Samsung Omnia Lite B7300 deals & review

Coming out with lite versions is a product strategy for mobile phone makers to widen the market reach of successful high end products. Korean mobile phone maker Samsung did just that with its successful Omnia handset with the Samsung B7300 Omnia LITE. 

Not only is it lighter at a pocket friendly 103 g compared to the Omnia’s hefty 148g, its features are likewise on the lighter side and housed in a more compact touchscreen body measuring 107 x 51.8 x 12.9 mm.

Lighter Features

The Omnia LITE is a 3G phone on a dual band UMTS/HSDPA (900 / 2100) with high speed data connectivity at 3.6 Mbps. It’s also a quad band GSM (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900) with class 1- GPRS/EDGE data speeds at up to 236.8 Kbps on the 2G network. It comes with WiFi 802.11b/g with DLNA for surfing in hotspots around the country. 

Local data connectivity gets Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for wireless and wired data syncing, respectively. You also get SatNav functionally with an integrated GPS receiver with A-GPS support or downloading satellite date over the networks and WiFi.

Under the hood, you get a slightly less powerful engine with a Samsung ARM 1176 processor clocked at 667 MHz to run the less capable Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro upgradable to the latest 6.5 Pro and topped off with the Samsung TouchWiz 2.0 UI.

As with any Windows device, it gets the Pocket Office and a PDF viewer preloaded but rather than an Internet Explorer browser you get an Opera HTML browser. 

More Modest Multimedia Features

Display technology comes with a par-for-the-course 3-inch TFT LCD resistive touchscreen with half-VGA resolution and a mere 65k colors recognized by its lackluster Windows platform while its bigger brother Omnia gets the Symbian S60 that can handle 16 million colors.

There’s the usual gravity accelerometer for auto rotate viewing convenience according to handset orientation. Imaging also gets lighter from 8 megapixels in the Omnia to a more average 3 megapixel snapper with autofocus, smile detection and geo-tagging from its GPS. No LED Flash this time. Video recording is a full VGA resolution at a decent 15fps and there’s also a secondary camera for 3G video calls.

Multimedia support begins with a stereo FM receiver with RDS and FM broadcast recording. Then come the media players that can playback MP3, AAC and WMA music file formats as well as DivX, Xvid, MP4, H.263/H.264 and WMV9 video content formats.

Any other format you need played may need 3^rd party players installed on the handset. There’s a speakerphone but you can listen with wireless stereo earphones from its A2DP profile support over Bluetooth. Unfortunately there’s no 3.5mm audio jack.

There’s a generous 250 MB onboard memory with practically unlimited phonebook entries but you also get microSD memory expandability for up to 32GB. It 1400 Li-Ion battery when fully charged delivers up to 9 hours of talk time on 2G and 650 hours on standby.