Samsung's SGH-i900 OMNIA, released first in Asia and Europe and arriving as a Verizon exclusive in the U.S. in December 2008, is a Windows Mobile-based touchscreen smartphone with HSDPA, quad-band EDGE, and a 5.0-megapixel camera. Samsung has replaced the standard Windows Mobile GUI with its own TouchWiz interface, providing one-touch access to major functions, and offering several input options, including fingertips, an optical mouse, and an included stylus. The touchscreen is resistive like the BlackBerry Storm, not capacitive like the iPhone — you have to apply a slight pressure to interact with the screen. When using the Samsung virtual QWERTY keyboard, pressing a key results in a small feedback vibration that helps with typing accuracy by mimicing the feel of a physical keyboard.

The Samsung Omnia has a 5-megapixel camera with flash — relatively high resolution for U.S. phones currently. The camera features geotagging with the integrated GPS receiver, auto-focus, face and smile detection, brightness control, continuous shooting mode, panorama mode, and a number of scene presets including sports, beach, sunset, indoor and more; video capture is also supported at 640 x 480 resolution. The phone comes with 8 GB internal storage, expandable to 16 GB with microSDHC cards.

The OMNIA has HSDPA 3G support on Verizon's extensive high-speed network and an Opera Mobile browser; you'll need to subscribe to Verizon's currently $29 data plan covering all email, web and text messaging to avoid losing the subsidy, which right now puts this phone at an attractively low price of $99 with a $70 mail-in rebate (this is a limited time discount from Samsung and will probably end sometime in April 2009).