Samsung B7330 OmniaPRO preview: First look

Going further though is not that great looking

Anyways, we don't want you bored of homescreens, so let's step down to the Main Menu of the Samsung B7330 OmniaPRO. We gotta give it to Microsoft developers, they've managed to keep that Windows 3.11 vintage look down the years. It almost makes you misty-eyed with nostalgia, doesn't it?

Beneath the nice homescreens there's still the ugly Windows-3.11-like interface • digging even deeper is where it gets even worse - design-wise, of course. It does remind us of the Blackberry OS.

Thanks to the Samsung-provided homescreen shortcuts, the Task manager is always at hand. Unfortunately, the standard issue WinMo is no good for switching between apps - you can only kill unnecessary processes from here. It's nice to see that those pesky usability improvements have not kept MS engineers up late in the evenings.

The Task manager shortcut • the Task manager itself

Phonebook has a slight facelift

Well, Windows Mobile Standard has one phonebook that's certainly not that handsome, but at least it's ready to do whatever you need it to. One visual enhancement over the previous version of the mobile OS is that all contacts now have their images as thumbnails in the list.

The phonebook is more colorful now thanks to the inline contact thumbnails

Email is still as good

As you might guess for a smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard, the new OmniaPRO is pretty functional, though it does lack a bit of window-dressing. Our test Gmail account was setup in no time just by entering the email address and password.

Email is easy to setup and it does the job without bells and whistles

Image gallery is not so basic anymore

The WinMo gallery is definitely not as basic as we remember it on WinMo Standard smartphones in the past. Once you select an image in the Contents manager, a nice popup appears to show you a larger version of the image.

There are also some standard features on it, but the one thing we were surprised at is how fast the zooming in and out is.

Image gallery is basic but zooming is fast

The gallery doesn't have auto rotation of course. Given the perfectly square screen of the Samsung B7330 OmniaPRO, an accelerometer makes no sense. Sure, accelerometers are not only about auto-rotation but we doubt it anyone will miss motion gaming, tilt scrolling or tap-for-time given the handset's potential target users. Turn-to-mute we kinda like, but it's no biggie on the B7330 OmniaPRO.

Windows Media player with some fresher looks

The Windows Media player is the regular WinMo player, only this time Samsung-skinned. It's also used to play video, but there are very few fancy features to write home about.

The Samsung B7330 OmniaPRO doesn't have DivX and XviD support, which is quite strange for a recent Samsung smartphone. We tried playing some standard MP4 videos with varying success. You should definitely not exceed 640x360 pixels resolution for them to play smoothly.

Windows Media player with a nice custom skin and the preinstalled YouTube application

For YouTube videos there's a separate application preinstalled. But as you'll see, the Internet Explorer Mobile has full Flash support and is just as capable of handling those as well.