Tips & Tricks: HTC Touch Diamond vs. Samsung i900 Omnia: Head-to-Head

It's PocketPC playoffs and HTC are giving Samsung a match at the GSM Arena. With two of the stars of the season arriving in our office all at once, we thought it's a heck of an opportunity for some Diamond-Omnia-Diamond-Omnia-Diamond-Omnia game-set-match with a pinch of iPhone flavor. We got two aces up to the challenge, so sit back and stretch out. Ah well, get that six-pack too and join us for the kick-off.

HTC Touch Diamond official photos

Diamond over Omnia:

VGA display (2.8-inch, 480 x 640 pixels)
TouchFLO 3D Home screen (better than Omnia's Touchwiz UI)
Nicer design
More compact body
Lighter weight
Active magnetic stylus (Omnia has no stylus slot)
Touch-sensitive scroll wheel (better than Omnia's optical joystick)
Better sunlight legibility (by a small margin)
Standard miniUSB slot (as opposed to Samsung's proprietary custom plus)
Dedicated graphics chip with 64MB memory
Comes with the amusing Teeter game (uses the accelerometer)
Has pre-installed YouTube client and MP3 Trimmer application for ringtones
Better video playback performance

Samsung i900 Omnia official photos

Omnia over Diamond:

Bigger, though lower-res display (3.2", 240 x 400 pixels)
Has a better, more solid build and finish
Almost double battery life
Better CPU performance (by a nice margin according to software benchmarks)
Quad-band GSM support (Diamond has two versions to cover all the four bands)
microSD card slot (Diamond has none)
8 or 16 GB of storage memory (Diamond has 4GB)
Much better 5 megapixel camera (better processing, higher resolution, face and smile detection, geotagging)
TV-out (Diamond lacks that)
Landscape QWERTY keyboard (Diamond has one but only in browser)
Auto screen rotation is available in all applications and can be switched off
Comes with DivX video support (Diamond has none, but DivX players can be installed)
Has pre-installed a custom Alarms app, a Video editor and a unit converter

Samsung i900 Omnia and HTC Touch Diamond might differ here and there in specs but no doubt we're talking fine top-of-the-shelf species. Never before have Windows Mobile powered devices been so rich in features without being coyote-ugly (another way of saying TyTN-bulky).

It's been a year now since Apple iPhone is out and its ground-breaking user interface took the industry by a storm. Windows Mobile however still fails to pick up the gauntlet thrown by the iPhone so device manufacturers are creating their own customized touch interfaces that don't necessarily require a stylus to make the Microsoft OS a bit more competitive and much more intuitive.

It took almost a year to see all manufacturers introduce their solutions. With the HTC Touch Diamond we are looking at the third generation TouchFLO UI - a really mature and impressive piece of software. The Omnia and its TouchWiz UI is Samsung's first attempt in this field, but they're building on their expertise in full touchscreen feature phones and they have achieved some impressive results too.

So you already probably guess that we will be spicing up today's Windows Mobile competition with a few Apple iPhone quotes. With the iPhone 3G just behind the corner, we think that several key generic comparisons might be of use to most of you. But for starters, check out some photos of the contenders lining up for the Windows Mobile cup. Slick, aye?

HTC Touch Diamond

Samsung i900 Omnia

Before we begin today's match, we should warn you about the units we are testing. The Samsung i900 Omnia is still a beta version, while the HTC Touch Diamond is a retail unit. However, dozens of bugs are being reported for the Diamond recently, so it isn't actually as stable as it should be. In fact, HTC are struggling to polish the Diamond performance, which - even though utterly impressive - is rather unfinished at its launch. Looks like HTC made haste to beat the iPhone 3G announcement.