Samsung Omnia i900

Whatever it says it is that's what it's not...

We've all seen "that" advert and the Samsung Omnia seems to be advertised everywhere apart from the back of cereal boxes, Samsung have gone all out with their all singing, all dancing, "does everything apart from wipe your rear" mobile phone, but should we believe the hype?

At first glance the Omnia, looks like the Svetlana and the Tocco as PingPing, measuring in at 112mm long compared to the Tocco at 98mm. It fairly light, so won't cause any unsightly bulges while being carted around in your trouser pocket, but the build quality is not that fantastic, the plastic back makes it feel a bit cheap.

Now, the touchscreen. Samsung has in the last year wheeled out the Armani, the F490 and the Tocco, all touschreen, none have improved. It's much the same story with the Omnia. It's sticky and unresponsive, you touch one thing it does another. Whilst scrawling through our contacts we managed to almost call our mum to thank her for the great night, and inadvertently called the doctors to order a heart-attack inducing meat feast pizza. Trying to cancel said mistake is even harder; the cancel button is the size of a pin, miss it and you go on loudspeaker for all and sundry to hear your blunder.

Snap happy

Bypassing the touchscreen, the features on the phone are pretty good. Once we managed to cancel changing the date for the umpteenth time, we got to the snapper. 5MP, with zoom and a Xenon flash, pictures are detailed, even at full zoom. It's packed with more settings than you can shake a stick at. For those with a nervous disposition there's the anti-shake function, and the sport mode worked well as we tried to capture Gazza after hearing the news his local had opened early.

Movie mogul

Other multimedia functions included on the phone are a movie and music player. With the massive 3.2-inch screen and the inbuilt accelerometer, switch to wide screen and watch movies. Sounds quality on both the film and music is impressive and pictures on the screen are detailed and clear, but battery life did take a beating during our movie marathon. On average it will last about four hours.

Internet explorer

Boasting Windows 6.1, the Omnia has push email, and the complete Windows package. Set up is fairly simple, slot in the disk to your PC for a simple set up and we were hooked onto our emails within minutes. Internet on the other hand is a slow burner. We couldn't get any signal on our 3G in most areas and when we did it was sluggish and web pages took an age to load. Get your self on Wi-Fi a and you'll be sorted, with the large screen web pages are easy to read an load up quick fast. Downlading and internet exploring again drains the battery, so a wee fix of "watchcheesemature.com" will see your battery run flat.

We were impressed by the Omnia, in terms of multimedia it's a power house, the battery life could do with a bit of juicing, but our main bug bear was the touch screen. For all the good things this phone can do, we just couldn't get to them. Imagine owning a Bugatti Veyron, but having the keys for a Fiat Panda. It's just cack.

From T3