Samsung B7300 OmniaLITE review: The light side of life

Arc-gallery rocks

The Samsung B7300 OmniaLITE is equipped with an elaborate picture viewing application called Photo Album. It sorts the photos by month and offers a nicely customizable slideshow. You get to pick the transition effects, the direction and the time for each separate photo to stay on screen. Naturally, scrolling images is easily done with finger sweeps.

The default sorting by months

Alternatively, you can opt for grouping the images in folders, whereby each folder containing pictures appears on screen in alphabetical order and with an automatically assigned thumbnail.

Alternatively folder sorting is available

Turning the phone sideways brings the third viewing mode available. All of your photos are displayed in a 3D arc and they slightly overlap, much like a deck of cards. You scroll them with a sweeping finger gesture.

We dig the arc mode the most

The second arc of thumbnails crossing the current one represents the photo folders instead of individual shots. Dragging them up or down changes the current folder quite naturally.

There's also an alternative in landscape mode where the photos are again sorted chronologically.

The final available view mode

Overall, the gallery is perfectly smooth and responsive and is definitely one of the coolest ones we've seen lately (though perhaps not as practical as it is attractive).

When you tap on an image within the arch, it loads in single view where you can zoom or slide to the next one. Zooming in is extra easy thanks to the one-finger zooming that is now becoming customary on Samsung touchscreens.

Browsing photos fullscreen

You simply have to hold your finger for a second over the part you want to zoom in on and drag upwards. A similar gesture downwards will zoom out. You can also zoom in and out by double tapping but that way you have no control over the level of magnification applied.

One finger zooming is really comfortable

Naturally, going from portrait to landscape mode is automatic thanks to the built-in accelerometer.

Thumbs up for the custom Media Player

Samsung have wisely decided to give users a new touch-friendly media player and spare them the inconvenience of installing a third-party one to make up for the poor Windows Media Player. It used to be called Touch player on previous devices, but on the OmniaLITE it goes by the name of Media player. It handles both video and audio files, supports playlists and has the standard album/artist/tracks sections.

There are three main views available in the Media player. The first one is the Library - at the top you have six tabs: all music, albums, artists, genres, videos and Now Playing. Turning the handset to its side switches to the cool album art view mode. You can then browse songs by simple finger sweeps.

Samsung Media player

When you switch into play mode, you see a simple and clean interface. It has the standard music buttons you would expect - volume, skip, play/pause and shuffle, while the album art fills most of the screen above them.

Play mode

The options menu further offers faster/slower playback or setting the track as a ringtone. Audio effects can be applied to both videos and audio tracks.

Playing videos is very simple - it's done the same way as an audio file. The player interface looks the same, but tapping twice turns on the fullscreen mode. It has the same control buttons as the standard one, but everything is meant for landscape orientation and there is no taskbar at the top or empty black spaces.

Playing video

The Media Player can easily handle DivX and XviD videos, making the OmniaLITE as capable a video player as most users will ever need right out of the box.

The Samsung B7300 OmniaLITE performs excellently at near VGA-res XviD video playback - we played an XviD encoded DVD rip for PC playback and, luckily, there were no skipped frames.

Videos with resolution slightly lower than VGA and bitrate of up to 2.5Mbps were no problem for the handset. As our experience shows this is about as much as most of the users will ever need.

CorePlayer benchmark results of OmniaLITE

The nice widescreen display earns the OmniaLITE another point as it is much better suited for watching videos than, say, common QVGA screens.