Well, it's the final whistle in our head-to-head. Tempted as we are to not leave it a tie and send it to a penalty shootout, we just have to pay due respect to both contenders. After all it's not the score that makes the game exciting. Sometimes a draw can be as interesting to watch, and this one here sure ain't goalless.

Anyway, it's nearly impossible to give a conclusive judgment as to which of these two fine PocketPCs deserves your money better. The Samsung i900 Omnia and the HTC Touch Diamond are both excellent choices with their own set of advantages and shortcomings. The good thing is they hardly overlap, so getting your priorities right is all you need to make the right choice.

You can certainly get the short version of their virtues at the beginning of this review, we won't be repeating all of those here.

The main point to make here is that there isn't a perfect device that's got it all for all consumer groups even in this high-end segment. Instead, when you go after one of these extra sweet devices you should carefully weigh your priorities and pick the one that covers most of them.

iPhone 3G is still to see a reality check, but it's almost sure that these two can give the latest Apple device a good fight. Maybe they still can't challenge the iPhone interface, but they are finally getting closer.

With HTC Touch Diamond and Samsung i900 Omnia, Windows Mobile handsets no longer seem chubby and nerdy. The next generation of PocketPCs match style with the best performance in their class.

Microsoft is committed to support a vibrant partner ecosystem and always delivers opportunities to create solutions that meet a wide range of Windows Mobile customers needs.

The Toshiba - Spb synergy is one good example of the rich benefits the Microsoft ecosystem secures to the market, where partners are able to complement each others strengths and deliver new innovative and rich experiences on Windows Mobile platform.

Astraware Fireworks is a simple FREE application, showing sequences of fireworks flying and exploding into the air. As 4th July is traditionally a time for fireworks and celebrations in the USA, the features have been created to help our American friends highlight one of their major holidays - Independence Day! Astraware Fireworks features a selection of patriotic backgrounds including the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and the Stars and Stripes, and offers a choice of stirring tunes including the Star Spangled Banner and Stars and Stripes Forever!

Astraware Fireworks is available for devices running Palm OS® 5 and later and Windows Mobile® 2003 and later, and this year a new BlackBerry® version is available which includes the backgrounds and firework effects but doesn't include music, so sorry BlackBerry-owners - this time round you'll have to hum your own marches!

What better way to celebrate 4th July than with some Fireworks? Download your copy today - it's available for a limited time only! Oh, and did we mention, it's FREE?!

What is Dashwire?

Dashwire automatically mirrors the content on your phone to the web, helping you access, manage, and share your mobile experiences

How does it work?

Once you sign-up for your FREE account, you’ll be prompted to install a small application on your phone that will keep your phone constantly connected and in-sync with your private, web-based Dashwire account.

What you do on the phone will instantly update on the web, what you do on the web will update your on phone.

No cables or effort required. Easy.

What does Dashwire bring to the web?

• Contacts
• Text Messages (SMS)
• Photos
• Videos
• Call logs
• Voicemail
• Phone settings - Ringtones, Web Bookmarks, Speed Dials

You control which items sync and when it happens. Dashwire connects across wireless data, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB.

Up to this point, Dashwire has primarily focused on helping users effortlessly bring their mobile phone and content it captures up to the web. But that is only part of the experience we want to provide for users, and today we’re excited to be releasing a new version of our mobile software to help people more seamlessly integrate their mobile and web worlds. Below is a look at some of the new experiences:

Mobile access to photos & videos stored online in your Dashwire account. What’s cool about this is we allow you to view photos even if the actual media files aren’t on your phone. We sync and optimize cache to bring in a set of your photos stored in the cloud on the Dashwire service and make it super fast to browse through, edit and share. This feature allows us to introduce new things like the ability to upload photos from your computer and have them instantly show up on your phone (we’re almost ready to launch photo uploads from your computer - stay tuned).

Media editing, blogging and sharing with friends –on the go. You can now add a title/description and share your photos with your friends, or post to your Dashwire shared page from your phone. Sharing media is accessible from the menu option, and allows you to pick from your contact list. Your friends will receive an email with link to view the photo so you don’t have to worry about sending a full size image over the carrier network every time you want to share a photo.

Direct mobile status updates to Facebook & Twitter. Status updates is something we’ve enabled from Dashwire.com, but it’s most useful to people when they are out and about. From the new mobile client, it’s easy to add your status and have it automatically update to Facebook, Twitter or both.

Privacy controls & media publishing - we added a privacy mode setting based on user feedback which is pretty cool. Now everyone who wants their Dashwire shared page to be open for friends and the public to view, can keep it published without worrying about new photos they capture automatically going live. From within each photo you can set it to private or public.

We have some exciting news to share today. It's almost time to release Opera Mobile 9.5 for Windows Mobile to the world. We thank you for your patience and support as we make what we (and many others) believe is the best browser for mobile phones. A release testing phase is underway now and the target date for the first beta is July 15th. You will be able to download it from opera.com just like you would any other versions of Opera.

Opera Mobile 9.5 will be based on the same browser engine as Opera 9.5 for desktop, and this is the reason why it has taken some time to get it ready. A new version of the browser engine will ensure that you can surf the Web with a browser supporting the latest and greatest in Web standards.

Some versions of Opera Mobile 9.5 are already shipping on great phones like the HTC Touch Diamond, and some of you have asked why we wouldn't be able to release it publically yet. As you probably know, releasing a version that works on a large variety of phones is more complex than making it work on one specific phone. You should also expect a few differences between the versions that are pre-installed on phones and the public version of Opera Mobile 9.5.

We'll have more details about the product in the near future. Thanks again, and we hope you're ready for some beta testing with us.