When I was due for upgrade this time, I wasn't particularly bothered which phone I had, I was more interested in whether they could offer me a better tariff on my contract. I have been with Vodafone for many years and have always been satisfied with the service that they have provided and I was over the moon when they offered me the tariff of 600 mins and unlimited text messages, all for £35. The tariff I was on before was 200 minutes and 500 text messages for the same price, in which I was going over by at least 500 messages and my bill was coming in around £100 per month which was ridiculous.

THe phone itself is very light, very slim and metallic silver. Its an extremely attractive phone. You have to slide the front to get to the key pad and when you open the front the screen lights up and displays the usual information, time, date etc.

I find Samsung phones extremely easy to use, I have had one before and loved it, and having a Sony Ericsson for a while, I kind of missed the Samsung phones.

The menu consists of 12 seperate images that have there own meaning and will take you to sub menus. These consist of: Entertainment, Vofafone Live, Music, Camera, Messaging, My Files, Organiser & Tools, Contacts, Calls, Profiles, Mobile TV and Settings.

When going into the entertainment section, to be honest I don't ever venture into this, it gives you the option to play and download new games. On this particular phone you also have th option to use ebay, so you can trade online using you phone if that is something that you are interested in. It also has a direct link to google for easy searching on the net.

The music player on the U700 is great. You can synchronise the phone with Windows Media Player and copy your albums onto your phone and use it as an MP3 player. This is great for when travelling and saves you a bit of money not having to invest in the latest Ipod.

The camera is 3.2 megapixel camera and the pictures that it captures are very good and very clear. You have the option to take still pictures and also take videos. The phone comes with a USB cable so you can transfer your pictures and video's to your laptop or PC.

This part of my phone always gets hammered, I am constantly texting. I'm a person in demand most of the time. I got up this morning and had 18 missed calls and 12 messages on my phone all from different people. Texting from the phone is really easy, you can use the normal method or predictive text. You have several boxes, incoming texts go into the in box, and you have folders for sent items, outbox and drafts. You can set your phone to have various report options should you need read receipts for certain messages.

This section is where you can store everything which goes into different folders and is easy to retrieve. You can store all ypu video's, pictures, and music and get to them just by a quick click of a button.

This has everything from calculator to currency converter, which prove to be handy when you need something and haven't got it handy. You can set alarm clocks from this section. You can also set appointments and tasks that will flag up if you set a time on them.

Up to yet the battery life of the phone is very good. I charged it up for 24 hours when I first had it and have not had to do it since. There is nothing worse than having a phone which the battery drains on it too quick.