For those of you who read my Nokia 5210 review, you will know how clumsy I am when it comes to mobile phones. Also you may remember I went to the phone shop with the idea in my head that I would be leaving with a colour screen Samsung as I have wanted one since they hit the shops. Instead I came out with a Nokia 5210.
Nokia was a brand which suited me for several years and I didn’t believe there was any other brand for me, but how wrong was I?
Just three months ago, I was telling my friend at work that I was getting bored with my Nokia 5210 but it had served me well for just over a year and a half, undamaged and still to this day in perfect condition. I had a look around in phone shops and on the internet for a new phone but when I saw the prices of the phones I liked, I could not justify buying one when there was nothing wrong with the one I had.
I didn’t need to buy a new one…
About a week after I told my friend I wanted a new phone, my partner said to me, ‘I have entered a competition on Samsungs website, it was simple, I never had to do anything. If I win you can have the prize’. And as usual we both looked at each other and said, ‘yeah right, we’ve never won a bean’. He knows how quickly I go through phones and that’s why he offered me the potential prize, bless him.
About two days later, he had received an email from Samsung saying, ‘congratulations, you have won a Samsung SGH-E700 phone. Please confirm your address and it will be dispatched immediately’. Neither of us could believe it, but it arrived several days later by special delivery. We both thought they must be some catch like you had to sign up with a certain contract but to my delight it came SIM free. So I popped in my existing Virgin SIM card and off I went…
Just to skip back to the beginning of this review. I bought a Nokia 5210 over a Samsung because I always damage my phones and I could change the casing on the Nokia 5210. I had the phone for over a year and a half and not one scratch. I have had my Samsung for almost three months and have acquired three biggish scratches
on my external screen, ‘TUT’.
The Samsung SGH-E700 is a flip phone and costs approximately £350 SIM free. It came with the actual phone itself, a small light charger, the battery, which is also very light, a hand strap, a hands free kit and an owner’s manual, (which is heavier than the phone).
Here are some technical details about the phone. The Samsung E700 is WAP 2.0 compatible, weighs is at 89g and has talk time of up to 180 minutes and stand by time of up to 240 hours. It is GPRS compatible and has a VGA camera built into the front of the phone. The actual dimensions of the Samsung E700 are 90x45x23mm, so it fits neatly into the palm of my hand. The internal display is 128x160 pixels and is equipped with a 65K colour TFT LCD. The external display is 96x64 pixels and only has 256 colours but both displays are excellent. The phone has a 40 polyphonic sound system and a big winner for me is the built-in antenna, which keeps the phone looking crisp and clean.
So what does this phone have to offer…?
At the main display, you can see the phones signal strength, the battery life, the network, the time and date, access the menu and access the phonebook.
The phonebook is laid out similar to most phones. Here you can add/search for names, send phonebook entries via infrared and set up speed dialling. The phonebook has a capacity of 1000 names and numbers, (who on this earth needs 1000?). Also you can see your memory status in the phonebook area and set up calling groups for friends and family etc.
From the main menu you can access 8 other menus.
1. Messages – Messages can be sent in three formats. Short messaging service, which is the standard text messaging format. Multimedia messaging service, which supports various media types and enhanced messaging service, which allows you to include simple images, animations and tones. You can do all the standard things in the message section like write new messages, read and save messages. You can adjust your message settings and see the memory status. Also voice mail can be setup and received from this menu.
2. Call records - This menu is quite standard. Here you can see your missed calls, received calls, dialled calls, call times, call costs and you also have the option to delete all of this information.
3. Sound settings – Melodies and sounds can be selected from this menu. There are 30 melodies preset onto the phone and spaces for 30 additional melodies. Ring volume and type can be adjusted too. Also the type of sound alert when you receive messages can be set here. You can have a different tone for each message format, so you know when you receive a text message or a multimedia message. There is a variety of sounds/tones available for switching your phone on/off, connecting calls and key tones.
4. Phone settings – You can change the phones greeting message in this menu as well as all of the other display features. Wallpapers can be chosen for your phone. They can be animated, still pictures and you can even use photos you have taken with your phone for wallpaper. The phone came preset with five animated animal themed wallpapers and a wide variety of interesting photos. Also in the display menu you can change your phones skin. A skin is basically the layout and colour of your phones display. This just makes it more personalised. Internal and external screen brightness can also be adjusted here. Most other options are standard like language settings, security options and being able to reset your phone to factory settings. You can also activate the phones infrared from the phone settings menu and you can enable fax mode so you can connect your phone to a computer and send faxes.
