The Price: TBD, at least as far as subsidized carrier deals go. You can grab it unlocked now for about $650, but 3G may not work on your carrier.

The Verdict: The Omnia HD does everything fine, and a few things extremely well. Video playback is top notch and widely compatible, the camera is among the best I've ever seen on a cellphone, and the video recording can actually hang with a lot of pocket cams, like the Flip or Kodak Zi series. On all other counts the phone never falls flat, but it never really shines, either.

The Hardware: Your first impression of the Omnia HD is that it's big, but that's not really fair: It's a tall device, but it's not meaningfully larger than any of the other popular touchscreen phones on the market today—it's just proportioned differently (see the gallery below for comparison). And for all the hardware crammed inside, it's reasonably thin. Speaking of guts: It's got HSDPA (on European bands), GPS, 8-16GB of internal storage with microSD expansion, and 8MP, 720p-recording camera sensor, a built-in flash bulb, a forward-facing video camera, USB connector and a 3.5mm jack. The lack of HDMI-out is semi-replaced by DLNA network streaming, though it's not really an even trade. At any rate, it's a healthy phone, hardware-wise.

Samsung touts the AMOLED screen over pretty much everything else, and with some good reason. It's vibrant and sharp, but side by side with an iPod Touch, it isn't strikingly better. The benefits of the OLED, such as they are, seem to manifest themselves more in the phone's long-ish battery life than anything else. In terms of touch, it's a capacitive panel, and it's extremely responsive. Any lag or difficulties with touch controls or soft keyboard are entirely down to the software.

Cellphone cameras are generally horrible, so the Omnia HD's camera is a rare treat. Seriously: I even trusted it to shoot a headphone review last week, and it came through impressively well. It'll match a low-end point-and-shoot in most situations, barring low-light—the sensor can't really handle darker situations too well, and the flash is pretty wimpy—and fast-motion scenes. Video, on the other hand, is at least pocket-cam quality. In daylight it's razor-sharp at 720p, while in low light it's passable. Novel-but-not-terribly-useful slo-mo and high-speed modes are thrown in for good measure. The Omnia HD doesn't quite match up to the best-of-the-bunch Kodak Zi8, for example, but it's amazingly close, especially for a phone. A phone, with a decent camera! How did this happen?

The Software: This is where things fall apart a little. Wherever the Omnia HD's hardware shines—along with the kickass camera, it can handle HD video playback in plenty of codecs—the software is fine. The camera interface and media playback interfaces, music and video, are never distracting and usually do what you expect. Everything else? That's a different story.

Samsung's thrown the old Omnia's TouchWiz widget UI, originally designed for Windows Mobile, onto the Symbian-powered HD. This in itself is fine, since TouchWiz has always been a decent, finger-friendly homescreen, wherever it shows up. Outside of the three main TouchWiz panels, though, is a bizarre UI stew, some from Symbian, some from Samsung, and some from the deepest bowels of design hell. For example: Scrolling! Instead of throwing menus and selecting entries, the selection follows your finger. It's hard to explain, but it's a terrible way to have to trudge around a menu-heavy operating system. The onscreen keyboard seems to be a Samsung special too. It's fine—it's spacious and rarely lags—but it's set on a perfect grid, doesn't come with any autocorrect and generally feels like it was designed in about an hour.

Outside of the core multimedia and homescreen areas, the phone is a fairly raw take on Symbian's S60 5th Edition shell, which means the UI is inconsistent and difficult to tackle with fingers. Not to mention S60's needlessly inserted extra steps all over the place. Want to enter a URL? Press a button, type your address, press another button, and press another. It doesn't make any sense. Samsung's given Symbian something of a makeover, but most of Matt's complaints about the N97 software carry over to the HD. Everything—even basic calling, contact management and OS navigation—is overcomplicated and disorganized, beyond the point of a "learning curve."

