New! Samsung Omnia i900 Screen Protector

Slipping out of the new product dock mere moments ahead of the expected 3G iPhone launch is Samsung i900 Omnia Smartphone.

Sharing a similar design as the iPhone 3G (and the LG KE830, Prada and Clie TH55 before it), the Omnia sports a beefy-sized 3.2″ 240 x 400 pixels big screen flanked by call start/end buttons either side and a central optical mouse whotsit.

The full opera browser should look quite nice on the Omnia's 400x200 pixel widescreen, and the 5MP autofocus camera supports features like image stabilization and Samsung's wide dynamic range. We're still missing specs on weight and battery life, but most of the details have been filled in at this point. In any case, take a look at the video below. One of Samsung USA's reps at the CommunicAsia show shot that and sent it to us this morning.

The display comes in the shape of a fancypants haptic touch screen which means you get some sort of vibration feedback when your fingers go pitter-patter on the flat glass.

The phone comes in two flavours offering 8GB or 16GB of internal storage, with an SD slot letting punters boost the storage up to a decidedly healthy 16GB.

It’s not the thinnest handset in the world at 12.5mm - it’s scoffed a few more pies than the HTC Touch Diamond - but the specs seem to come up to scratch, with quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and HSDPA connectivity serving speeds up to 7.2Mbps and built in GPS letting you know where you are on this crazy ol’planet.

Samsung Unveils Omnia i900 Touchscreen Handset. The onboard camera is a healthy 5MP number packing geo–tagging as well as the unexpected bonus of image stabilisation keeping the wobblies at bay.

There’s also a built-in accelerometer, Wi-Fi, USB port, FM radio with RDS and stereo Bluetooth (A2DP), with the Omnia running on a fiddled-about version of Windows Mobile 6.1, with Samsung slapping on their TouchWiz user interface.

The i900 comes with HSDPA, 16GB internal storage, a 5-megapixel camera and runs Windows Mobile 6.1. Aside from that, we also know it has a 624MHz Marvell processor, 128MB of RAM and haptic feedback.

For the uninitiated, haptic feedback in a mobile phone is designed to make the feeling of pressing an on-screen virtual button more realistic. If you use your finger on the i900, it buzzes slightly to let you know it has registered that touch. This was very useful when we tried out the custom Samsung text input applications - making it almost like typing on a real keypad.

Like the SGH-i780, the i900 also has an optical sensor for a directional pad. This can be used in two modes — as a regular four-way directional pad or as an on-screen mouse pointer.

Though we were not able to get pictures of the custom interface, Samsung seems pretty confident that fingers will suffice when using the i900. We know this because the i900 doesn't have a stylus slot. It still has a stylus, but this is attached to the carrying case that will be bundled with the device.

An orientation sensor is built into the i900. When rotated, it does this fancy transition whereby the display shrinks and expands back to fill the screen in a different orientation. The 240x400 display does seem a little weird, but is not unheard of - we've seen it in the Asus M930's internal display. It makes sense, too, if you are to use it as a media player because the aspect ratio is much closer to the 16:9 aspect ratio commonly seen in movie files. To that end, the i900 also comes with a media application that supports DivX and Xvid out of the box.

Listed below are the key specifications of the i900. This device will be available soon, we believe. Surely Samsung will not delay it and let the HTC Touch Diamond hog the limelight. Our source suggested that it will be priced similar to the Diamond.