(Click here for a larger view of Verizon's Samsung Omnia)While Verizon has not officially announced the device, the Omnia's arrival has already made ripples in the blogosphere. This morning, several phone enthusiast sites tracked a brief appearance of the Omnia in Verizon dress on the Samsung website, pictured above. Later on, the
Boy Genius Report site located the device in a Verizon store and photographed both the phone and its packaging.
Like the
Saga, another Samsung device that reported for Verizon duty earlier this week, the Omnia will apparently retain its native quad-band (850/900/1800/1900MHz) GSM capabilities, but add the dual-band (800/1900MHz) CDMA functionality the U.S. carrier's network requires. Other features of the phone, apparently otherwise unaltered, include a 3.2-inch, 400 x 240 touchscreen display, and a "TouchWiz" user interface.
Verizon's Omnia apparently retains standard
Windows Mobile 6.1 underpinnings, though of course there's no way to be sure. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that the Chinese carrier China Mobile would
ship a version of the Omnia with Windows Mobile 6.1.4, including the software vendor's new
Internet Explorer Mobile 6 web browser. Previous Omnias have featured a customized version of
Opera Mobile 9.5.
Clearly intended to remind one of Apple's iPhone, the Omnia is visually similar. Measuring 0.5 inches thick -- in its international version, at least -- it has a brushed-metal back, a screen that covers most of its front, and a tiny optical trackpad to boot.
Fortunately, one iPhone resemblance goes further than skin-deep: like Apple's device, the Omnia has been offered with 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB of flash storage, making it the most capacious Windows Mobile phone we know of. Unlike the iPhone, it also has a microSD slot, allowing the addition of even more storage.
Samsung's Omnia has iPhone-like storage, plus a microSD expansion slotThe original international version of the Omnia offers an FM receiver, while an enhanced
T*Omnia for the Korean market adds a DMB (digital multimedia broadcasting) television receiver. Verizon's version certainly won't boast TV reception, and we won't speculate about the FM radio. Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11b/g, and GPS are certain, however, since they've been confirmed by photos of the device's packaging.
Further informationFor specifications of the original Omnia and its enhanced successor, the T*Omnia, see our earlier coverage,
here and
here, respectively. To read U.S. reviews of specially imported European Omnias, see the
Engadget Mobile,
MobileTechReview, and
SlashGear websites,
here,
here, and
here, respectively.
To see the
Boy Genius Report photographs of the Omnia and its packaging in a Verizon store, go
here.
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