Functionally, though, it holds up fine: The browser could be easier to navigate with, but renders with WebKit, supports Flash and generally does its job. Same goes for pretty much everything else: The experience could be smoother, but you'd be hard pressed to find a task that the HD explicitly can't handle. And if you do find a gap, remember that this is full Symbian, so you can always go app hunting. As dumb as the UI can be, don't be fooled into thinking this is a dumbphone: It can do pretty much anything an Android or Windows Mobile phone can, and sometimes even more—it's just that sometimes, it's painfully awkward.

Vivid, responsive, generously proportioned touchscreen

Camera shoots nice stills, surprisingly great 720p video

Powerful HD video playback, wide default codec compatibility

3.5mm jack!

DLNA, but no HDMI

Aging, overcomplicated Symbian/S60 software

UI is extremely inconsistent, occasionally unresponsive

No carrier availability yet, iffy US 3G support

[Samsung]

The Omnia isn't running the game, of course. Instead, its being processed remotely and streamed via OTOY, an upcoming server-side rendering service that'll let you play high-end 3D games on low-powered machines.

In this video, Crysis is being played through the Omnia's browser with no additional plug-ins and is being controlled wirelessly with an Xbox 360 controller.

It'll be interesting to see how many people take advantage of this when it officially launches. [TechCrunch]

Samsung had a good thing going, but then they blew it by sticking the following slogan on the placard beside it: "meaningful innovation, wow experience."

Seriously? Sounds like a move by the same committee who commissioned this beautiful AMOLED screen to begin with, then saddled it Symbian, instead of Android, or even WinMo 6.5.

Before we get started, a quick note on the last Windows Mobile test, and what we're doing differently here. Some of you guys complained that the Samsung Epix was a crappy, slow piece of hardware. However, according to Laptop, its 624MHz Marvell processor and 128MB RAM are specs that just about on par with the three phones clamored for in the comments. Still, you get your wish: Here we lined up the Sony Xperia X1, HTC Touch Pro (AT&T's Fuze) and the Samsung Omnia, and put them through the same tests. On the Epix, for Opera testing, we went with v8.65 in order to not use beta software. (Opera's own site lists 8.65 as its most recent stable version.) Here, all the Windows Mobile hardware we've added to the test have Opera 9.5 built right in.

So without further explanation, here are the numbers—time to load the page, and how accurately it was rendered using Firefox 3 as a reference:

As you can see, the Xperia, Fuze and Omnia are about on par with the Epix when it comes to IE (they suck!), though Opera Mobile 9.5 obviously crushes 8.65 when it comes to speed and competency. I asked Opera why I saw the performance differences between the three phones and they admitted that there are some tweaks, which "are mainly with making our browser work best on the different devices." So, let's look at the new phones and see how they rate against the Epix:

Xperia X1
You probably noticed in the chart that load times are longer over Wi-Fi in a few spots. This is because it would randomly hang, not loading data, for up to 20 seconds. The Xperia was aggravating because its touchscreen seemed to be the least responsive of the three, making navigation a pain, though its optical mouse came in handy for zipping around pages, and it worked better than the Omnia's. One other annoyance is that Opera blocked its virtual symbol keyboard from coming up, which made it hard to enter one of the URLs. It falls smack in the middle.

HTC Fuze
I had the smoothest overall experience with the Fuze, and would be my closest thing to a recommendation. Its touchscreen was responsive, which made double tapping to zoom and pan around pages fast and mostly intuitive in Opera Mobile. Having symbols mapped directly to the keyboard is a big time saver while punching in URLs. This is good, since it seemed to be the slowest of the three, both over 3G and Wi-Fi. Sluggishness aside, the web experience is markedly more usable than the other two new phones.