5. Organiser – In the organiser, new memo’s can be set and so can new schedules and to do lists. You can access the calendar and view all of your appointments at once or view by day. You can also set reminders/alarms to remind you that you have an appointment due and you can even choose from a variation of alarms. The time/world time and date can be set and there is also an alarm clock too. Other features include a calculator and a conversion feature. The
Pictures of Samsung SGH E700
Samsung E700
conversion feature converts currency, length, weight, volume, area and temperature. Lastly there is a timer and a stopwatch.
6. Network services – In here you can setup call diverting, call barring and call waiting. You can also change your network selection from here and access your caller ID setting, so you can withhold your number.
7. Fun box – From here you can access the internet via the WAP browser, (wireless application protocol). You can download new ring tones, games and get all the latest news, weather and entertainment etc. In the fun box there is also your media box where you can access all of your photos, images, sounds and you can delete them all from here and check your memory status. Next is JAVA world. You can download Java games using the WAP browser and play them from here. Two Java games came already pre-loaded. These are snowball fight and bubblesmile, which is an arcade puzzle. Lastly is the games section, which included three standard games pre-loaded. These are honeyball, go! Hamster and bowling.
8. Camera – From the camera menu you can take pictures. You can change the mode of the camera so that you can take normal shots, self shots, multi shots, night shots and a capture only shot. You can add frames to your pictures including all kinds of fancy frames. There is even a monkey frame if you want to be cheeky and add your best friends face to a monkeys body. You can also take your pictures using several different effects. These effects are: grey, negative, sepia, emboss and sketch. You can look at all the photos you have taken and arrange them into two separate albums too. You can also select your photo size and quality from the camera menu. The sizes to choose from are: VGA 640x480, QVGA 320x240, QQVGA 160x120 and mobile 128x120. The different image qualities to choose from are superfine, fine, normal and economy. The camera is also equipped with 5x digital zoom.
These are all of the main features of the Samsung E700, I shall tell you about several other features on the phone. The phone has four shortcut keys, which are very useful. They take you directly to the camera, to write a new text message, to today’s page in the calendar and directly to your sound settings. These are surrounding your WAP push button, which allows you to push it just once to be instantly connected to the internet. The phone also has a scroll button on the left side, which can be used in several ways. It can be used to adjust the key volume, call volume and it also acts as the zoom whilst in the camera mode. Also on the right hand side of the phone is a camera button, which you can press and hold to take instant self shots without having to open your flip and go through the menu. The Samsung E700 also has 9MB of storage for the camera, MMS, sounds and images. There is also an extra 600KB dedicated for Java game storage.
My opinion.
This is the best phone I have ever had. The Samsung E700 is a very fun phone to have, yet very stylish and very elegant. The phone looks the part. Some camera phones and colour screen phones I have seen recently look really cheap and tacky and the image quality has been poor, but the Samsung E700 is an all round top performer. It is a sleek and sexy phone. The internal TFT LCD is absolutely amazing. The picture quality is superb, 100% crisp and clear and the colour detail is also excellent. All images are smooth and do not look ‘blocky’ at all. Another thing that really makes this phone special is the quality of the sounds and ring tones. It is about time that phone companies changed them droning, annoying old ring tones, so that they sound realistic. I downloaded ‘Hey Ya’ free of the Brit award site and the sound quality is unreal. The ring tones also include voices and singing, which completely shocked me when I first heard them.
The Samsung E700 is definitely more up market and is certainly a far better quality phone then Nokia, (I’m sorry to say). I have stuck with Nokia for a long time now, but now I have this phone I don’t know why I stayed with Nokia. I have compared the Samsung E700 with the Nokia 7250icamera phone, which is the one I had my eye on before winning this one, as my friend now owns one and I have to say the Samsung E700 wins hands down on picture quality and sound quality. Another thing I love about having a duel screen phone is that taking self shots is so easy as you can see what you are doing on the external screen. I tried to take a picture of myself on the Nokia 7250i and because the camera is on the back and the screen is on the front, it is so difficult and it took several attempts to get the desired shot. The photos I take are excellent quality and I transfer them very easily to my PC with my infrared link. The phone has been designed very well and the keys are laid out in a nice easy order too.
The only downsides I can see for this phone is that it is not blue tooth compatible and it does not have a built in radio, which most phones in this price bracket do have. I suppose the quality and design of the Samsung E700 makes up for the loss of these two features. Overall… I absolutely love this phone and I would not swap it for the world, (or at least until some other sexy Samsung comes along). I would definitely recommend this phone to buyers and the bit that won me over is the fact it was free.
All I have left to say is, ‘goodbye Nokia’!
Thank you for reading Maria.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
May 1st, 2004
exceptional by (17%):
very helpful by (82%):
helpful by (1%):
