Samsung Mobile announced yesterday the official release of its i900 Omnia Pocket PC in Germany, scheduled for the 6th of August. The new handset will be offered by all the German mobile operators: T-Mobile, Vodafone, the KPN-owned E-Plus and Telefónica's O2.

The availability of Omnia in the first week of August is surely great news for German mobile users, but there's also a not-at-all great aspect, which relates to the price of the handset. More exactly, Samsung said in the press release that announced the launch, that the 8GB version of the Pocket PC will have a retail price of 649 Euros. This means about $1,030 and will make the new handset one of the most expensive Pocket PCs on the market. Sure, Samsung has packed lots of high-end, attractive features into the Omnia, but the high price will surely turn away lots of users who might want to buy it.

Omnia's price when bought with a contract agreement and a data plan has not been announced yet, but German users hope it's a decent one.

Prices aside, the new i900 Omnia is one of the most advanced Pocket PCs to come this year. Its highlights include a 3.2 TFT touchscreen display with 240 x 400 pixels and handwriting recognition, a TouchWiz UI, quad-band GSM connectivity with GPRS and EDGE, HSDPA for fast data transfer speeds, GPS, Wi-Fi, accelerometer, a 5 Megapixel camera with image stabilizer, auto focus and flash, Windows Mobile 6.1, a 624 MHz Marvell PXA312 processor and 8GB (or 16GB) of built-in memory which can be further expanded via microSD or microSDHC cards.

After Germany, Samsung Omnia will surely hit most of the other European mobile markets too. Also, the Pocket PC is rumored to be offered in the US, via AT&T, but for the moment there are no exact details about this.