Samsung J700

Editor's Review of the J700

The Samsung J700 is a low end slider phone from Samsung. Although relatively basic in its features, the J700 is quickly becoming a very popular mobile phone handset because of its smart design and great low price tag.

The Samsung J700 looks much like the other recent slider phones, and that includes the luxury Ultra range from Samsung. Measuring 99.5 x 48 x 14.8 mm the J700 is not the smallest Samsung slider mobile phone around, but it is still slim and comfortably pocked sized and there are plenty of clumpier slider phones than this one. Weighing in at just 92g, it is lightweight and easy to handle. The grey and black exterior gives it a very smart look and on the back of the phone there is nothing visible when the slider is closed although it the plastic look on the back shows the price range. There are some corners cut compared to the Ultra range, but they're not easy to notice. The glass look cover on the phone is actually plastic that is somewhat prone to scratches.

On the front of the Samsung J700 is a 2 inch TFT LCD display with 65,536 colours and 128 x 160 resolution. It's that resolution that lets the J700 down more than anything else, because it's not enough for a 2 inch colour screen and makes the display look pretty poor when compared with some similar looking mobile phones and definitely compared to other Samsung sliders. This is even visible when browsing the menu, not just when taking photos and handling images.

Beneath the screen is an iPod style jog wheel with a select button in the middle. This is pretty sensitive but it made scrolling down menus very fast and only took a few minutes to get used to. Either side of the jog wheel are smart silver coloured circular select/contextual buttons. Below these are the three Call, Cancel and Hang Up buttons with discreet symbols on them. The phone slides open smoothly to reveal a standard 3x4 keypad with relatively large keys and a standard Samsung look and layout.

Open the Samsung J700 and on the back you will then see the lens for the integrated 1.3 megapixel camera. It's enough for basic shots of scenery or of non moving items, but other than that the camera isn't great. There's no flash and the 12x digital zoom seems unnecessary considering the 1.3 megapixels. There are however a few functions to change white balance and daytime/nightime settings which can offer some improvement to the output. The J700 can also record videos but these are extremely low quality. We would like to have seen a similar camera to the Nokia 6300 with 2 megapixels and a flash as this was Nokia's nearest thing to a decent low end phone, although to be fair to this is a significantly cheaper phone than the 6300 was when it was first released.

As has become so standard now, the Samsung J700 offers a decent media player supporting MP3, AAC, AAC+, e-AAC+ and WMA in music as well as MPEG4 and H.263 in video. The J700 has the same proprietary plug for headphones as all other Samsung slider mobile phones but the headphones are included in the box, and they're quite good. You can also play music through the speaker on the phone. Unusually for a phone of this price, the phone has an FM Radio, which although lacks RDS for displaying track information, delivered a high quality sound. The 10MB internal memory is not much to speak of but the J700 has a MicroSD slot for additional external memory.

Referring to the Samsung J700 is really in comparison to contract mobile phones, rather than to the basic pay as you go phones. It still supports SMS and MMS as standard and has predictive text input. It has bluetooth connectivity for handsfree kits and USB connectivity for transferring files and syncing with a computer. The software includes a calendar, to do list, time display in different timezones, alarm clock, currency converter, calculator and timer. So all the features that are taken for granted are still present.

Reliability is the Samsung J700's strong point. Firstly it's quite a tough handset that is resilient to falls. Unlike the disappointing Samsung U600, the J700 never crashed or froze while we were testing it. We tried hard, but it was always fine. That said, it doesn't allow for multiple applications to be run at one time. It is a tri band mobile phone that also has EDGE for faster web browsing although the web browsing feature should not be relied on at all, as it didn't always cooperate with larger websites.

Overall, we really liked the Samsung J700. Lots of compromises have been made to create this package with such a low price tag, but if you want a good looking phone that handles the basics well and does OK in terms of music and a simple camera, then this is the phone for you. If you need a high quality camera or want to browse the web from your phone, we'd suggest you look for a higher end mobile phone.