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>> Hi I'm Bonnie Cha, Senior Editor at CNET.com and today we are taking a First Look at the Samsung Omnia. I know we looked at this a couple of months ago, but that was the unlocked GSM version and it's finally coming to the States with Verizon Wireless. Physically, it's pretty much the same. It's got a very nice sleek form factor and of course the highlight is the touchscreen. It's not as sharp as the Storm or say, the HTC Touch Diamond, but it's still very nice and bright. The cool thing about the Samsung Omnia is the user interface, which they called TouchWiz and this includes a little tray here, of widgets that you can drag over to your home screen and really customize the device to your liking. One of our complaints about the unlocked version was you couldn't add additional widgets and you still can't on this version, but Samsung [inaudible] and added a couple, most notably the Internet Web Browser which I was happy to see. The screen also provides haptic feedback, so you get a little bit of vibration to let you know that it's felt your touch and is registering your actions, so that's really good. There is a built-in accelerometer, so when you rotate the phone it will rotate with you and again you'll get a vibrating feedback and of all the accelerometer smartphones that I've tested this is one of the fastest, so I was really happy to see that. Down here you get some navigation controls. You have some Talk and End keys in here as an optical mouse that you can use to get a little mouse-like cursor on your screen or you can switch it back to the directional keypad. I found it a little bit small to use as an optical mouse, so I use it as a directional keypad instead. Feature-wise it's got a Wi-Fi which is really great for Verizon. It is EV-DO Rev. A, but I like having that alternative for connecting to the web. It uses Internet Explorer Mobile as well as the Opera Web browsers. Multimedia is great. It's got a 5-megapixel camera on the back and it also has a multimedia player that plays various music formats, as well as DivX video files. It's running Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition, so you get the standard mobile Office Suite to edit and view Word and Excel documents, some things like that. There's also a Verizon apps store where you can download more applications. Overall, it's a pretty good phone. There's still a little bit of that Windows Mobile sluggishness, but I think it was faster than the BlackBerry Storm in terms of launching applications and again the accelerometer. It'll be at $249.99 with a 2-year contract at launch. So it's a little bit more than the Storm, but I think if you want a more high-powered smartphone this is the way to go. I'm Bonnie Cha and this has been your First Look at the Samsung Omnia for Verizon Wireless.
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