Samsung SPH-i700 Smartphone
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- Processor: 300 MHz Intel XScale
- Installed Memory: 64 MB
- Design: Mobile
- Style: Smartphone, Touch Screen
- Network Type: GPRS
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Convergence device that forgot it's purpose
Pros
Large bright screen, pretty good PDA functionality, syncs well with Outlook
Cons
Horrible phone functionality, very large, issues with hardware buttons
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
There are far better PDAs and far better phones -- this is not a good combination of the two.
The idea behind creating a phone and PDA combination device was that a person could carry only one device. But if your only cell phone thinks it's only a PDA, you've got trouble.
Why I Got It
When my Samsung SCH-I600 stopped working, I called up my phone insurance company and asked for a replacement. This phone came instead and after much wrangling with the company (they said my contract allowed them to replace my phone with a phone of "similar features and functionality"), I had a new phone.
The I600 was a decent phone but had it's flaws. However, it generally did what I wanted pretty well: operated as a phone first, and held all my contacts and appointments synced from Outlook. The I700 is more of a PDA first, though it's sold as a phone.
Physical Layout
The phone is enormous. It's five inches long, not including the antenna. This makes the screen very large, since there is only a small set of four buttons and a directional pad at the bottom. It can be slipped into a coat or back pocket since it's also quite thin, but holding it up to your ear looks a little silly.
Screen quality is good. It's bright and clear. It would be nice, however, to be able to set it to landscape for some things. Some applications do that internally, but Palm's built-in screen orientation is much better.
Hardware Buttons
The buttons on the side include camera, volume, phone on/off, and backlight on/off. I'm continuing to find the side buttons on phones to be problematic since I'll frequently grab the phone there. When in the hand, however, it is nice to have quick access to volume, for example.
The problem the buttons, however, is that they tend to stop working. I haven't researched this problem, so there may be a fix, but it's incredibly annoying. The only button that works all the time (and there are still issues) is the phone on/off button. The rest frequently stop responding to presses. A phone call comes in, I'd like to press the "talk" button. But it's not responding. Missed call?
Update: While writing this review, I discovered a new problem. Sometimes when the hardware buttons are working and you press one, the phone turns off.
The phone on/off button has its own issues. First of all, on/off is not quite the same as what you might be use to. In other phones, off means powered down and not receiving a signal. With this phone, off is like sleep. The screen is off but the phone is still receiving a signal and will wake up for phone calls. (But not appointments or alarms -- frustrating.) Other than removing the battery, I couldn't find a way to actually turn the phone completely off.
There is a setting that allows only the power button to wake the phone from this standby state. It's this phone's version of a key lock. But here's the rub. Consistently with few exceptions, when I press the power button, the phone wakes up briefly, the screen lights up, and then it goes back to sleep. So, each time I want to wake the phone, I have to press the power button twice. And not too fast, either. Two presses too close together will not wake the phone.
Battery Life
One good thing about standby is that it conserves quite a bit of battery life. Considering the large, bright screen, the I700 has the potential to chew through batteries quickly. But by using standby regularly, I can get much more life out of this phone than I could with the I600, which barely lasted a day with the slim battery on. It's still nothing to cheer about it but it'll now last a quick 2-day business trip without draining.
However, you have to guess about it. There is no indicator on the "Today" screen (the phone's Home) to tell you how much juice you have left. You can find out either by a) going into a deep menu of settings to find out, or b) installing a separate program that will put and indicator somewhere. The latter is acceptable but what were they thinking by not putting a battery indicator in the top bar??
Phone Functionality
Since there are very few hardware buttons, interacting with the phone is done almost entirely on the touch screen. At first, this sounded worse than it turned out to be but it's still awkward.
Dialing the phone means going to the phone application and pressing the nicely sized buttons on the screen. However, since I tend to make calls while walking around carrying my briefcase, I can't pull out the stylus to navigate the screen and end up using my thumb. This is probably not good for the screen and tends to get it dirty fast.
