Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 review: The toddler

TouchWiz phonebook is good

The Phonebook in the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 is very straightforward. Your contacts get automatically synced with your Google account unless you explicitly disable this and you can also let the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 sync your social network contacts if you want.

Contact manager

The navigation is intuitive with the contact list on the left and one focused contact on the right. You also get a search bar and letter indicators for faster finding.

Viewing a contact

You can, naturally, edit contacts and add quite a bit of useful information like address, emails, notes, etc.

Email - new Gmail and Hangouts

The Gmail app displays contact images in mails. If an email has multiple recipients, they're shown in a grid similar to the Hangouts app. If there is no contact image, it just shows the first letter of the sender on a color background.

Gmail sorts emails by Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates as you can on Gmail web, which makes it easy to keep track of your mail.

Gmail

The Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 also features a combined inbox in its standard email app. It brings together all your mail in a single folder. This can be quite handy if you have lots of accounts and you just want to check if there is a new message needing your attention.

Email

For each email account, the app gives you security options (e.g. encrypting outgoing email and signing it with a private key) and a synch schedule, which can be set to check for new mail more often during "peak schedule" (you can pick the days of the week and start and end times when "peak schedule" is active).

Hangouts handles the Instant Messaging department. It offers group video chats, emojis, photo exchange, GIF support, history sync across multiple devices, and a fresh, minimal design. It's available on iOS as well making it multi-platform.

Hangouts

Excellent text input

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 comes with several text input options.

The big screen makes for comfortable portrait typing, and we appreciate the extra row just for the numbers. Two finger typing is comfortable on the Tab 3 Lite 7.0 in portrait mode, but becomes a pain in landscape. Sadly the split-screen keyboard isn't available on the Tab 3 Lite.

QWERTY keyboard

There are a handful of clever tricks that this keyboard can offer. You can swipe left and right on the keyboard to position the cursor. The keyboard can also be made into a type of floating widget as well.

Floating keyboard

Another option shows you a list of all recent items in the clipboard (both text and images) that you can quickly paste. This is great as it lets you juggle multiple copied items.

You can also enable "Continuous input", which lets you input words by swiping over the keyboard (yes, like Swype).

Handwriting recognition is also available, but it's quite slow since there is no S-Pen support. The available keyboards are much better options.

Continuous, Voice, Handwriting input

You can, of course, use voice input and since the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 is running Android Jelly Bean, this will work even if the tablet is offline as long as you have downloaded the required language package.