Samsung B7330 OmniaPRO preview

Assorted homescreens

The Samsung B7330 OmniaPRO runs on Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard and that's our first encounter with this latest version of the smartphone OS. We're speaking non-touchscreen of course - that's what Standard stands for - but you probably knew that already.

The thing is, unlike the touch-enabled WinMo 6.5 Pro, the improvements here are perhaps not as obvious. To tell you the truth, we saw no visual difference at all. Most of the changes we actually noticed were courtesy of Samsung themselves.

But let's not waste any more time and let's get our hands dirty. Samsung have been quite generous in providing a nice set of homescreens to choose from, much like they did with their previous WinMo Standard products ever since the good old Samsung i600 (a.k.a. BlackJack).

A variation of the BlackJack card-wheel interface, what we have here is the Samsung WizPro homescreen, which consists of a number of side scrolling panes or tabs.

Each of them offers different functionality, but the first one is probably the one you should keep an eye on all day. It displays info on time, messages and emails, appointments and missed events.

The first screen gives you important info about time, appointments, messages and missed events

The rest of the screens on Samsung WizPro get you access to favorite contacts, the music player (though displaying Album Art is buggy on the homescreen) and even the gallery. There are also a number of shortcuts - to the FM radio, Solitaire, Word Mobile, Task manager and the Wireless manager - again no visual changes in these core WinMo applications.

Among the screens, you will also see tight Yahoo integration with Yahoo!Search having its own separate screen - the same thing goes for Yahoo!Finance, which gives you stock quotes of companies that you preset.

Giving a nod to current trends, there is a whole screen full of shortcuts to various social networking sites and the Facebook Mobile application even comes preinstalled on the Samsing B7330 OmniaPRO.

And finally, there's weather, of course, courtesy of AccuWeather.

There are a bunch of other screens almost eliminating the need to enter the main menu

Here is also a quick UI demo video, showing the real life performance of the Samsung B7330 OmniaPRO.

Taking its cue from its bigger Pro brother, Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard also comes with its own interesting homescreen. It's called Sliding panes and is scrollable vertically.

As you can see it gets the most important info across, such as missed events, messages and appointments plus you've got multimedia panes such as Music player and the Gallery. There's bookmarks too - oops, sorry, that's Favorites in proper MS language.

The regular Windows Mobile 6.5 homescreen is also here and looks nice - it's called Sliding Panes

Anyway, moving forward, Samsung have also added their location-aware Living World homescreen - those green fields you see down there are the generic background. It's supposed however to change according to the city (or at least country) you're in, showing you some kind of local landmark.

Besides, Samsung also have on board some minimalist homescreens that pay homage to the nice wallpapers that you may have stashed. Those show only the bare minimum amount of info - usually in one row only, but you can of course scroll down. By the way we saw those same homescreens on the Samsung i600 a.k.a. Blackjack when we reviewed it exactly 2 years ago. That's some progress, right?

Samsung Living world • the other homescreens display info in a more minimalistic and unobtrusive manner