Receiving calls is much, much worse. Unless you're in the phone application, when a call comes in, a small "pop-up" appears from the top of the screen with a few meaningless icons, small wording telling you who is calling, and two small buttons to "Answer" or "Ignore" the call. These buttons are awful! They are a really small target to hit with a thumbnail and often don't accept my clicks so the phone keeps ringing and my anxiety about getting the call in time keeps rising. It is some of the worst design I've ever seen.
Call Volume and Reception
Incoming volume is loud and clear. I've had no complaints on outgoing volume and a few people were unaware I was on a cell phone. Reception seems to be good. No complaints.
Calendar and Contacts
On my I600, one thing that always annoyed me was that the Home screen would only show one upcoming appointment at a time. The I700 does a much better job of this, showing several appointments at a time, giving me a good look at the day or next couple days. Interacting with the calendar will feel very comfortable if you're an Outlook fan like me. Because of the large screen, the views are extremely similar to the desktop version.
The address book I'm less fond of. I can't put my finger on it, but when using it to look up numbers to call, I find it very difficult to use. It could be again the "thumbnail" input device is clumsy and I wish there were a way to find contacts using the keypad. I also think the layout of contact records isn't very good. The labels for fields are on the right-hand side, right-aligned, where the fields themselves are on the left-hand side, left-aligned. Scanning for a certain piece of data in a larger record is very slow and I'm not sure why they went away from the traditional layout of label then field.
Syncing with Outlook, once you can get ActiveSync to work properly, is quite good. It's really nice to have a full set of data from Outlook on your phone.
Email and Web
I haven't used these at all on the phone. I find surfing the web far too slow on a phone and really never need it. Email is also slow to download and given the quantity of mail I receive, is not that useful. I prefer to wait until I'm near a connection and download email to my laptop. So you'll have to rely on other reviewers to describe that.
Games, Music, and Other Applications
My phone is woefully lacking in addons. Since it's powered by Windows Mobile, I have the ability to add all sorts of neat things to it: games, productivity apps, street maps ... there are entire sites dedicated to the software for these phones. It's a really nice idea that I haven't taken much advantage of.
The two things I do use are games (while waiting in line or on the plane) and music (though less so since I got an iPod Nano). Games are fun. Playing Solitaire with the stylus goes fast and is a whole lot less clumsy than press 6 and then 4 to move a card. There are tons of really advanced games for the phone that, again, I haven't gotten around to downloading.
Music functionality is not terrible. The sound through the included headphones (which double as a mediocre handsfree) is reasonable. Windows Media Player doesn't use the ID3 tags very well (or at all) and there is no library aside from the file name and file structure. You're limited to whatever you can fit on an SD card or squeeze onto the phone's unused memory. It's not really an MP3 player -- more like a savior when you're desperate for music.
It plays movies but not MPEG movies. You have to download another application or convert your movies to WMV. When it plays movies, the screen looks great.
Camera
It takes terrible pictures. No other way to say it. I have a feeling it was added on because camera phones are so popular, but little thought was actually put into making it a good camera phone. I've used it occasionally to take snapshots but they're so grainy that they look like abstract art. At best, it's a useless appendage.
Conclusion
I am not a fan of this phone, if that weren't obvious. I think it tries to do too much for a phone and does it very poorly. It's a decent PDA, but there are much better (and cheaper) PDAs out there. I miss the keypad, though if they had made the onscreen targets (buttons, etc.) larger and oriented towards fingernail usage, it might have been acceptable.
Why I Got It
When my Samsung SCH-I600 stopped working, I called up my phone insurance company and asked for a replacement. This phone came instead and after much wrangling with the company (they said my contract allowed them to replace my phone with a phone of "similar features and functionality"), I had a new phone.
The I600 was a decent phone but had it's flaws. However, it generally did what I wanted pretty well: operated as a phone first, and held all my contacts and appointments synced from Outlook. The I700 is more of a PDA first, though it's sold as a phone.
Physical Layout
The phone is enormous. It's five inches long, not including the antenna. This makes the screen very large, since there is only a small set of four buttons and a directional pad at the bottom. It can be slipped into a coat or back pocket since it's also quite thin, but holding it up to your ear looks a little silly.
Screen quality is good. It's bright and clear. It would be nice, however, to be able to set it to landscape for some things. Some applications do that internally, but Palm's built-in screen orientation is much better.
