The Samsung F700 is a touch screen/sensitive phone with a QWERTY keyboard which can slide out when tilting the phone counter-clockwise. If you feel that you don’t want to use the QWERTY keyboard you can use the touch screen instead. Double clicking on a text area will bring up a virtual keyboard which includes T9 support and is layed out exactly the same as previous Samsung phones. Problem with using this is that to start off with you will find yourself touching extra characters by mistake till you get used to it. At first texting with the QWERTY keyboard takes longer than on a normal device but once your used to it you wont be going back to the normal way of writing things.
There are cameras situated on both sides of the phone to allow for 3G video calls, no protective slide protecting the lenses
though. The main camera is a 3.15 MP camera that produces images up to a resolution of 2048×1536 pixels and next to it you will find a flash. The camera on the front of the device is a bog standard VGA camera with no flash.
On the front of the device there is only one button which when pressed brings up your shortcuts. On the right hand side of the device you will find volume controls, camera button and a slidey type button that is used to lock the keypad. On top of the device there is the power button and flap which when pulled to the side will reveal the power socket and socket for hands free/headphones. The device can support memory cards which are located under the back cover along with battery and sim card. With my phone i was given an additional back plate so you may also get this if you purchase your phone. My back plate hasnt scratched up yet so i have not yet to use it. The speakers and mic are hidden at the top and bottom of the front of the phone respectively but i reckon these will gather a lot of dust and cleaning them could be hard unless you have some compressed air to clean them out once in a while.
The main menu is shown as a 3 x 4 grid with a cross hair which you can drag around to get to the icon you wish to select. Hovering over icons displays the name of the icon making it easy to find the place you want to get to. Unfortunately there are no additional themes/skins with this phone and your stuck with the dark background with light text.
The touch screen itself is pretty responsive but there has been times where i’ve had to click a number of times to get it doing what i want it to do. I put this down to my finger not being in the right place rather than the phone not registering something is being pressed. Samsung has added a nice feature where the phone vibrates when you click on things and the level of vibration can be changed or turned off completely. This is called VibeTonz Technology if you wanted to search for it for more info.My device came with 3 pre-loaded applications, YouTube, GoogleMaps and an application for social sites (which i havn’t used so cant give any details on this). The first two applications are pretty nifty, on GoogleMaps you can plan journeys and find out where you are in the world). The YouTube application lets you view videos from their site but the number you can actually watch is limited for the time being. There are also three games for you to play with, i have uninstalled all of them from my device because they were 30 second trials of not very good. Currently support for this phone in the applications and game departments is poor so i havn’t added anything new so wouldn’t know how easy or hard it is. The phone features all the type of things youd come to expect from a modern phone, web browser, alarm clock, calendar which can be sync’d with Outlook, calculator, music player and my phone came with a feature to connect to and view live TV - whether this is a feature just for Vodafone customers i dont know.
I have had a few problems with the Bluetooth that is used with the phone. It seems to connect to other Samsung phones and Sony Ericsson models but not Nokia phones, i tested with a N95 and my phone couldn’t find the Nokia and the Nokia couldn’t find me. When trying to connect to my computer using a bluetooth it refused to connect because the bluetooth device installed on my computer was too old but im sure this will be sorted out with new firmware.
Advantages:
* An extremely good looking interface and screen quality.
* Battery life is good if you consider the size of the screen, there are also energy efficiency options where you can turn down brightness or change the time at which you want the QWERTY keys backlight to become active.
* Sleak design and just the right size to fit in your pocket.
* Buttons on the QWERTY keyboard are just the right size for me although people with larger than average digits may have a problem using it.
* Good sound and voice quality, including when using it on speaker phone mode.
Disadvantages:
* The 3.1MP camera, as with my previous Samsung phone, isn’t that great and pictures always end up blurred.
* Phone seems slows down when viewing messages and you have 100+.
* Documentation with the phone was very poor, still don’t know what the PIN default is or anything like that.
* No way to get rid of the pre-installed backgrounds which is very annoying to have something on there you don’t want or need.
Available Memory Cards for Samsung F700:
Micro-SD card
Micro SD memory
Memory Stick Micro
M2 memory
M2 card
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