Throwing the battered carcass of the Samsung Omnia from the ring, the iPhone continues its winning streak. Enter the next challenger, complete with cheesy theme music and tight spandex shorts… Lets hear it for the Samsung Omnia II. Despite weighing a whole 18grams less than the iPhone this Korean competitor packs quite a punch.

There isn’t a lot of difference between the two contenders; at 118mm high the Samsung Omnia II just has the edge over its rival. Rest assured, even though the Samsung’s slightly bigger it doesn’t mean it’s any harder to handle. The new Omnia can dodge, duck and dive to escape even the quickest of advances thanks to the complete overhaul of the Windows Mobile system. Unlike its predecessor, the sluggish, boring Windows Mobile has been revamped, offering Windows Mobile 6.5, a fast and responsive system. The accelerometer (the thing that automatically rotates your image) boosts the Samsung’s chances of escaping the iPhone attack, providing a fairly quick and accurate rotation when needed. And that’s not even the best bit, the accelerometer has a cool mute feature, so if you don’t want to be heard or disturbed simply put the phone face down on any surface and it will turn the ringer off, clever huh?

The Samsung Omnia II can spot its targets and pinpoint their exact location, thanks to the monstrous 3.7” touchscreen. It has some of the clearest views around with a 480 x 800 pixel AMOLED display. If that means nothing to you, let me put it into perspective, a few years ago you’d be able to find that kind of resolution on a computer monitor. Luckily for the Omnia II, the display is one area where it far surpasses its rivals; it can launch an attack before its enemies even see it coming. Most touchscreens tend to look very similar, with a large touch display taking up most of the real estate, and perhaps a few buttons underneath. Not so the Omnia II, although it follows the general trend, it is instantly recognisable as a Samsung. It has all the sleek styling that the Koreans love to flaunt both inside and out, making it a mean contender for the top spot in the Smartphone rankings.

One of the first things you will notice from the outset is the new-look cube button. Underneath the display, you’ve got the usual call and end keys at either side; in the middle is the ‘cube’. It now sports a transparent 3D effect, and no longer glows; even so it still looks pretty impressive. The function of the cube has also changed, pressing it now brings up the normal menu, unless you hold it down for a short while, in which case the task switcher pops up, A handy tool when you need to do ten things at once. So just how does the Samsung Omnia II expect to defeat its iPhone rival? Well it’s simple really fight fire with fire, or menus with menus, lost? Allow me to explain. During the WinMo revamp some work was done on the main menu, and Samsung has opted for the iPhone look, spreading the different icons over numerous pages, (you can have up to ten but why anyone would need that many is beyond me) making it easy to re-arrange things just as you would on the Apple.

Of course, the current champ knows all the workings of the Samsungs main menu, having a similar one itself, so how does the budding Omnia athlete expect to get the better of him? With a few sneaky extra menus and shortcuts, that’s how. At the top of the screen the Samsung Omnia II, naturally has the Microsoft ‘start’ button leading to the main menu and a couple of icons to do with battery life, alarms, connectivity and volume. A quick tap across any of these will bring up yet another menu giving in-depth details about any of the features I’ve just mentioned. As with the Omnia, the Omnia II still has the ‘cube’ menu, which can be brought up either through the main menu, or by holding the back button on the side of the handset. And it’s pretty much the same as before, a spinning cube with different features on each side, at the minute it is programmed for multimedia use, but that can be easily changed.

Both the cube menu and general touchscreen use is quick and responsive; well it would have to be to survive the full 12 rounds against the iPhone. The Touchwiz interface provides three homescreens to personalise, with an array of widgets kept handily on the left of the screen in the designated ‘Widget tray’. It’s so easy to use even your great aunt Doris could handle it. Just simply drag and drop the different widgets onto the homepage and hey presto, what’s more with the resistive touchscreen it gives you the added bonus of using anything to prod the display, be it your finger, pen, stylus or well, you can try pretty much anything. One of the only flaws I could find with the Samsung Omnia II was the sun. Any natural light bouncing around and it was game over. Considering all the features it has crammed in, designed for use on the go, Samsung should have prepared for this. But hey, as long as Apple’s fighter doesn’t find out, the Omnia II could well go the whole hog.

From a multimedia perspective, it’s just as impressive. The 5-megapixel camera delivers high quality images, all stored in an imaginative ‘flicker’ gallery; the best way to describe it is to imagine you’re thumbing through a pack of cards, and each one has a different photo on it. If you turn the phone to landscape mode, it gets even better. I think I can safely say this is definitely the coolest gallery of late. Samsung hasn’t wasted any energy on the touch player either, which can handle pretty much anything you throw at it. The player sorts through both audio and video and is very simple to use with all your standard media buttons. The Samsung Omnia II has one final blow to deliver, pre-installed Office Mobile, not only can you read Word, Excel and PDF documents, but also edit them to your hearts content, take that Apple.

So, how do we think it has faired in the ring? Despite surviving ‘til the end, it’s a very close match, too close for me to call; I think I’ll have to leave that to the judges.