Todays & Tomorrows Technology

According to an unnamed phoneArena tipster, Verizon have confirmed that they will be offering the CDMA version of Samsung’s Omnia II this July. The source is seemingly Verizon’s customer services, who revealed that the touchscreen AMOLED Windows Mobile phone will be dropping just next month.
Samsung made the Omnia II official earlier this month, surprising with the fact that the device publicly announced was not the GSM HSPA handset expected but a CDMA device. Verizon’s latest smartphone will offer EVDO Rev.A; there’s no talk of it being a “worldphone” with both CDMA and GSM support for roaming.

Also unknown is a specific release date in July, and what sort of pricing the Omnia II might command. The phone has a 3.7-inch WVGA display, 5-megapixel camera, WiFi and A-GPS.

Further details regarding the Samsung GT-I8000 have emerged, and it seems that you’re looking at the Samsung Omnia II (or Omnia2; the nomenclature isn’t decided yet). Packing a 3.7-inch WVGA 800 x 480 touchscreen - that’s tipped to use an AMOLED panel - the Omnia II has an 8.1-megapixel camera with dual LED flash and VGA video recording at 30fps.

Connectivity is tipped to include 3G UMTS, WiFi, Bluetooth and miniUSB, while there’s also GPS and a microSD card slot. The UI is prompting discussion: some are saying that it’s unchanged over previous iterations of Samsung’s Windows Mobile TouchWiz overlay, while a video demo said to be of the Omnia II shows a new, cubic arrangement.

Other hardware specs include an unspecified Qualcomm processor and 150MB of internal memory. There’s also some confusion over the display specifications, as at least one source tips the AMOLED panel to support up to 16.7m colors while at present Windows Mobile will only support 65,000 colors.

Nonetheless, this looks to be an interesting follow-up to the original Windows Mobile Omnia i900. There’s talk of it being announced at a Samsung event on June 15th.