I had an opportunity to test Samsung OMNIA (Samsung SGH-i900) last Thursday at The Peninsula Manila, during its press launch. Here are my impressions.

The Samsung people were careful enough not to position this device as their answer to Apple’s iPhone, but the comparison can’t be helped. In fairness to Samsung, OMNIA has several features that iPhone doesn’t, and that clearly differentiates it from the so-called gold standard.

First, the touchscreen. I fond of touchscreens, and the OMNIA’s touchscreen is good. It doesn’t come with a stylus (the Samsung people said it will come with a stylus, but the phone does not have a slot for one, so that’s doubtful; they did provide stylus during testing), so you have to use your fingers. The TouchWiz user interface is a Samsung custom UI for Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. The icons are large enough so that you can easily point to the right icon. What I like about the custom UI is that Opera Mobile is available as an alternative to IE Mobile. This is a great addition. More on this later. Of course, you can revert to the traditional WinMO UI.

Haptic feedback is available, but I had it turned off, as I find it annoying. Basically, the phone vibrates every time you press an icon. It is not a useless feature, but as I have said, I am annoyed by haptic feedback, and I felt it is a waste of battery.

There is a mouse pointer that is controlled by an optical touch pad below the screen. It is like having a touchpad on a phone. I find it odd, but it has its uses.

The on-screen keyboard remains a lot to be desired; people with large fingers will have to get used to it. The keys are too narrow for the thumbs. That is why I think the lack of stylus is a drawback.

It has an accelerometer on board, so that when you turn the phone, the UI changes its orientation. The orientation can be sluggish when, for example, Opera Mobile is running and showing Plurk in mobile mode, for example. But that is hardware limitation, which is understandable.

Probably one of the best features of the phone is its camera. It has a 5-megapixel camera, though the flash is just LED. It has camera functions that are not found in other camera-enabled phones. For example, you can take a panoramic shot with the phone, and you can stitch up to 8 images for a panoramic shot IN THE PHONE. There are other helpful features for taking shots, and I think some of them are quite useful.

One problem that I had found with OMNIA is that it runs out of memory that fast. For example, using Task Manager, the apps that were currently running were Main Menu and Task Manager, which consumed less than 1MB of memory combined. But when I tried launching Camera, I got the insufficient memory error message. Good luck running the Camera app while Opera Mobile is loaded.

I have not tested the multimedia capabilities of the phone – these features are not on top of my preferences for a phone, and there were no available video files for viewing.

The phone is nice when held, though it is shiny and fingerprint magnet. It does not feel flimsy, and you will not be embarrassed to be seen using it. Heck, I’d want this as a phone, though the lack of stylus and keypad would make me pause.

Here are the specs of this phone:

Network: HSDPA (7.2Mbps), EDGE/GPRS 850/900/1800/1900 bands
OS: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
Display: 3.2″ WQVGA TFT LCD (240×400 pixel resolution)
Camera: 5 Megapixel CMOS with autofocus, image stabilizer, geo-tagging, auto sequence, panorama shot, wide dynamic range (WDR), face detection, smile detection, 14 scene modes
Video: DivX/XviD/H.263/H.264/WMV/MP4 formats; video recording; video editing: trim video, audio dubbing, live dubbing, add subtitle, image capture
Audio: MP3/AAC/AAC+/WMA/OGG/AMR formats, FM radio with RDS, Touch Player, A2DP
Other features: GPS/AGPS,TouchWiz UI, haptic feedback, MS Office Document Viewer, Advanced PIM apps, push email, accelerometer, etiquette pause, TV out, digital frame, optical touch pad, business card recognition
Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, WiFi
Memory: 8GB/16GB flash + external memory slot: up to 16 GB microSDHC