Loko’s Domain You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Wow. Really. Wow. This is truly my first smart phone, but I know this isn't because of that little detail. This phone has blown me away. This is running Windows Mobile 6.1. Look at these incredible features.

The phone comes with 8GB internal storage. This can be further increased by microSD cards. I will snatch a 8GB card soon for 16GB total soon. Wi-Fi ready. Oh, and a removable battery! No sending this little guy into the shop.

A 5 MP camera with face detection, 15 different shooting modes, image stabilization, smile detection, image resolutions up to 2560x1920, 4x digital zoom, panoramic photography up to 8 frames, flash, video resolutions up to 640x480, and a lot of other little options.

The phone is DivX certified. As for video, there is a Video Editor. This allows for trimming video, audio dubbing, and subtitles. With multi-codec support, it can also play just about any format available with a slew of media players including FM radio, multiple media programs such as Windows Media Player, Touch Player, MPlayer, Real Player, etc. It also has a TV-Out option to play videos and images recorded on an LCD television set and can double as a digital frame.

The Omnia also sports an integrated optical mouse that is really handy while browsing non-mobile websites. There are multiple options for on-screen QWERTY keyboards and awesome hand writing recognition software to be used with any application. Voice commands, with password protection, are also pretty well done.

The phone has a flash light, full PDF support, Office Mobile with Word and Excel, Skype, Opera Browser Mobile with tabbed browsing and directory favorites, chat program for almost all protocols (AIM, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, etc) all in one program/buddy list. You can also password protect this phone; one would need to type it in after the phone goes idle or turns on from a cold/warm boot.

Other browsers include Iris, SkyFire, Internet Explorer (ugh), Bolt, and soon to be Firefox Mobile and Google Chrome. I say Chrome because just about every Google service has a mobile side to it, why not their new browser in due time?

The phone has software for Podcasts, RSS feeds, and tons of games. Soon to be more, lots more.

It has a motion sensor that automatically rotates the screen in several different ways either to landscape or portrait, depending on how you're holding it. Also, there is an optional feature that allows all sounds to mute when place screen face down.

The Youtube Player freeware (not from YouTube themselves) allows you to search YouTube for videos, save the video on your phone, and will also extract the audio stream from the video into MP3 to save on your phone as well.

Did I mention the native encryption for storage cards and built-in GPS receiver? It also has features to do factory restoration on the phone and to format external flash cards from the phone itself.

I also forgot to mention that you can throw your own ringers on here. Just fire up your favorite program, either MP3myMP3 or Audacity, record or cut a little bit of a song, upload it to your phone with the very easy USB connection into the Ringers folder. That's it. No further input is necessary, until you want to assign those ringers as your default or to any of your contacts.

Samsung TouchWiz is also rather pretty to look at while adding or removing widgets from the desktop area. Nothing incredibly unique or special, but everything can be replaced with another like SPB Mobile Shell.

Oh, drat. I almost forgot to mention the Remote Desktop support for Windows based computers. It does a wonderful job remoting into the chosen desktop on the network and shows a full screen (on the phone) version of the Windows desktop PC. This feature really impressed me.

If a program is hanging, that's no problem. We are all familiar with the Windows Task Manager. If you're not, you probably just pull the plug on the computer when Microsoft Word freezes for more than two minutes. If you don't use Windows, but are familiar with the Task Manager, it's probably why you're off using OS X or any of the hundreds of Linux distros.

I don't know what else to add. It's a very solid phone. I can't imagine what I'm missing, but I'm sure there is plenty. Well, there is the bit about the stylus not actually having an embedded place to call home in the phone, but with a responsive touch screen and optical mouse, the stylus isn't that necessary. Undoubtedly a last minute after thought.

If you have Verizon, give it a try while you wait for your name to be called. And then while you wait for someone to help you. And then while you wait for the associate to figure out what's going on with your account. Then while you wait for the associate to fix his mistake that you told him would happen before he went and made the changes to the account.

To the Verizon guy Chuck: I told you that would happen. You should have listened. You made me angry, told me my phone's promo ended a week ago when another associate told me the promo would last well into April, and then did nothing to try to calm me down besides act like a huge d-bag. I was an inch away from canceling my out of contract subscription. How would that have looked on your commission and to the manager hovering over your shoulder?

It's a great phone, though. Aside from this phone, the Pre is the only other one I think I would get this year... so far. While I was stroking my Omnia earlier, Talal had to go and mention the Palm Pre. Oh, what a sexy beast that will be if it ever hits retail...