Omnia
The all-touchscreen Omnia, despite being the fastest over 3G in a number of cases, was a nightmare. During the 3G tests, it managed to crash Opera on three of the six pages tested. I also had tons of Wi-Fi issues. Eventually I was told by Samsung that VZAppZone, Verizon's pseudo-app store that's all but pre-installed on the phone (after you fire it up, it installs), was breaking the Wi-Fi. (On the Epix in the previous showdown, I was later told by Samsung that installing Opera is what broke Wi-Fi for IE. So, uh, Samsung maybe...oh, whatever.) Also, its portrait keyboard has keys so ridiculously skinny, they'd remind anorexic models not to eat. When Opera did work and a page was actually loaded, it was the snappiest at moving around the page. But overall, yeesh.

Conclusion
So where would I slot Opera 9.5 overall if I were to slide it into the previous browser battle? I'd give it a B-. It has a great, desktop-y UI (though I wish a few of the buttons were a smidge bigger, taking into consideration fat fingers and the inadequacies of resistive touchscreens). It's really competent, and it has a solid zoom metaphor, with the double taps usually working like a charm. And it has extras like tabs. But, and this is the big but, it still doesn't feel quite as smooth or instantly responsive as Safari or Android's browser. It's clearly an OS issue, though, not an Opera one.

Speaking to that, testing these three phones actually took longer than it did to test the six in the original Battlemodo, entirely because of how much wrestling I had to do with Windows Mobile. I've used close to a dozen Windows Mobile devices over the last year, and it's still a bitch.

If you haven't noticed in our reviews of Windows Mobile phones, we've basically ceased comparing to them anything but other WM phones, in a wishful attempt at dulling our totally appropriate disdain for the OS, lest the review essentially turn into one giant bitchfest. They're clearly off in their own world of performance and function.

Even ceding the point that Windows Mobile is somehow more functional than the iPhone or Android, it's like comparing one of those 100-in-1 kitchen gadgets that'll blend, slice, dice, toast, saute, braise, set the table, clean the dishes AND suck you off while it's doing all that to a Waring MX1000 blender. It doesn't matter how much the all-in-one gadget can technically do if you can't figure out how to use it, and it performs every task with only mediocre results.

If the iPhone ran half as poorly as Windows Mobile phones, Apple haters would (rightfully) scream as loudly as Apple fanboys do about Vista. If any BlackBerry was as much of a flustercuck, reviewers would trash the crap out of it. I'm sorry, but at this point, any apologist left defending Windows Mobile is either delusional or full of crap—either way, not worth listening to.

I won't touch another Windows Mobile phone until WM7 or at least 6.5, no matter how awesome the hardware looks. Call me when it runs Android.

Price: $250 after two-year contract and $70 mail-in rebate.

The Verdict: The Omnia is a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone, so at the basic level, you know what you're getting. The difference between it and basically every other WinMo 6.1 phone lies in the TouchWiz UIcing that's been slathered on top, and the hardware. If you're doing a double-take after peeking Sammy's Behold for T-Mobile, we wouldn't blame you—the Omnia is kinda like the smartphone version of the Behold, since it's got an almost identical industrial design, the same TouchWiz UI and a 5MP camera.

Hardware

Okay, so what sets this apart from other Windows Mobile offerings is that the hardware is in a fairly tight, if verrrrry familiar form factor. (I don't know why Jesus thought it felt so obese, actually.) It's faster and feels more responsive than most other WinMo phones, too, with a 624MHz processor compared to the more common (for HTC phones, anyway) 528MHz CPU, even though it has a puny 128MB of RAM. (It's still not quite as nimble as I feel like it should be, however.) The five-megapixel camera, like the Behold, is good—better than most phones, anyway—and has similar extensive-for-a-phone software for photo tweaking and editing. It's also got the Verizon equivalent of a unicorn with one testicle—Wi-Fi. Verizon's awesome network plus Wi-Fi gives it a serious network leg-up on most of the competition. And it comes with 8GB of storage, which is handy since it supports a crazy number of video formats natively.

