Fashion model
Samsung's U700 is certainly a bling-tastic looking thing. An all-silver case combined with a mirror finish on the front face and an almost jewel-like navigator dial lend it some serious high-fashion cred. It’s also as slim and lightweight as any catwalk clothes hanger, and attracted considerable acquisitive attention around the PC World office.
Ted Gibbons | Tuesday, January 29 2008Comparisons with LG’s very similar-looking Shine are almost inevitable with this slider phone and I’m afraid, that here the U700 comes off second best. Even though the U700 looks metallic, it’s actually pretty flimsy and plasticky (hence the sparrow-like weight) and I wouldn’t like to drop it on the pavement.
On the upside, the U700 is not the brick in the pocket that the Shine is and that is definitely something to be welcomed.
Around the outside of the U700 buttons and ports are kept to a minimum with an on/off switch on the top, a volume rocker and a proprietary port (for charging, USB connection and the headset) on the left, and a dedicated camera button and microSD slot on the right. It’s great to see the memory card slot on the exterior of the phone but I’m no fan of these proprietary ports that render your existing headsets and USB cables useless. I also found the volume rocker and camera button to be placed too close to the bottom of the phone to be used comfortably.
On the front face of the phone you’ll find avant-garde inclusions aplenty like touch-sensitive buttons and a central navigator that combines both scroll-wheel and click functionality. However, this mixture of technology really turns out to be the U700’s Achilles heel. Like the LG Chocolate, the touch-sensitive buttons do not react reliably to your touch and this quickly becomes irritating as they provide call and end commands, menu access and ‘back’ button functionality. Similarly, while I like the scroll-wheel idea, it is not executed that well. It spins very freely but this does not translate to the speed of scrolling, creating a frustrating disconnect, and it’s not adjustable.
Slide the U700 open and you’re presented with a nicely spacious backlit keypad with big keys. It is, however, very flat and has little differentiation between the keys, making fast texting and dialling difficult.
Onscreen, the U700 looks very good indeed. The screen is large at 56mm and has a high 240 x 320 pixel resolution coupled with 262,000-colour display. The menu is bog-standard Vodafone but at least it’s easy to navigate. There are however no pre-loaded themes to choose from which seems a bit stingy in a phone like this.
Chief amongst the U700’s other attributes is the flash-enabled 3.2-megapixel camera. Around the lens you can see written ‘autofocus’ and that means Samsung’s new Rapid Focus technology. This actually works very well but it is not aided by the significant shutter lag. As a result, you can be sure that your still images will come out properly focused, but anything in motion will probably escape you. Picture quality is reasonably good but with a certain lack of colour saturation. One real disappointment with the camera is the low-res QCIF (176 x 144) video capture.
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