My girlfriend just got a Samsung U700 mobilephone today — it looks pretty great and feels much like the Samsun U600 and the two phones, I assume, are basicly the same. There are a few major differences, most of them are improvements to the U700 over the U600.
First of all, the U700 has two cameras — the classical back camera, and a front camera as seen on a lot of 3G phones. That’s another thing about the U700 — it’s a 3G phone, meaning it has a lot more bandwidth available (if you need it).
The userinterface of the U700 is a lot more sleak than that of the U600, except that Bluetooth settings are no longer in the main menu, but is part of a submenu of the menuitem “Settings” in the main menu. Considering how often most people need to access these settings, I can understand why it isn’t in the main menu, but hiding it in a second level submenu, is too far away.
Now for the really bad stuff. The U700 only plays MIDI files as ringtones. Yeap. No MP3, OGG or WMA. Not even WAV. Nothing other than MIDI. I haven’t had a camera phone — ever — that didn’t play at least two lossy formats as ringtones. It plays WMA and MP3 allright, just not as anything but music. The U600 plays MP3 and WMA (at least) pretty darn well in all areas and it’s not like it’s more capable in any area than the U700 so I’m really puzzled just what Samsung was thinking when they decided to remove suppor to use any sound format that the phone plays, except midi from the supported formats of the ring tone player. It just doesn’t make sense. And no, I didn’t just give it a go and see if I was lucky. I read the manual carefully, checked for updates on Samsungs homepage and called technical support — the manuals didn’t mention supported formats at all, and technical support responded that it simply doesn’y play anything but midi.
Well, even with this in mind, I think it’s a pretty great phone. At least, it looks great.
