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Review by Prasad Naik
The Sony Ericsson 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.
In-box contents
Sony Ericsson G700 phone, battery, charger, headset, USB cable, extra stylus, 1GB M2 card, PC suite CD and User guide
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.
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.
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.
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)
Connectivity:
The phone supports Bluetooth v2.0, GPRS, UMTS and USB 2.0. No EDGE and no Infrared. 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 - Verdict
+ 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
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