The Samsung Omnia SCH-i910 is Verizon's best camera phone, masquerading as a somewhat quirky, but mostly solid touch-screen Windows Mobile smartphone. It's got a lot of strengths, including 8GB of integrated storage and Wi-Fi, but the 5-megapixel camera is the showstopper here.

Looking a lot like the iPhone 3G or the LG Dare, the Omnia is a 4.4-by-2.2-by-0.5-inch (HWD) rounded rectangle with a 3.2-inch, 240-by-400-pixel touch screen. Below the display are Pick Up and End Call buttons and a small touchpad that Samsung calls an optical mouse. Volume, camera, and menu buttons are on the side. What you won't find is a standard headphone jack; fortunately, Samsung ships an adapter with the Omnia that lets you use 2.5mm headphones, though the adapter dangles a bit awkwardly. The 5-megapixel camera is on the back of the phone.

The Omnia is a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone, but you wouldn't know that when you first pick it up. The typical WM home screen has been replaced by what Samsung calls "TouchWiz," which isbasically a bunch of widgets. You can plunk icons for the note pad, the media player, the image viewer or various other applications right onto the home screen. This seems like a lot of fun at first, but it's way too easy to clutter up the screen with little boxes—the Omnia could use more pixels.

I've got no such qualms, however, about the way the Omnia has replaced Windows Mobile's program launcher, Web browser, software keyboards, and media player with easier-to-use, more powerful versions. The Web browser is Opera 9.5, which displays pages with much more fidelity than Internet Explorer Mobile. And you can hit the Internet on Verizon's excellent CDMA EV-DO Rev A network or with Wi-Fi. Samsung's Touch Player media player is much more finger-friendly than Microsoft's media player, and the program launcher offers big icons that are easy to stab.

For entering data into the Omnia, you can choose between small and large QWERTY keyboards or handwriting recognition. The keyboards are better than the standard Windows Mobile QWERTY, but they're still somewhat finicky. Samsung includes a stylus with the Omnia but doesn't give you anywhere to put it; you'll need it mostly if you're dipping into third-party Windows Mobile applications, with their tiny buttons.

Unfortunately, swiping or tapping the touch screen was frustratingly unreliable at times, and the accelerometer spun so often it had me a bit dizzy—sometimes I found myself accidentally using the device upside down. The touch screen and accelerometer issues make me hesitant to recommend the Omnia as a mobile office; from what I can see, the upcoming HTC Touch Pro seems likely to provide a better alternative.

The really big deal here is the autofocus 5MP camera, and it's a breakthrough for Verizon. Sure, the LED flash isn't terribly strong, and pictures are less sharp and saturated than on the Motorola MotoZINE ZN5 for T-Mobile, the best camera phone available from a U.S. carrier. But before the Omnia, the best that Verizon subscribers could get was the 3.2MP LG Dare, with its soft photos. The Omnia's somewhat overexposed, slightly noisy daylight pictures are still a little better than those of the 5MP Samsung Behold. Shutter lag, at 0.3 seconds with prefocusing and 1.2 seconds without, is average for a good camera phone. The Omnia also takes smooth, sharp 320-by-240 video at 30 frames per second and somewhat jaggy 640-by-480 video at 15 frames per second.

Also a very solid voice phone, the Omnia had clear reception, and calls sounded unusually good on Verizon's network. The speakerphone and earpiece are loud and clear; they delivered clear-sounding reception on the other end of calls, too. The phone supports both mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets; it auto-paired with our Plantronics Voyage 520 mono and Motorola S9 HD stereo headsets. The Omnia has speaker-independent voice dialing that you can activate from a Bluetooth headset, but accuracy wasn't stellar on my tests. Talk time, at nearly 6 hours, was impressive.

The Omnia features built-in GPS, but that feature appears to be locked to Verizon's VZ Navigator software, which wasn't yet available while I was testing the phone. And the free Google Maps couldn't detect my location.

Samsung amps up the Omnia's media capabilities with 8GB of built-in storage and support for 16GB microSD cards, which inconveniently slide into a slot under the battery. Our 16GB card worked fine. The device has an FM radio, a new media player and DivX video file support. Yes, it plays DivX files, though playback for several of our DivX and MP4 files was a bit jerky, and Xvid files crashed the player a couple of times. Music, whether MP3, AAC, or WMA, sounded fine through wired or Bluetooth headphones, as long as I wasn't trying to maneuver the Web at the same time; surfing made music skip occasionally.

Samsung throws in a ton of other software, too. You get an AOL, Windows, and Yahoo IM client, while Shozu lets you post your photos to Flickr. There's a business card scanner, an RSS reader, a podcast client, a file explorer, a task manager, and a Wi-Fi media-streaming server. The 624-MHz processor scored very well on the SPB Benchmark Windows Mobile performance tests, second only to the Samsung Epix.

When we reviewed the unlocked GSM version of the Omnia, we were underwhelmed; it simply isn't worth its $750 street price. But dropped into Verizon's lineup for $249 (with a two-year contract and rebate), and boosted by 3G, the Omnia is much more appealing. While I'd still recommend a device like a BlackBerry Curve with a physical keyboard for business users, the Samsung Omnia SCH-i910 is the best Verizon phone we've seen for photos, video recording, and Web browsing.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 52 minutes
SPB Benchmark: 466.34
CPU index: 1896.4
File system index: 189.74
Graphics index: 5874.67

Compare the Samsung Omnia with several other mobile phones side by side.