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Sony Ericsson S700 Review

Planned to be released almost at the same time as the Sony Ericsson K700 it has a lot of similarities with this model and contrary to the impression created by many amature reviewers the Sony Ericsson S700 is not a replacement for PDA / smartphone P series line (Sony Ericsson P800 and Sony Ericsson P900). At first glance the Sony Ericsson S700 might look like a PDA but in fact it is much smaller and it seems Sony Ericsson aimed to create something rather different. From the technical point of view the Sony Ericsson S700 can not be classified as PDA phone and not even as a smartphone, in fact it is an excellent cameraphone in a very unusual package.

First let us look at the phone side of the device. The Sony Ericsson S700 is a Tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz, with support for GPRS class 10 (4+2) and WAP 2.0. Mobile connectivity is provided by supporting SMS, EMS and MMS messaging and QuickShare™. It also fully supports Java platform (MIDP 2.0) and PC connectivity via Bluetooth, infra-red (IrDA) port, RS232 or USB cable. Battery life is not so bad either for this kind of device, whith talktime up to 7 hours and tandby up to 12.5 days (300 hours) it can be sufficient even for business use. All these features are almost virtually identical to the Sony Ericsson K700 model.

The size of the Sony Ericsson S700 is a bit larger and here is where the most interesting part begins. It measures 107.5 x 49 x 24.5 mm and weighs 137 g and similarly to the Motorola V80 features an unusual rotating mechanism allowing to split open the phone by rotating the top 180 degrees to access a hidden keypad. However, perhaps trying to outsmart Motorola in terms of originality Sony Ericsson placed the point of rotation not to the top of the phone but at the bottom of it. As a result the Sony Ericsson S700 opens down (not upwards like the Motorola V80) thus creating a bit of inconvinience as the phone itself and the keypad in particular happen to be upside down in this position and has to be turned 180 degrees to operate normally (another way of opening the phone would be to twist open the back part rather than the front but one needs to use both hands to do this). So the ability to shoot the phone open in a split second which is in the heart of the rotating form factor design idea suffers slightly in this case. To be fair, in many other respects the functionality of thr Sony Ericsson S700 by far exceeds the one of the Motorola V80.

The larger size and the rotating format are both actually needed to accommodate the advanced visual features that are indeed the Uniqe Selling Point of the Sony Ericsson S700. Introducing in this phone an outstanding 262,000 colours, 240 x 320 pixel, 2.3 inch TFT display the Sony Ericsson becomes again one of the leaders in this class. The most impressive however is the camera of the Sony Ericsson S700. It is a Sony 1.3 megapixel CCD unit allowing to take pictures with max 1280 x 960 pixels resolution and equipped with an advanced 8X digital zoom. The resolution of the camera has nearly four times the number of pixels of a "standard" 640 x 480 VGA camera producing an image quality comparable to a modern digital camera. It has also a night shot mode as wel as an inbuilt photo light (flash) and a small mirror for self-portraits. And this is not all. The Sony Ericsson S700 also supports video recording allowing to take short video clips.

The Sony Ericsson S700 is an advanced Mobile Fun platform as well, offering 40 tone polyphonic ringtones and the ability to create your own ringtones with the Music DJ™ ring tone composer application. With a Hi Corp Mascot Capsule™ Engine Micro 3D Edition gaming engine , the Sony Ericsson S700 is also the ultimate gaming device and comes with embedded Java games and the capability to download more Java Games. The phone also has an inbuilt MP3 music player, mobile music service and video player supporting MPEG4 video file format.

The array of features provided by the Sony Ericsson S700 is supported with the Sony Memory Stick Duo memory card expandability allowing to add up to 128Mb of memory at a time. There is also a wide range of Bluetooth Accessories for the Sony Ericsson S700 aloowing to expand the functionality of the device even further.

Another reason not to call the Sony Ericsson S700 a PDA or smartphone style phone is that Sony Ericsson did not use Symbian OS and instead put their proprietary OS similar to the one used in Sony Ericsson T610, Sony Ericsson T630 and Sony Ericsson Z1010 models. It is too early to say if this will become a big disadvantage or will turn to be one of the advantages of the phone but sertainly it will create certain compatibility problems with Symbian software already written for many other mobiles, but ultimately this is not the point as the Sony Ericsson S700 is an advanced multimedia device and it is one of the first devices offering a proper 1.3 megapixel camera in a GSM phone on the European market.

The camera feature is indeed almost uniqe and perhaps only the Sharp GX30 offering 1 megapixel camera can compete with the Sony Ericsson S700 here.

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Sony Ericsson S700 is not available on major UK networks.
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