Samsung Omnia HD Launched

The Samsung Omnia HD and HTC Touch Diamond 2 were unveiled at Mobile World Congress. What do they have to offer compared to the predecessors?

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, HTC took the wraps off their newest phones based on the HTC Touch design. The HTC Touch Diamond 2 (and the accompanying HTC Touch Pro 2) is a feature bump to the original, popular HTC Touch Diamond phone.

Like the original, the new HTC Touch Diamond 2 (specs) is a Windows Mobile phone with an improved graphical interface running on top. In this case, HTC has improved the already-impressive TouchFLO 3D interface, and the new HTC Touch phones will be upgradeable to Windows Mobile 6.5 later this year. This upgrade will be free to existing owners, and will for instance add Internet Explorer Mobile 6, Windows Marketplace and the new My Phone cloud service for mobile backup.

At the same time, Samsung announced their newest all-touch smartphone, the Samsung Omnia HD (specs). While the original Omnia was a Windows Mobile device, the new Samsung Omnia HD is a Symbian device running a touch-friendly interface. In fact, the Omnia HD will use the same Samsung TouchWiz interface that we saw on the original Samsung Omnia. The interface relies heavily on desktop-like widgets, and screenshots of the new Samsung Omnia HD show that the phone will retain this design paradigm, albeit on top of Symbian S60.