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Features

One of the biggest appeals of the F700 is that it's a touchscreen phone with a QWERTY keyboard. There aren't many devices in the mobile phone market right now in the same league as the F700 that looks as sleek. The closest comparison we can muster would be the Sony Ericsson P1i, but the keyboard layout on that is vastly different from the one on the F700. Not to mention that it is also using a more robust Symbian UIQ operating system--a factor which may be crucial for some users.

Unlike the recent SGH-i780 which runs on Windows Mobile 6 Professional, the F700 uses a rather new interface called the Croix. The Armani phone that was just available recently uses the same UI, too.

The good stuff first. For those who are grappling with the fact that they no longer have a hardware numeric keypad, the F700 offers an onscreen alternative, though we feel that is a moot point since the whole proposition of the F700 is for you to use the QWERTY keyboard. That said, it is always great to have a choice.

To lower the learning curve, there's haptic feedback. So whenever you tap on the handset, a short pulse of vibration lets you know that a letter or numeral has been pressed. It is possible to customize the strength and rhythm of the haptic feedback. In short, the generous size of the onscreen alphanumeric keypad along with the main control buttons and vibration controls would help ease first-timers into using a touchscreen handset.

While Samsung has gotten those parts right, there is still room for improvement on the usability of the phone. Firstly, the user interface looks primitive even with the snazzy slide-and-control features on the menus and music player. In addition, scrolling on the panel took a bit of getting used to and perhaps more so than we'd like. This makes it hard to find a number in the contacts folder unless you use the keyboard.

There are also a couple of other quirky nuisances. For example, we had to make two taps in order to read a message: Once to bring the onscreen cursor to the selected point and the second time to open it. This was the same with picking up a call. We had to press the central hardware button to unlock the phone before we could tap on the screen to answer the call. While Samsung may have built the UI that way so users won't have to deal with pressing the wrong options, we found the interface experience not as intuitive.

Unlike some of the current QWERTY phones, the F700 doesn't have a directional pad. Instead, there are separate arrow buttons on the keyboard which result in common punctuations being relegated to secondary keys. Pressing and holding down the backspace button deletes an entire line of text. This is, again, counter-intuitive as the backspace key on a QWERTY is expected to work like a regular computer backspace. In this case, it means deleting the letters faster and not taking out the whole line in one go.

If you depend heavily on Microsoft Outlook to sync data between your mobile device and desktop, the F700 isn't the most ideal companion. During our review, information in our Contacts and Calendar didn't get ported over to the handset in its entirety. Most people will probably find this out the hard way (especially during times when they need certain information) since the synchronization process in our tests didn't specify data from which entries were omitted. We also found that the Subject and Location fields in the calendar were limited to only 15 letters. That was mildly amusing in the beginning, before it got frustrating.

At this point in time, we are not sure if the Croix platform is the most ideal solution for the F700. Besides the various issues we've talked about, there are also no additional bundled applications on the F700 for productivity tasks. The phone does have a list of decent specifications, though: Tri-band GSM with HSDPA, Bluetooth stereo A2DP, microSD expansion card slot and a 3-megapixel camera with a widescreen 2,016 x 1,120-pixel resolution.

« Design | Performance And Conclusion »

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