The Samsung Omnia W comes packing Windows Phone Mango right out of the box, and is the follow-up to last year’s Omnia 7.
Bucking the industry-wide trend for sticking bigger and bigger screens on new smart phones, the Omnia W has a modest 3.7-inch Super AMOLED display. That’s even smaller than the Omnia 7, which had a 4-inch panel. A bold move when HTC is poised to unleash the absolutely massive HTC Titan.
It’s not all backwards though, as Samsung’s new Windows Phone blower will rock a 1.4GHz processor, which should make it substantially snappier than its predecessor.
Elsewhere the specs are rather modest — a 5-megapixel camera sits on the back, and there’s 8GB of storage on board.
The Omnia W will weigh a mere 115g, which is much lighter than the iPhone 4, which tips the scales at 137g. It’s not as slim as Apple’s offering mind — the iPhone 4 is 9.3mm thick, while the Omnia W rolls 10.9mm deep.
Mango (or Windows Phone 7.5, to give it its boring name) brings multi-tasking to Microsoft’s OS, dragging it into line with Android and Apple’s iOS platform, both of which have been able to run apps simultaneously for ages. It’ll hit older Windows Phones as an automatic update very soon, Microsoft has promised.
Despite having been out for a year, the silky tile-based Windows Phone hasn’t been a huge success. We’d point to a lack of apps as the reason, but because we’re addicted to the swoopy way the tiles fly on and off the screen, we hope Mango can squirt some juice into an otherwise dry OS.
The Omnia W will be coming to the UK, and we’d expect to see it launch here within the next few months, so stay tuned.
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