Not so great on the hardware side, I feel like the touchscreen is slightly less responsive than the Behold or Instinct, though that might be Windows Mobile coming through. The resolution is disappointing, just 400x200, which looks markedly crappier stretched across its 3.2-inch screen than the 640x480 pixels HTC crams into the Touch Pro. I really miss a dedicated back button for navigating (or escaping, rather) WinMo's menus. Its optical mouse (in case you don't wanna go the bullshit stylus route to hit tiny, finger-hating Windows icons) is jankier and harder to use than the one on its cousin the Epix. Also, internet standard complaint for not having a 3.5mm jack and a BS proprietary power and USB connector.

UI, Features and Usability

TouchWiz more readily reveals some of its deficiencies here compared to the Behold—like not being able to resize widgets—since you want to do more from the home screen to avoid diving into the WM UI (or at least I do). Love the wireless manager widget for instance, but it's too damn big, covering like half the screen. As I said about the Behold, TouchWiz is really only skin-deep—it's not as deeply integrated as HTC's TouchFlo interface, so after one or two clicks you'll arrive in WinMo land. The plus side, conversely, is that performance is much better than the also fresh-off-the-boat HTC Fuze for AT&T (aka Touch Pro), since there's a lot less overhead from the skin. Still, overall, it does make stuff easier to get to. There are some thoughtful touches here as well, like the haptic feedback letting you know the accelerometer has been tripped, so the screen's about to flip around with a snazzy (albeit slightly gratuitous) animation.

The onscreen keyboard is shockingly worse than the Behold's that I just came off of, with a weird layout (why is space way on the other side of keyboard??) and a thoroughly terrible QWERTY rendition in portrait mode. The VZAppZone is another UI atrocity, which not only looks like crap, but functions really terribly as a browser based app store. Speaking of browsers, the Omnia ships with Opera 9.5, which offers a really pleasant web experience with solid page rendering, nice zoom and tabs, even though WinMo occasionally lags it up. (More on this in an upcoming piece, hint hint.) Finally, on the media front, the Omnia busts down a few barriers, with a built in FM radio (though you have to have the headset connected, since it uses it as an antenna) and support for a ton of audio and video formats from Ogg to Xvid. Too bad the media player UI is plenty bleh.

Final score

If you're looking for a Windows Mobile device on Verizon, you don't have a lot of (good) options. Luckily, the Omnia is one of the best choices for WinMo overall, not just on the carrier, though we wouldn't blame you for wanting the actual keyboard of the Touch Pro. However, that'll cost you $100 more, since the Verizon Touch Pro is $350 to the Omnia's $250. And if you're just looking for a standard smartphone on Verizon, you can get cheaper still and go with the $199 BlackBerry Storm, which, despite its flaws, I think is ultimately a more compelling, and usable, device that will only become more so after RIM fixes the bugs. But if you want Verizon, and Windows Mobile, and don't want to pay $350 for it, you've got a new phone.

Network: HSDPA (7.2 Mbps), EDGE / GPRS 850/900/1800/1900
OS: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
Display: 3.2” WQVGA TFT LCD (240 x 400)
Camera: 5 Megapixel CMOS, Auto Focus, Image Stabilizer, Geo-tagging, Auto-Panorama Shot,
Wide Dynamic Range (WDR), Face Detection, Smile Detection
Video: DivX / XviD / H.263 / H.264 / WMV / MP4
Video recording: Video Editing: Trim video, Audio dubbing, Live dubbing, Add subtitle, Image capture
Audio: FM Radio with RDS, MP3/ AAC / AAC+ / WMA / OGG / AMR
Bluetooth Stereo Headset (A2DP)
Value-added Features: GPS, TouchWiz UI, MS Office Document Viewer, Advanced PIM Apps, Push Email, Auto Rotation, TV Out, Connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0 / USB 2.0 / Wi-Fi
Memory: 8GB / 16GB Flash + External Memory slot : microSDHC™
Size: 112 x 56.9 x 12.5
Battery: 1440 mAh