Sony Ericsson G700 Review
by krazzy
The G700 is one of the two newest smartphones launched by Sony Ericsson (the other being G900), running the Symbian UIQ 3 operating system. It comes in a slim, stylish casing with a large 2.4" touch sensitive display and a standard keypad like any other regular Sony Ericsson phone. It also packs in a 3.2 megapixel camera and the Walkman 3 player inside. So lets get on with the review.by krazzy
Design & Construction:
One look at G700 and you'll be forgiven to think it as any other standard SE phone instead of a UIQ smartphone. The reason for that is the complete absence of features that were found on previous UIQ phones and inclusion of some new ones. For starters, the G700 is slim, exceptionally slim for a phone that packs so much under its hood. Then it's the colour, Silk Bronze as SE likes to call it, is also a far cry from the silver and grey that would've usually been expected. It's obvious that this smartphone is designed to look stylish and appeal not just to men, but to women as well. Then there is the absence of a QWERTY keypad and the Jog-dial. SE had previously dumped it's QWERTY keypad in it's W950i and W960i, but this is the first time ever that they've completely dumped their Jog-dial and instead replaced it with a solution that would be more welcoming to newbies to UIQ. The G700 and G900 have a 5 way D-pad and a standard T9 keypad. But there is something exclusive to the G700 which even the G900 lacks, and those are the two soft keys below the display.
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As for the construction, the phone is solidly built and produces no creaks and groans when pressed hard. The phone also feels very light in the hand (light by smartphone standards, that is). One thing to note is the unnecessary amount of wrestling required to remove the rear cover. It could have been made easier to remove. The quality of plastics used is very good and looks worth the price. The screen protector found on the phone is a bit too long, covering the navigation keys along with the display.
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The front of the phone has the in-call speaker at the top in the centre and on it's left is the video call camera. Right below is the display. Below that is the navigation keys which includes the two soft keys, the D-pad and the SE-typical back and Clear key. Then there are two shortcut keys for the messaging app and the notes app. Below is the standard T9 keypad. On the left of the phone is the keypad/touchscreen lock key and below is the M2 card slot (accepts upto 8 GB M2 cards) and right above it is the SE universal Fast-Port. There is also a small LED that blinks in green whenever a call or message arrives and remains on when the phone is charging. On the bottom is the microphone. On the right is the volume/zoom key and below is the camera shutter key. On the top is the power key and the stylus slot. The rear houses the sole loudspeaker at the bottom and a 3.2 MP camera lens and twin LED lights.
Keypad:
As already mentioned, the G700 has a regular SE phone keypad with two additional shortcut keys. All the keys on the phone are a joy to use and give no problems at all. They have adequate travel and give good feedback when pressed. The camera key is a bit too soft though and there are instances where the camera app is launched accidentally.
Display:
The phone has a large 2.4" 262k, QVGA touch sensitive display. The display is nice and bright and produces good colours. As seen in the pic, it is brighter than my 5700's display at full brightness. The touch screen's sensitivity is good enough and the display legibility under direct sunlight is also quite good.
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Text Input:
G700 supports multiple ways to input text, four to be precise- standard multi-tap, T9, handwriting recognition and on-screen QWERTY keys. The standard keys work as expected and myself being more used to this method of input, I found this to be the fastest. Handwriting recognition also works well but one need to get used to it. Also it would've been nicer if it could recognize entire words instead of single characters. On-screen QWERTY is also nice but I found some characters to be missing, like "&" for example. On has to dig deeper in the menu to find these extra characters. The multiple input methods are a nice touch and one can use the method that one is more comfortable with. Although it must be said that nothing beats a full QWERTY keypad and had it been present, it'd have easily been the fastest at entering text.
Calling & Messaging:
The call quality is excellent on the phone. Both the caller and the called can hear each other perfectly. Signal reception is also good enough. The Contacts app is also good enough. One can enter multiple numbers per contact and assign a picture and a ringtone and stuff like that. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary here and everything that one would expect. Ditto about the messaging app.
UI Design, Speed & Multitasking:
The UI of the G700 is a typical SE UIQ. Firstly on the standby screen one can put a row of shortcut icons at the bottom and then scroll through them. This contains stuff like the music player, the alarm, bookmarks, RSS feeds and some other shortcuts. This is the default arrangement. One can also select Business view which puts a number of shortcut icons on the screen and a Today's option, as in P1i. Then there is also the option to keep the screen blank and display a large clock.
Entering the menu shows up a grid of 9 icons- Organizer, Internet, Entertainment, Calendar, Messaging, Media, Calls, Contacts and Settings. Organizer has stuff like File Manager, Tasks, Notes, Time & Alarm, Torch Calculator, Converter, Quick Office, PDF+ and stuff like that. Entertainment has stuff like Camera, FM radio, TrackID, Playnow and the games and installed Apps. Internet is the Opera browser. Media is where one can find all the photos, videos and the music. It has the new PSP style menu The player is also what I believe the new Walkman 3 player.
The speed of the UI is disappointing. Firstly the phone takes ages to start. Then even after starting it takes a while to come to it's senses. After that opening apps takes quite a while. I know smartphones can be slow, but this seems a bit too much. It's nowhere near the speed of my 5700. I am hoping a firmware update will solve this.
Another thing is that the apps don't close when you press close. I guess this is the standard UIQ behaviour but being used to S60, where Close means Close and not minimize, this is a bit annoying. Every time I have to open up the task manager to find and close apps. Luckily the phone has lots of RAM to play with (60mb available at startup), so even if a lot of apps are running in the background, one will not notice it.
