Samsung has had a busy year, and one of their featured events was an introduction of a mobile phone into the mid-range smartphone market with the redesigned, upgraded Samsung Omnia W I8350, which takes some of the good of the year-old Omnia 7 and includes a few of its own special bells and whistles to make a unique mark.

The model isn’t without its own drawbacks, though, so let’s take a look at what it offers and sort through the good and the bad.

Overview

The Omnia W offers a really decent range of connectivity options, making user communications and Internet activity pretty convenient. It doesn’t grant WiFi Hotspot capability, which is sometimes-yes and sometimes-no in the mid-range market.

The smartphone comes preloaded with WP 7.5 Mango, bringing the mobile phone to a top-tier status of the Windows Phone 7 OS field.

One big drawback is that it does not offer external memory expansion; eight gigs is all you get. While the external option is another yes-no-sometimes availability in mid-range mobile phones, the minimal internal storage capacity makes the internal-only aspect a major drawback.

Now for the nitty gritty.

Specifications

Dimensions: 115.6 x 58.8 x 10.9 mm / just over 115 g.
Display: 3.7 inches / Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen / 480 x 800 pixels at 252 ppi.
Operating System: Windows Phone 7.5 Mango
Speed: 1.4 GHz Snapdragon
Memory: 8 GB, internal memory only.
Battery: Talk: up to 7 hours / Standby: up to 370 hours.
Camera: rear: 5 MP / 2592 x 1944 pixels / autofocus / LED flash / Video: 720p at 30 fps. / Front: VGA
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. / 2G: GSM 850, 900, 1800, 1900 / 3G: HSDPA 900 / 2100, [For Samsung Omnia W I8350T: HSDPA 850 and 190] / HSDPA / HSUPA / GPRS / EDGE

Additional comments: Excellent speed for any device, much less one priced in the middle of the pack. Stereo FM with RDS. MP4 / WMV / H.264 / H.263 video player; MP3 / WAV / WMA / eAAC+ sound player. No DivX/XviD video support: Zune software transcoding. Zune-only file management.

This model is almost identical to the Samsung Focus Flash in the US market via AT&T.

Overall opinion: For a mid-range smartphone, the Omnia W I8350 is a very decent mobile phone; just don’t expect it to be an upgrade if your current phone is high-tech.