Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 review: The toddler

Organizer and apps

The Tab 3 Lite 7.0's organizing skills cover the basics - there is a calendar, document app, notes app and some others but if you miss anything the Google Play store is always there with cheap or even free alternatives that will get the job done.

Polaris Office document viewer and editor lets you open word files, pdf's, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, as well as connect to various cloud services such as Box, Dropbox, and Google Docs. Creating and editing documents, sheets and presentations is available as well.

Polaris Office

S Planner is really powerful calendar app part of the TouchWiz UI. The tabbed interface lets you easily toggle between year, month, week, day list and task views.

Creating event is very easy and you can add reminders, location, people, images, repeat intervals. All events automatically sync with your Google account.

S Planner can sync with multiple calendars and you can switch off individual ones to reduce the clutter.

S Planner

Samsung has enabled their new S Cloud service on the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0. It can sync contacts, calendar and notes and back up logs, messages (SMS and MMS) and the wallpaper. You can choose not to back up some of those things and you can set up automatic backups.

S Cloud can also hook up to Dropbox. If you do this, photos and videos from your Dropbox account will be synced with the tablet's gallery. You can have the Tab 3 Lite 7.0 sync those photos and videos only over Wi-Fi to save on data usage.

S Cloud

The once unified clock app has been divided on the Tab 3 Lite 7.0 into World Clock and Alarms. Both are pretty simple and do just what the name entails - one sets up alarms, while the other lets you pick cities with their corresponding time.

Samsung has included its Smart Alarm - it starts the lowered alarm tone a couple of minutes early and gradually increases it until it's time for you to get up.

Alarms • World Clock

The Calculator has both the numpad and the scientific shortcuts in portrait and landscape mode.

Calculator

Naturally, Notes app is also available.

Notes

The My Files app has an interface similar to that of the gallery, though that one is available only in landscape mode. The app is launched automatically when you hook up a USB mass storage device (a USB drive, another phone an SD card etc), which we find to be a nice touch.

My files

Google Maps

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 comes with a GPS receiver, which took about two minutes to get satellite lock upon a cold start. You can use the A-GPS functionality to get near instantaneous locks. Alternatively, network positioning will also do if you only need an estimate of your location but that requires the slate to be 3G-enabled.

Google Maps offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere. It functions best when connected to a wireless network, offline mode won't be able to show you routes and POIs, even if you've cached the maps you need.

3D buildings are shown for some of the bigger cities and you can use two-finger camera tilt and rotate to get a better view of the area.

Google Maps

Google Maps uses vector maps, which are very data efficient. Caching of maps is done by positioning the map and selecting Make Available Offline from the search bar.

Note that there's a limit to the size of the area you can cache - you can't just make all of Europe available offline, not even a whole country. We managed to cache London and some surrounding regions before Maps told us the area is too big. Also, there's no address search in the cached maps and you can only cache map data in supported regions of the world.

Street View

You can also plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View. The app will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.

Play Store

Running Android Jelly Bean, the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite 7.0 has access to the latest apps and the microSD-expandable memory guarantees you won't have trouble with storage space.

The Store is organized in a few scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. The in-app section is untouched though and it's very informative - a description, latest changes, number of downloads and comments with rating. There is usually a demo video and several screenshots for most apps too.

Google Play

Samsung Apps features largely the same type of interface as Google Play, except here you'll find a far lower number of apps. The good news is Samsung uses this repository to distribute some exclusive titles and some promotional offers, available only to its customers.

Samsung Apps