Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"Translated from Greek, the name of Samsung's new model means "everything" and its main purpose is to fully satisfy the needs of the modern cell phone user. This is a phone with a unique combination of characteristics such as 5-megapixel camera, large touch display and GPS, taking advantage of the Windows Mobile 6.1 platform. In addition, this is the first device with a built-in support of not only DivX, but XviD video. The logical question "Can it cook?" comes to mind..."

When these phoneArena guys review a phone, they really go to town - a 360 degree view of the phone? Wow. Reading through the review, you realize that Samsung excels in some areas, and falls short in others. For instance, their efforts on the custom user interface elements seem to be lacking - look at the photo above and the tiny scroll-bar in the lower right corner of the screen - that's just sad. On the other hand, the hardware design of the device seems quite excellent, and the overall performance of the device is snappy and lag-free. So is the OMNIA on anyone's techno-lust list? Expansys has the OMNIA for pre-order over on our affiliate store, but the price for the 16 GB version is nearly the same as the 8 GB version, so I suspect those prices fall into the "really rough guess" category. Still, you can pre-order one today if your desire to own this phone overrides your concern about the price.

My friend Nghia from MobiFrance attended the global launch for the Samsung OMNIA in Singapore and he captured a couple of great videos. The video above is your typical marketing fluff (complete with some rather cheesy dialogue), but it shows the capabilities of the device - the OMNIA has some very interesting features, and in many ways, it doesn't even look like Windows Mobile. Samsung obviously picked up the glove HTC threw down with TouchFlo over a year ago and they've put some serious effort into customizing the user experience.

The other video that Nghia published shows a live walkthrough of the user interface on the OMNIA - a must see if you're interested in this device (embedded after the break). Read more...