Every now and then, a phone comes along that completely changes the landscape of technology. Whether it's because of a unique design or groundbreaking software, sometimes a new phone can really blow our minds.

The Samsung ATIV Odyssey is not that phone. It's not the antithesis of that either, though, because it's not a terrible phone. Instead, what we have here is a mid-tier Windows Phone 8 offering from Samsung, exclusive to Verizon Wireless customers, that is middle-of-the-road in ways that extend beyond its specs or price point.

Build and Design
After checking out the Odyssey at this year's CES, we declared its design to be uninspired and unfortunately, our stance hasn't wavered after spending some more time with it. I cannot stress how unremarkable this phone's design is. There's nothing bad about the design, per se, it's just very plain.

Rather than going in one direction or the other -- think the sexy, minimalist designs of the Apple iPhone or the new BlackBerry Z10 versus the colorful, ostentatious designs of just about all other Windows Phones -- Samsung settled for a very middle-of-the-road approach. The Odyssey is relatively small, has round corners and slightly rounded edges, and is complimented by a faux-metallic trim and backing. No bright colors here, just silver and black.

It also feels a little on the cheap side, between how light it is (4.4 ounces) and the fact that if you do so much as tap the back, you can actually feel the tiny haptic feedback motor shake. It makes it feel like the phone is almost hollow.

The device feels comfortable enough in the hand thanks to how compact it is and the speaker grill lining the bottom of the phone's back is a nice touch, but otherwise the Odyssey has a design that doesn't take any risks. Heck, it doesn't even play it safe by emulating designs that have already been deemed successful. Instead, it eschews aesthetic appeal or uniqueness for what can be considered, at best, practicality. It's the station wagon of smartphones.

Display
The display of the Odyssey is, in a word, rough. The 800 x 480 resolution is unimpressive and it's painfully easy to see individual pixels on the screen, making everything look rough instead of clear and sharp. The contrast and colors don't look impressive either, at least not in comparison to that of Nokia's handsets (a feat due, in large part, to the company's ClearBlack display technology).

The only satisfactory element of the Odyssey's screen is its brightness. The Super AMOLED display looks good on the highest setting and fights glare quite well. On the whole, though, prepare to be disappointed by the Odyssey's display, as it's possibly the weakest aspect of the entire device.

Other Buttons & Ports
The Odyssey has a comfortable, traditional set up for its buttons and ports. The power/standby switch is on the right side with the dedicated camera button located further down the same edge. The volume rocker is located on the left side along with a covered microSD card slot, a design choice that we found particularly appealing. All of the other Windows Phone 8 devices that feature microSD card slots have them located behind the phone's back panel and/or battery, which is a hassle to get to, so the external slot is a welcome change.

Besides the 3.5mm headphone jack up top and a micro USB port for charging on the bottom edge, that's it for the ports. As for the cameras, the phone's front-facing, 1.2-megpixel shooter is located in the upper left-hand corner above the display, while the 5-megapixel camera is centered towards the top of the phone's back.

Performance

The dual-core, 1.5 GHz processor of the Odyssey provides respectable performance that's basically on par with the Lumia 820 and its variants. The Lumia 810, for example, had a WP Bench average of 240 marks and a high of 250 over the course of five tests, while the Odyssey was just a hair lower, with an average of 239.33 and a high of 244.37.

And with an OS as efficient as Windows Phone 8, it doesn't take much to keep things running speedily, which the Odyssey does easily. While in the process of reviewing Skulls of the Shogun, we often preferred to play it on the Odyssey over single-core, Windows Phone 7 devices because of how much better it ran on the former. Seriously, the framerate was vastly superior on the Odyssey compared to a last-gen HTC Trophy; the game ran smoother than butter.

Unfortunately, the Odyssey only comes with 8 GB of internal storage, which isn't great. But, as mentioned, the phone does have a microSD card slot, plus it's located on the outside for easy access.

Software
The suite of software here is relatively standard fare for a Windows Phone, including the close integration with Microsoft's other services, like Outlook, Office, Xbox Music, and Xbox Live. Also, as this is a Verizon Windows Phone, it benefits from NFL Mobile (useless right now) and the carrier-exclusive Data Sense service, which is used to track data consumption.

Samsung contributed a few of its own apps, but like we mentioned after spending some time with the Odyssey at CES, none of them will change your life. We said that the MiniDiary was probably the most intriguing, since it's the only piece of preloaded Samsung software that actually does something marginally unprecedented: users can make entries with text, geotagging, a corresponding picture, and an icon indicating what the weather was like that day.

In all likelihood, most normal people probably won't use the MiniDiary, but at least it's something a little more outside the box than the other offerings from Samsung. These include Live Wallpaper, which lets you mark multiple images from your photo roll to cycle through as your lock screen wallpaper, a photo editor, and Now, a familiar content aggregator that pulls together news, weather, stocks, etc.

Camera
The images taken with the ATIV Odyssey's camera tend to gravitate towards warmer tones in most indoor shots, giving all of them a reddish hue. That being said, one shot that we took that featured a lot of green and blue looked like it had been taken from behind a blue piece of cellophane, so it's safe to say that in general the white balance is off.

In fact, the camera in general is a throwaway, as most of the indoor shots we took were noisy and not particularly crisp, the latter problem likely being attributable to the modest 5-megapixel resolution. Your best bet is to stick to outdoor shots where poor lighting isn't an issue and the color saturation looks good, but forget about shots with moving targets.

Battery Life
One of the few notable strengths of the Odyssey is definitely its battery life, which is great. Even more impressive is that the phone didn't have to be massive to allow for a battery that is physically very large to increase capacity. Of all the 4G LTE phones that we've tested, this is certainly one of the better ones.

Even with email push on multiple accounts, as well as toast notifications for games and a max brightness setting on the display, we could get almost three full days with light usage of the phone. We typically used it as a secondary device, so heavy lifting like browsing or frequent activities like texting were usually done on another phone. Nevertheless, we found it to have solid battery life and, at least in this sense, probably a good bet for road warriors.

Conclusion

The Samsung ATIV Odyssey is about as plain as plain gets. On the whole, it's not a terrible phone (though there are some bad aspects, like the camera and display) it's just uninspired and safe. This is one case where you can judge a book by its cover; the unremarkable design tells you everything you need to know about this phone.

But, like most mid-tier phones, the price is its strongest point. The Odyssey can only be faulted so much for its shortcomings and modest features when $50 price tag is factored in. Still, there are better options than this one out there for just a little more cash, like the Nokia Lumia 810/820/822 carrier variants (if you're looking to stick with Verizon, the Lumia 822 is the one you're looking for). Given that there are so few Windows Phone 8 handsets out there for US customers -- the Lumia 820 variants, the Lumia 920, and the HTC 8X are your only other options -- it would have been nice to see something a little more head-turning than the ATIV Odyssey.