Samsung OmniaPRO B7330 Preview

Interface and Functions:

As we mentioned, the Samsung OmniaPRO B7330 runs Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard. Samsung has added three home screens and the one that we like best is called “Samsung WizPro”. The personalization pack is reminiscent of the HTC-made TouchFLO 3D, but has been tailored for non touch-sensitive screens. It provides fast access to information about missed and upcoming events, favorite contacts, music player, gallery, a host of shortcuts, social networks and basic settings. We need to congratulate Samsung on the great job and functionality their device comes with.



The most interesting new functions in Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard are the online app store called Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft My Phone and the preloaded widgets. The online app store wasn’t open for business when we tested the Samsung OmniaPRO B7330 and we were greeted by a friendly sign that was saying “coming soon”. My Phone is a service that allows online synchronization of your device.



You can place various widgets on the home screen and some of them are active, i.e. provide updated information about the topic they are dedicated to, say, weather. “Search” is the only widget that our unit came with and what it does is to open Bing, the Microsoft-hosted search engine in Internet Explorer 6.

Naturally, capable messaging is one of the most important features of any smartphone equipped with QWERTY keyboard. The Samsung OmniaPRO B7330 allows composing of SMS, MMS and email messages and you can chat on Windows Messenger. The email client offers automated account setup with mainstream services providers like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Comcast, EarthLink, GMX and Hotmail.






The handset comes with Windows Media Player that handles all multimedia content and it seems Samsung has made minor alterations in the interface of the app - they don’t add functionality really, but do lend color and make things look more appealing.

Typically, this is the part when we get down to the camera. Unfortunately, our prototype seems to have quite a problem here, because the camera would invariably crash, despite all we did to make it work. Still, we could see its interface looked pretty nice, so we hope we won´t be disappointed at the image quality.





Expectations:

The Samsung OmniaPRO B7330 looks like an appealing device that, thanks to its personalized interface, will be easy to handle by virtually anyone. We highly doubt it that it will manage to steal the hearts of business customers using BlackBerry handsets, but it will probably attract quite a few people who need QWERTY keyboard and capable organizer. Of course, a rich application catalogue is more than welcome and we hope Windows Marketplace for Mobile will offer one.