Samsung i900 Omnia

Heating up the competition

A little brown box landed on our desk the other day with the message "Anything else is just a toy" inscribed on it. Inside was a toy phone, a bad Chinese imitation of the iPhone. Later in the day, a similar box arrived, this time with the Samsung i900 Omnia. A little surprise, it seems, from our friends at Samsung. We were almost impressed.

Out of the box, the Omnia is a looker, its carbon fibre-inspired look immediately establishing that Samsung wants to position it as a premium phone. The 3.2inch touchscreen is perfect for size and the minimal buttons on the side include a dedicated camera key, a proprietary USB port and a rather tiny power key that annoyed us ever so often. At the back is a 5MP camera lens with flash guarded by a tasty looking plastic panel.

On start up, the Omnia behaves like a regular Windows Mobile phone – you struggle to enter your date, time, language and regional preferences without reaching for the stylus. But once you're in, you'll soon see how Samsung has desperately tried to play down, or (dare we say) hide, the WinMo interface with its own visuals, thank god.

The homescreen features the company's now ubiquitous TouchWiz, featuring the widget bar running along the left side where users can arrange widgets in any order or drag them into the main screen. The icons were big and large and perfect for the finger. If you don't like the look of this, you have other homescreen options to choose from.

Some of our favourite features include an application that lets you use the flash as a torch and the business card reader which was surprisingly accurate. The optical joystick in front comes as relief when you need to use a stylus (there's no stylus dock but you have the option of hanging it on the side). The camera took great pictures while the DivX Player, 8GB internal storage and microSD card slot come as great additions.

Web browsing on this 3G phone was smooth and easy but texting was a pain. The auto-correction was annoyingly pervasive (used even while browsing and searching through contacts) and never seemed to get words right.

At its best, the Omnia is a great looking device so well endowed you'd probably end up with more features than you'd ever need. At its worst though, it is often sluggish, smacks of being a wannabe and is hampered by an operating system that looks clearly behind the times. But in an ever-crowding touchscreen smartphone market, it does hot up the competition – only we know Samsung is capable of much better. For now, we remain almost impressed.

Price: Dh2,399

Verbatim

'We're still in preliminary development of the software, and haven't done any publicity on this yet'

A spokesperson for red office, a China-based software maker, which is reportedly designing the operating system for computer giant Dell's first smartphone. Dell is rumoured to be entering the lucrative but crowded smartphone market as it looks for new revenue sources.

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