14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, AT&T will soon be offering the Samsung Omnia Pocket PC, a device that could be considered, by some, far better than Apple's iPhone 3G. I'm sure you already know that AT&T will also carry the new iPhone in the US, starting July 11, and now it seems that the largest North American operator has yet another killer-handset, Samsung Omnia.
Omnia's arrival at AT&T is not official for the moment but, according to Boy Genius Report, the new Samsung is ready to hit the US starting the third quarter of this year, coming with lots of AT&T goodies like AT&T Navigator, AT&T Mobile TV, AT&T Video and AT&T Music.
Besides the AT&T-only stuff, Samsung Omnia will also bring an impressive range of features: a 3.2 TFT touchscreen display with 240 x 400 pixels, 65K colors and handwriting recognition, Windows Mobile 6.1 with a TouchWiz user interface, accelerometer, a 5 Megapixel camera with auto focus, flash, image stabilizer and video recording, quad-band GSM and tri-band HSDPA connectivity (for data transfer speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps), Wi-Fi, built-in GPS, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, Music and Video players with lots of formats supported (DivX, among them), TV out, document viewer, full HTML browser, email, Instant Messaging, 128MB of RAM, 256MB of ROM and a Marvell PXA312 CPU at 624 MHz.
Weighing 127 grams and measuring 112 x 56.9 x 12.5 millimeters, Samsung Omnia comes in two versions, just like the iPhone 3G: an 8GB one and a 16GB one. The difference between Omnia and the iPhone is that the Samsung handset also supports microSD cards for up to another 16GB - hence, theoretically, an Omnia can provide as much as 32GB of storage space.
Since it's rumored for the third quarter of 2008, Samsung Omnia might be released shortly after the iPhone, in July. Or maybe AT&T will first wait for users to rush and buy Apple's new handset and only launch the Omnia in August or September, thinking that the Samsung handset could steal from iPhone 3G's potential buyers.
Omnia is the second full-touch Samsung handset to be released in this period in the US, after Sprint's Instinct, which is already on sale, as of June 20. Now, imagine if Omnia had been also announced by Sprint and not by AT&T - the double T carrier would have really had reasons to be worried about the iPhone 3G sales. But since Omnia will be an AT&T business, the only one to worry is Steve Jobs, as its new iPhone might not sell as well as he wishes to.
