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The Samsung Omnia Lite is a reasonably sized touchscreen phone. It adopts the regulation black slab that's become familiar post-iPhone, although the casing of this model is less curvaceous than recent Samsung touch-phones such as the Omnia 2, Blade and Jet, and more like the Tocco Ultra.
It measures 107(h) x 51.8(w) x 13.3(d)mm and weighs 109g, so it is suitably Lite in your pocket.
The black casing is offset by chrome trim around the sides – all tastefully done. The front panel physical keys are typically minimalist, with a Call and End button flanking a central Back button.
This may look like a navigation pad, but it isn't. It will, though, launch the Task Switcher function – enabling to see what features are running by pulling up open apps in panels on the screen, allowing you to tap to select the one you want to use. A secondary camera for video calls sits above the display.
Side buttons includes a screen sleep/lock/unlock key, a camera button, volume rocker keys and a Menu key for accessing the main menu.
There's a MicroSD card slot on the side too (though no card is supplied, the Omnia Lite can support MicroSDHC cards up to 32GB), while up top is a multi-connector microUSB socket. A standard 3.5mm headphone socket isn't included on this model, however.
A miniscule reset button on the side is provided though in case the device freezes on you.
The main action, of course, is via the touchscreen. The screen is a WQVGA (240 x 400 pixels) 65K-colour TFT resistive display, measuring 3 inches diagonally.
While Windows Mobile 6.5 has supposedly been developed to be more finger-friendly than previous versions of the Microsoft mobile OS, a stylus is included in-box – which is certainly required for some on-screen tapping action.
Instead of a slip-in slot for secreting the stylus in the casing, Samsung has built a tiny hook into the top of the body, which you can string your stylus onto. Not ideal, and not exactly snag-proof, unless you carry only your phone in your pocket or handbag…
We found that we needed the stylus more than we would have expected. The resistive screen was fine for general scrolling, stroking and so on. But when it came to precision tapping, we found it wasn't as finger-friendly as we'd like.
Tapping the thin bars at the top and bottom of the display, for instance, sometimes required stylus precision or we'd open up the Widgets toolbar by mistake.
The close apps button too requires precision. And in some functions we felt our fingers sometimes were too big for accurately tapping an option – when texting, the soft QWERTY keypad numbers around the edges of the display proved a bit fiddly to select with fingers.
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