A Year on - My Samsung E700 (Samsung SGH-E700)

Member Name: Cat2005

Product:	Samsung SGH-E700
Date:	04/05/05 (1369 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks good, Lots of camera features

Disadvantages: Can scratch easily

I have had this phone for exactly a year today and I am still very happy with it. It has everything I need in a phone, looks good and does the job well.

**Looks - external**

The Samsung E700 is a small flip phone. It is an attractive silver and dark blue colour with a front LCD screen. The name 'Samsung' is printed in shiny silver on the front just below the screen. Above the screen is the camera lens. On the side there are two buttons, the left button controls the volume of the speaker and the keys, and the other is for the camera self-shot mode (more on that later). There is also a connection for a hands free headset on the side as well, this has a silver cover that can be rotated to reveal the opening. On the bottom there is the charger connection, covered by a removable rubber covering, and on the left side there is the infra red transmitter & receiver.

The external screen shows you the time, date, battery life, signal, whether the phone is muted or not and whether you have a call or message. The screen does not stay on all the time, it will stay on for approximately 15 seconds after closing the phone, then the screen saver will kick in. My screensaver is the clock, which flashes up every few seconds. This can be changed to flashing coloured blobs, or a scrolling clock.

**Looks - internal**

The internal colour of the phone is a matt silver colour. The buttons are black with white writing (apart from the green "answer call" button and the red "hang up" buttons). The internal screen takes up most of the top half of the phone, where the speaker is also located. The brand name is embossed below the screen in a shiny silver colour.

The wallpaper of the screen can be changed to anything you like. You can use any of your photos as wallpaper, or use the supplied ones. You can also download wallpapers. Some of the supplied wallpapers even move, I like the pelican one the best. The screen shows you the date, time, network, battery life, mute symbol and two soft key options (which are defaulted at Menu and Phonebook). You can move the text around the screen and change the colour and style of the text.

The lower half of the phone has the buttons, all the usual numbers and symbols, as well as two soft keys and a frequent functions button. This is a square button, the centre of which is a blue button that connects you to the WAP service. The 4 sides of the square each have a function - write text message, calendar, ring tone options and camera. These are really useful as you don't have to go through all the menus to get to these common functions. I find the write message one the most useful as it takes you straight into a blank text message. This square is surrounded by a blue border which looks really stylish.

**Features**

This phone has the following features:

Camera
MMS (stores 150)
SMS (stores 200)
Customisable ring tones
WAP
Java games

**Camera**

The camera has lots of extra features that can produce some really cool pictures. For example you can select Grey, Negative, Sepia, Emboss or Sketch. My favourite is emboss which makes the picture look like a raised drawing. You can also take mirrored, flipped or self-shots (for this you hold the camera pointing to yourself and you can see the picture on the front screen). The camera can also be set to take multi shots, which takes a number of shots in quick succession (you can select different numbers of shots to take). Another fun feature is that you can add frames to your photo, for example faces, hearts or speech bubbles. A nice one is if you want to send someone a birthday picture there is a cake frame. The quality of picture taken by the camera can be changed. The highest quality is 640x480 on setting fine. I find this is a fairly good quality and it doesn't take up much storage space in the memory.

**Games**

The 3 games includes on the phone are Honey ball, Go hamster and Bowling. Honey ball is kind of like ping pong, you have to shoot the ball to hit the honeycomb at the top of the screen. Go hamster is a bit like Pac man and Bowling is just as you would expect - either play the computer or play two player.

There are also 2 games in the Java world menu - Snowball fight and Bubble smile, both are quite simple. Snowball fight basically involves dodging the snowballs thrown at you in different levels, and in Bubble smile you have to rotate the bubbles to get 3 the same next to each other, then they disappear.

**Other useful features**

The best thing I like about this phone is that you can assign different ring tones to different people. This way you always know who is calling you before even looking at the phone. There is also an organiser section, which includes a calendar, to do list, alarms, calculator, stopwatch, conversions and a timer.

I'm sure I have missed out some of the features on this phone, but overall it is an excellent phone and even a year on it still has everything I need. I would definitely recommend it.

Summary: