Samsung L 700. Review on Samsung L 700

Samsung L700

Samsung L700.

Last month, after four years of loyal service, my Sony Ericsson broke down. So I need to buy a phone. I like Sony Ericssons, but one with reasonable features are unreasonably priced.

Can’t afford. Nokias may be good technically, but I feel them all ugly. My first choice was a Samsung J210, one of which I bought two months back for my sister. A lovely phone, reasonably priced but with lots of features.

But with the 3G services about to be started soon, a wise decision would be to buy one with that. So I made a second round of search and ended up on Samsung L 700.

Samsung have introduced it in the lifestyle series, with ‘minimalist’ design. Its unique no frill design is that attracted me first. Straight lines with soft curves give it the elegant look. The body, that’s back panel and the major portion of front panel, is metal.

They say its stainless steel, brushed (back panel) and great looking. It also gives us some reassurance on build quality. Display is 2.1” but the resolution is only 176x220. It is little inadequate for that sized screen. (Same resolution on J210 with 1.8 screen looks great)

You don’t have choice of themes, neither you can install any. We can change the font, color etc that’s all. The ‘living world’ active desk top is interesting, but there also you have only one option. Can get bored over time.

The menu is quite intuitive, but people used to other brands may take a while before getting comfortable to it. Menu transitions are not available. It was a disappointment considering the much lower J210 featuring it. But as a whole, I find the menu much more user friendly than other brands and of course earlier Samsungs.

One delightful feature is the smart dialer. That is, when you key in the numbers, possible phone entries with that combination appear on screen. Like the T9 input. You can select and dial straight.

Reception is very good and the sound is very clear. The ringer at the maximum is the loudest I ever heard. The key strokes are accompanied by Xylo or beep, we can’t disable it. This I don’t like, so I kept at the lowest volume.

The music player is quite good. Even though, I read at reviews that the sound quality is not that good, I find it no way inferior to my Zen Stone. There is no Hot key for music player as such, but the navigation and Ok keys can be set to that by opting the music player to play as background.

Have dual camera, but the front camera can’t be activated other than for video calls. Photo and video quality (15 fps only) are ok. Don’t count them for serious photography. Another pleasing information is that the phone will support up to 8Gb of external memory. It can be set to data storage device mode so that you can just drag and drop files to and from PC. Samsung also provides PC suite and Windows media player synchronizing. 1 Gb card comes free with the phone.

Unfortunately L 700 doesn’t come with pre-loaded games other than a few demos. Lots of them are at Samsung site for Rs 50 each. It supports mobile blogging and photo uploads to the blog sites. Also have a document viewer. I was very enthusiastic about this feature, but found almost useless. Supports word, power point and PDF files. It just displays the pages like images, you can of course zoom it, but don’t think you can read your e-books with this feature.

One feature I loved much in my previous SE, was its selective call reception. That is you can assign few numbers or groups and when you switch to selective mode, only calls from those numbers will be accepted. Samsung also provides such a feature, but the other way around. You can assign numbers and the phone will reject their calls. Almost the same, but definitely there is a change in attitude, no? Internet access is quite fast. Have hot menu for Google services. I was surprised to see my Gmail inbox checked in no time.

Samsung provided a high stamina 980mAh battery. With moderate amount of talk and no other applications used, the charge can be hold for almost 2 days. Obviously media players and camera makes it much shorter. This point was a big disappointment for me. Added later: It seems I underestimated the battery. When it came to the last bar in the indicator, I took it as the charging point. But the phone cleanly manages more than a day with it! So total more than three days , that's good!

Conclusion: I strongly recommend this phone. Like one reviewer said, this phone has looks well above its class and I would say, have performance in par with any other phone in its class. But you can have problems with themes and java applications.