Samsung L700 Review

The Samsung L700 is a mid range phone but offers solid features for its price. It has a stylish metallic look, remniscent of many other Samsung phones. Samsung has never quite been able to stand up to Nokia or Sony Ericsson or even Motorola in the mid range segment. But it seems to be trying hard with many launches in this segment in the past few months. In this review we check out if it’s latest salvo in the mid range smart phone war actually deserves to win over the segment. It doesn’t have perfect specs but does have lots of useful features which you would expect in this range. It tops this with absolutely sturdy build quality and a great metallic feel. It competes head on with the Nokia 3120 classic and the Sony Ericsson S500 and W580i.

Samsung L700 Specifications:

• Dimensions : 109 x 46 x 12.8 mm
• Weight : 107 gms
• Display : 2.1″ TFT, 256K Colors, 176 x 220 pixels
• Camera : 2 MP Cam, 1600 x 1200 pixels, Flash, Video recordingvideocall camera
• Memory : 40 MB Internal memory
• Connectivity : GPRS Class 10, EDGE Class 10, 3G, USB 2.0
• Bluetooth : Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP

Other Features: Java MIDP 2.0, MP3/AAC/eAAC+/WMA player, MPEG4/3GP player, FM radio with RDS, Office Document viewer, Organizer, xHTML Web Browser

Design and Display:

The Samsung L700 has a decent looking design mostly comprised of metal. The design isn’t very appealing and looks rather bland but the metallic looks are very promising. It gives an overall sturdy feel to the mobile and that reflects in its build quality. It has dimensions of 109 x 46 x 12.8 mm which are quite compact, though not exactly slim. It weighs just 107 gms which is quite good considering it is mostly made of metal. It is a far cry from the usual stylish and slim phones and is rather robust and utilitarian phones. The phone looks like it can be alternately used as projectile weapon in case the cell phone part doesn’t quite suit you. The keypad and the whole phone has a very comfortable and ergonomic feel to it. If you can compromise on style, this phone won’t disappoint you at all in terms of design, the build quality is superb.

The Samsung L700 sports a 2.1″ LCD display with a resolution of just 176 x 220 pixels. The low resolution is a huge letdown and lowers the display quality. Most other phones in this range with screen sizes smaller than the Samsung L700 also sport 16M color displays. The display has superb brightness and contrast levels but the low resolution just doesn’t feel right.

On the front face of the phone, there is the 2.1″ display with the secondary cam and ear piece, and the superb metallic keypad below it. The keys are quite comfortable and spaced out and offer good feedback. The D Pad is quite good to use and responsive. On the right is the common connectivity port which can be used to connect the charger, USB cable and headset. It also sports a volume rocker on the right side. The left side sports a micro SD slot and the camera shutter key. The top and bottom of the phone are bare with almost no ports or buttons. The back of the phone houses the 2.0 MP camera and the LED flash.

Interface and Multimedia Capabilities:

The user interface is the typical Samsung interface with a few improvements - which means downright simple and easy to use, in fact it is so simple that it feels stupid at some point. The interface is very fast and responsive with minimal animations thrown in. It is stripped of most interface enhancements including the cool transition effects as well as themes. Even the basic interfaec is not as refined as Sony Ericsson’s and is way behind Nokia’s. It is pretty zippy and fast though. It has a standard file manager using which you can access the different media types easily. The Gallery application is integrated into the file manager.

The Samsung L700 is not a branded as a music phone but does farely well in the music department as well. The music quality is good and the speaker volume is loud too. The music player interface is very intuitive and offers all the features that any good interface would. You can fully control your music playback using the D Pad. The music player supports playlist creation, podcasts and album art as well. You can sort your music according to artist, album, genre, composer and recently played. The

The video playback in the Samsung L700 is decent, the video quality is good and you can easily fast forward or rewind the videos. You can also view them fullscreen. The L700 comes with a built in FM Radio with RDS support. The FM reception is good and thanks to the RDS support, you can view track and channel information on your handset.

Camera and Other Features:

The Samsung L700 comes with a 2 MP camera with a maximum image resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels. It doesn’t have autofocus but does come with a LED flash for night shots. The camera interface is standard and easy to use and offers a wide range of options to customize from - picture size, mode, advanced color effects, white balance etc. The image quality is nice and sharp with good and accurate color reproduction. There is very less noise in any given pic under any conditions. The L700 also supports video recording in QCIF resolutions at 15 FPS in the very popular 3GP format. The video recording quality is not much to speak of.

The Samsung L700 also has office document viewing support. It also ahs a customized Netfront 3.4 browser built in which is rather underpowered. It also has all the other standard additional features like Calendar, To Do list, voice recorder etc. It is powered by a 960 mAh battery which easily lasts for about 2 - 3 days with moderate usage. It offers nice call reception quality and has good speaker volume levels. It can outshine quite a few biggies in terms of sound volume if not in terms of audio quality.

Pros:

• Sturdy Build Quality with Metallic body
• Inexpensive

Cons:

• Low Display Resolution
• Poor Video Recording quality

Conclusion:

The Samsung L700 is a good buy considering it’s features. It does miss out on many aspects but is definitely worth it’s asking price if you want a nice, sturdy phone with decent features built in. It performs most of the smart phone functions decently, if not superbly.

Our Rating: 3.25 / 5.