The Omnia from Samsung is a Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone, though you would hardly know it from first impressions. Windows Mobile is hidden away behind a finger-touch friendly front-end that tries to make it look a lot more snazzy than it is.

That touch interface adds some very consumer looking elements to Windows Mobile. For example, the main screen can be populated with widgets which you drag from a bar down the left-hand side of the phone. Widgets can tell you the time, list new emails, let you change profile and even, in a much more active way, pause the currently playing music track. You can even put shortcuts to your favourite contacts on this screen.

Samsung has tweaked many of the Windows Mobile applications to make them more finger friendly too, so that you hardly need to resort to the stylus which, unusually, doesn't fit inside the phone's casing but instead hangs on a lanyard.

That noted, if you are very keen on mobile email, or even texting, you may find the screen-tappable keyboard on the Omnia a little annoying. We found it too small to use accurately with the screen in tall mode, and when flicked to wide mode the keyboard got larger but very little space is given over to the text you are typing.

The hardware is sleek and minimal. A 3.2-inch, 240 x 400 pixel screen is dominant, and underneath it are Call and End buttons and, between them, an optical mouse pad. This is one of the disappointments of this handset. You run a finger over it to move around, but we found it to be fairly ineffective and preferred to use the touchscreen most of the time.

This is a 3G handset with HSDPA to 7.2Mbps and it has a front camera for two-way video calls. It also has Wi-Fi and GPS. The main camera shoots at 5 megapixels. The music player takes advantage of 8GB of internal memory (or 16GB in the Orange version of this handset) and a microSD card slot under the battery cover lets you add more. Unfortunately it doesn't have a 3.5mm headset connector, relying instead on a proprietary connector which is shared with the mains power adaptor.

The Web browser is Opera Mobile which is more rewarding to use than Microsoft's own Internet Explorer and the accelerometer takes a role here too, turning the screen into wide format as you swivel the phone in your hand.

Verdict
We like the Omnia a lot. It brings Windows Mobile into a more consumer friendly world, adds a good camera and includes plenty of strong features. But both its optical mouse and its on-screen keyboards are disappointing.

Company: Samsung

Tags: microsoft internet explorer windows mobile opera mobile windows phone 7 samsung group samsung clients