Java apps works fast on this phone, even faster then my 5700. While Opera Mini takes a while to register clicks on the 5700, on the G700, the response is instantaneous.
Applications:
The phone comes with a standard suite of UIQ apps. There is however a new one called Notes. This app also gets it's own shortcut key on the keypad to stress it's importance. One can create new sticky notes and scribble anything on them. One can add text to the note, change the note colour or add an alarm. The notes can be classified as Business, Urgent, Personal and Unfiled. They can be sent over Bluetooth or MMS. That's about it. It's nice, but nothing too special.
For business use there is the usual Quickoffice and PDF+ for viewing all the document files. Then there is the (quite capable) Opera Mobile browser. Browsing the web with the TS is fun, but is not fun over GPRS. It desperately needs 3G (even EDGE would've been fine had it been present). There is also a Blackberry Connect app, which finds it's name on the phone's box as well which suggests it's something special. Anyway I have no use for it.
For fun there is the TrackID feature, now slowly making its appearance in non-Walkman phones. It is quite a useful feature and works wonderfully well and manages to recognize all International as well Indian tracks. Then there is the (absolutely useless) PlayNow app. There are two games, The Sims and Sudoku, both Java.
All other apps are the usual SE/UIQ fare. Nothing special there.
Multimedia:
The media menu on the phone is where one listen to the music and watch videos and stuff. As said earlier, the interface reminds of the PSP/PS3 interface. The music player supports a variety of formats. One can sort the music by the usual album, artist, tracks, composer and stuff. The player interface is also good and the on-screen play/pause/ff/rew buttons look a lot like the ones on the iPhone/iPod Touch. The album art can be enlarged a little by tapping it. There are a lot of equalizer presets available, including the Mega Bass. But I didn't find an option to edit the equalizer to my preference. The sound quality is very good, as good as any Walkman phone out there, and the max volume is also sufficient. However the max volume drops a lot when you use the Mega Bass preset, probably because the phone would not be able to handle all the bass at very high volume without producing distortion. There is no stereo widening here however, not that I care since I never really liked that feature.
The supplied headset, HPM-62, produces a very mediocre sound. It is recommended to get the HPM-70 headset if you are serious about the sound quality. The phone also supports A2DP profile for using bluetooth stereo headsets.
Listening through the loudspeaker isn't a pleasant experience though. It's loud, as loud as my stereo speaker enabled 5700, but cannot match it for quality. Where the 5700 manages to output smooth, quality sound with good bass and volume, the G700 shrieks into your ears, with exaggerated treble and virtually no bass to speak of. The loudspeaker also gets a bit muffled when placed on a surface.
There is also a FM radio on board. It also supports RDS. However the fm sensitivity is far from strong, finding it difficult to catch a decent signal indoors. In comparison the radio on my 5700 is much stronger, working well indoors as well. A good feature of UIQ phones is that the equalizers are available wherever sound is played, including the radio. This is something that all others lack.
The video player is decent. One can view .3gp and .mp4 videos on it in full screen. The player did manage to play a 30fps QVGA video recorded by a K850i quite smoothly but didn't play 30fps VGA video recorded by the N95 at all.
The image viewer is also decent. But image opening is a bit slow. Opening 3 mp images captured phones camera itself is a bit sluggish. It could've benefited with a bit more horsepower.
The camera on the phone is a 3 megapixel CMOS sensor with fixed focus and twin LED lamps for low light conditions. The lens is exposed and hence attracts fingerprints and gets smudged. The quality of the images is quite good, most notably the colours which are very vibrant (maybe a bit too vibrant for some). The contrast seems a bit too high as well. The lack of auto-focus means there won't be any decent macros. In the dark, the noise is well under control and the twin LED lights help. The video recording quality is nothing to write home about though. It's jerky and pixellated and best unused.
Camera Samples: (Sorry for the less number of pics. It's raining outside and I hate to step outside in the rains. Taken these from the window. Probably will add more later)
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Connectivity:
The phone supports Bluetooth v2.0, GPRS, UMTS and USB 2.0. No EDGE (big loss here in India
) and no Infrared (what's that supposed to be? ). The bluetooth works well and so does everything else. USB transfers could've been faster though. Battery Life:
It lasts a couple of days with normal use. With GPRS, the battery only lasts a single day. Not impressive.
Conclusion:
The G700 is a mixed bag. It's strong points are a good, slim design, large, bright display and capable multimedia performance. However it loses with a slow UI speed, unimpressive battery life and lack of vital features like wi-fi, EDGE, autofocus and a QWERTY keyboard. So in the end, the G700 neither comes across as a strong business phone nor a strong multimedia phone. It does manages to get adequate number of features from both the camps and packs it in a slim, attractive case at an affordable price. And if one must have those features, there is always the P1i or the G900. In the end , I'll give it a 'Recommended' badge because it's advantages far outweigh it's disadvantages.
Sony Ericsson G700
+ Good design
+ Slim and light weight
+ Large and bright QVGA display
+ Great keypad
+ Good multimedia performance
+ Sizeable built-in memory and RAM
+ Well priced
- Slow UI
- No EDGE, Wi-Fi
- Camera lacks auto-focus
- Small stylus is a bit uncomfortable
- Unimpressive battery life
Total Rating: 8/10
Price: 15k
[In-box contents: G700 phone, battery, charger, headset, USB cable, extra stylus, 1GB M2 card, PC suite CD and User guide.]
