Samsung’s Omnia range of phones was originally trailed as a set of three different phones that would appeal to three different sets of users. The Samsung Omnia Lite is the third and final addition to the range and is described as a ‘simple all-rounder’. In reality, though, it isn’t much different to the two other phones in the range, the Omnia II and Omnia Pro, with most of the same features – and most of the same flaws.

Style and handling on the Samsung Omnia Lite

Looks-wise, the Samsung Omnia Lite is the same as any Samsung mid-range handset. A three-inch touch-screen covers most of the black fascia, with just three hard keys sitting underneath it. You get three home screens, the main one of which includes a customisable shortcut bar to access any of the phone’s programs.

The back of the Lite is patterned with a subtle honeycomb motif, and the sides are positively festooned with buttons and slots. Crammed on are the charger port, camera shutter, volume control, phone lock key, microSD slot and a hard menu key.

Touch-screen on the Omnia Lite

The Samsung Omnia Lite has a resistive touch-screen – the kind that responds to pressure – rather than the superior capacitive screen that requires swipes and gentle touches. While a resistive screen will never be as good, it won’t necessarily be bad – plenty of resistive touch-screen phones have proved to be responsive and accurate. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them. It’s slow to register your instructions and once it has, there is often a delay before it kicks in. Because you are unsure if your action has registered, you will be tempted to hit it again – do it too much and you lose control of the phone, as applications you didn’t want start to open up and those you were using shut down.

There is a stylus bundled in although it needs to be tied to the phone – yes, tied! – using the lanyard on the little cap. The stylus is two inches long and about the circumference of a pencil and the cap is almost impossible to get off with one hand. Not that the stylus makes for easier use of the phone, but it would be nice if it was smaller, attached and easier to use in an instant.

We are pleased to report that the touch-screen keyboard is better than we expected. It can be a little slow, but we’ve used worse, and the auto-complete system keeps you accurate by slotting in the right word. The keyboard is ugly, though, and the keys tiny, using the dated Windows Mobile font.

Windows Mobile 6.5 on the Samsung Omnia Lite

Samsung’s TouchWiz interface is, as usual, overlaid over the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. Its main contribution is the widget toolbar, from which you can drag and drop Samsung widgets onto your home screen. The clumsy touch-screen hampers the process, and most of the widgets are average at best. For example, the Facebook widget is just a link to the preloaded Windows Mobile app (which is fully featured). You get memo, calendar and weather, all of which are handy, and the CNN news feed, although that will only automatically update every six or 12 hours unless you manually refresh. The widgets also look quite dated.

The updated WinMo 6.5 applies vibrant icons to your scrolling programs menu, but once you are in an application, you’re back with plain, text-based menus. They may not be the flashiest looking, but they are easy to navigate.

Internet on the Samsung Omnia Lite

The excellent Opera Mini browser is preinstalled on the Samsung Omnia Lite. It automatically loads mobile-optimised websites rather than the full, desktop-friendly versions.

A handy tab in the corner will launch the toolbars at the top and foot of the screen that allow you to go back, switch windows or go to your homepage. There is also a small box showing how far down the page you are, but you can’t interact with it, for example to skip downwards.

Both text and pictures load up clear and smooth, but it’s all too easy to lose control of the page – the touch-screen is over-sensitive and a small upwards stroke to scroll up the page sent us flying to the top of the page.

Unfortunately, YouTube does not do well on the Omnia Lite. Many of the videos are resized wrongly, they don’t play smoothly and the images are blurry with ghosting. This happened even when we allowed the whole video to buffer before playing it.

Camera on the Samsung Omnia Lite

The Samsung Omnia Lite has a three-megapixel camera with a good selection of camera modes, including night, portrait and text scan. You can also make adjustments to white balance and light exposure. The shutter is quick to release and the camera takes only around half a second to recover after each picture so you can snap several shots in quick succession.

Auto focus only takes a few second to get a clear picture, but the resulting photos are slightly dull. Photos are good enough for sharing online with friends, though – you can send them via MMS, email or Bluetooth, or upload them to Facebook, Flickr, Friendster and MySpace.

Office and email on the Samsung Omnia Lite

Being a Windows Mobile phone, the Omnia Lite comes with the full Office Mobile suite, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe Reader. The touch-screen makes creating and editing documents a fiddle business, even with the stylus, but it’s great if you just need to read of check documents.

You get push-email alerts on Microsoft Exchange accounts only, but popular webmail accounts such as Gmail can be set to send/receive emails at regular intervals.

The verdict on the Samsung Omnia Lite

Theoretically the Omnia Lite is a great phone, packed with entertainment and business features. But it falls flat on usability – the touch-screen is fiddly and difficult to get to grips with and the user interface doesn’t help matters. The web browser and email are very good, but it’s just not an enjoyable experience to use.