positions were better. If you're going to go down this route, I suggest you search for SiRF III Bluetooth GPS in eBay.

[RolfBroch]

The latest release of ArcPad 8 (SP4) that came last friday has fixed the problem with ArcPad hanging when the GPS is closed.

Rolf