First impressions: Samsung Omnia II

Samsung's Omnia II, a Windows Mobile smart phone available from Verizon for $200 with a 2-year contract and rebates, is packed with loads of goodies. These include a widescreen, 3.7-in. touch screen, a 5-megapixel camera, and Wi-Fi for the fastest data connectivity. It runs Windows 6.5 Professional, so you get advanced Office document editing out of the box, support for corporate e-mail and calendaring via Exchange Server, and wireless synching between your phone and a Windows PC. You also have a choice of two Web browsers: Opera and IE.

But its most intriguing feature is an interface called Swype, which allows users to type words without lifting a finger—literally. As our video on this feature showed, you enter a word by dragging your finger across the screen from letter to letter. Though it's initially awkward to use, I eventually had a lot of success "typing" quickly and accurately with Swype. For double letters, as in the word "look," I just had to make a little swirling gesture over the "o." Allowing your thumb to linger on any key inserts produces the alternate key or symbol. For example, to type the number "1," I just paused at the letter "q."

Here are my first impressions of other aspects of the Omnia II, based on about a day's use of the phone:

The display is sharp. Omnia's 3.7-in. display ties with that of the Motorola Droid for largest screen on a cell phone. With a resolution of about 250 pixels per inch, it had no trouble displaying the tiniest type in my informal tests and it seemed quite bright for photos and pictures. It was also quite responsive for zooming in out of Web pages, or flipping through a long list of e-mails.

The camera's feature-packed. Omnia's 5-megapixel camera worked quite well, with controls for fine-tuning your shots conveniently on display on the left and right of the viewfinder. Pushing the on-screen "globe" button launches an app for sharing your shots via e-mail and on Facebook and other social networks. Ditto for the video camera, which can output directly to a TV via an optional cable, and comes with software for editing your videos on-camera, including adding photos, text, and music.

The interface is cluttered. For all the power of the Windows Mobile 6.5 for business users, it's a more awkward OS for consumers than iPhone, Android, and even Blackberry.

For one, its dozens of apps, for such functions as voice dialing, executing searches, accessing social networks, and acquiring widgets, are scattered over as many as 10 menu pages, as on a sloppy computer desktop. For example, I found the app for Visual Voice Mail on Main Menu 1 but the app for voice dialing was on Main Menu 3. And the video-editing app can't be accessed from the camera; you have to hunt for it on one of four possible menu pages.

—Mike Gikas