Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 review: The toddler

No frills camera

The Samsung Tab 3 Lite 7.0's main camera can capture stills of up to 1600 x 1200 pixels and VGA videos.

The interface is pretty simple - it has a virtual shutter button, shortcuts for exposure, effects, settings, etc. and a switch to go into video mode..

Camera and Camcorder

An interesting option is contextual file names - the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 will name photos with your location (the GPS needs to be on for this to work).

You can customize the shortcuts available here, but most people will probably stick to the Mode selector.

There are relatively few manual settings, the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 just gives you an ISO setting, white balance and exposure compensation. You can also use color effects too.

2 MP images aren't considered high quality in the phone world for close to 10 years now and as you'd expect the ones taken with the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 don't wow with detail, colors or anything, really.

They are good for the resolution with decent detail and colors, but at 2MP that's not worth bragging about. All in all we would suggest using the camera in extreme emergency only. Then again, that's probably the way to go for all tablet cameras - good or bad.

Here go the samples themselves.

Camera samples

As for video - the VGA samples are stored in MP4 format with a bitrate north of 2500 Kbps, a slightly sturrety 23 fps framerate, single audio channel with a 60 Kbps bitrate with a sampling rate of 48 kHz. Read all of that as not impressive.

Again detail is pretty good for this resolution, but that's hardly a great achievement. There's little stutter but not to be a nuisance and colors and exposure look great too.

You can also download the untouched video sample - VGA@23fps (21s, 6.74MB).

Connectivity

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 has the basic connectivity features. Since we have the Wi Fi-only version, there's no GSM/3G connectivity to speak of while the Cellular model lacks LTE.

The Wi-Fi support covers b/g/n, with Wi-Fi Direct. The tablet also has Bluetooth 4.0 support.

The AllShare DLNA functionality, which used to be a standalone application, is now more tightly integrated into the respective Samsung applications. To share or access content on nearby DLNA-enabled devices, you do this directly from the My Video app and the Music Player.

Moving on, there's Samsung Link, another way to share content between devices. Samsung Link is intended for personal use. You can link the phone to a computer that is synced with Dropbox, SkyDrive or SugarSync and remotely access content on that device.

Samsung Link

There's also no infrared port on the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite so you won't be able to use it as a remote for your TV.

Two web browsers

The Jelly Bean browser is running on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0. It looks much like Google Chrome and has pretty much about the same functionality sans the cross-platform sync.

Google Chrome's interface is the same as most of the desktop browsers - a top row with all the opened tabs, and a second row with the back and forward buttons, the URL bar with a refresh button, the tab switching key and the bookmarks key.

Chrome is preferred by many as the default browser because it has excellent cross-platform syncing of tabs and history and lets you pick up from your PC, tablet or smartphone to any of your other devices.

Google Chrome

Chrome comes with Incognito mode, which lets you surf the web without the browser keeping track of your history or storing cookies.

Incognito Mode

Quick controls are available in the preloaded Jelly Bean browser and give you quick access through a pop menu to page navigation, options and more.

Built-in browser's Quick controls