Hardware Buttons
The buttons on the side include camera, volume, phone on/off, and backlight on/off. I'm continuing to find the side buttons on phones to be problematic since I'll frequently grab the phone there. When in the hand, however, it is nice to have quick access to volume, for example.
The problem the buttons, however, is that they tend to stop working. I haven't researched this problem, so there may be a fix, but it's incredibly annoying. The only button that works all the time (and there are still issues) is the phone on/off button. The rest frequently stop responding to presses. A phone call comes in, I'd like to press the "talk" button. But it's not responding. Missed call?
Update: While writing this review, I discovered a new problem. Sometimes when the hardware buttons are working and you press one, the phone turns off.
The phone on/off button has its own issues. First of all, on/off is not quite the same as what you might be use to. In other phones, off means powered down and not receiving a signal. With this phone, off is like sleep. The screen is off but the phone is still receiving a signal and will wake up for phone calls. (But not appointments or alarms -- frustrating.) Other than removing the battery, I couldn't find a way to actually turn the phone completely off.
There is a setting that allows only the power button to wake the phone from this standby state. It's this phone's version of a key lock. But here's the rub. Consistently with few exceptions, when I press the power button, the phone wakes up briefly, the screen lights up, and then it goes back to sleep. So, each time I want to wake the phone, I have to press the power button twice. And not too fast, either. Two presses too close together will not wake the phone.
Battery Life
One good thing about standby is that it conserves quite a bit of battery life. Considering the large, bright screen, the I700 has the potential to chew through batteries quickly. But by using standby regularly, I can get much more life out of this phone than I could with the I600, which barely lasted a day with the slim battery on. It's still nothing to cheer about it but it'll now last a quick 2-day business trip without draining.
However, you have to guess about it. There is no indicator on the "Today" screen (the phone's Home) to tell you how much juice you have left. You can find out either by a) going into a deep menu of settings to find out, or b) installing a separate program that will put and indicator somewhere. The latter is acceptable but what were they thinking by not putting a battery indicator in the top bar??
Phone Functionality
Since there are very few hardware buttons, interacting with the phone is done almost entirely on the touch screen. At first, this sounded worse than it turned out to be but it's still awkward.
Dialing the phone means going to the phone application and pressing the nicely sized buttons on the screen. However, since I tend to make calls while walking around carrying my briefcase, I can't pull out the stylus to navigate the screen and end up using my thumb. This is probably not good for the screen and tends to get it dirty fast.
Receiving calls is much, much worse. Unless you're in the phone application, when a call comes in, a small "pop-up" appears from the top of the screen with a few meaningless icons, small wording telling you who is calling, and two small buttons to "Answer" or "Ignore" the call. These buttons are awful! They are a really small target to hit with a thumbnail and often don't accept my clicks so the phone keeps ringing and my anxiety about getting the call in time keeps rising. It is some of the worst design I've ever seen.
Call Volume and Reception
Incoming volume is loud and clear. I've had no complaints on outgoing volume and a few people were unaware I was on a cell phone. Reception seems to be good. No complaints.
Calendar and Contacts
On my I600, one thing that always annoyed me was that the Home screen would only show one upcoming appointment at a time. The I700 does a much better job of this, showing several appointments at a time, giving me a good look at the day or next couple days. Interacting with the calendar will feel very comfortable if you're an Outlook fan like me. Because of the large screen, the views are extremely similar to the desktop version.
The address book I'm less fond of. I can't put my finger on it, but when using it to look up numbers to call, I find it very difficult to use. It could be again the "thumbnail" input device is clumsy and I wish there were a way to find contacts using the keypad. I also think the layout of contact records isn't very good. The labels for fields are on the right-hand side, right-aligned, where the fields themselves are on the left-hand side, left-aligned. Scanning for a certain piece of data in a larger record is very slow and I'm not sure why they went away from the traditional layout of label then field.
Syncing with Outlook, once you can get ActiveSync to work properly, is quite good. It's really nice to have a full set of data from Outlook on your phone.
Email and Web
I haven't used these at all on the phone. I find surfing the web far too slow on a phone and really never need it. Email is also slow to download and given the quantity of mail I receive, is not that useful. I prefer to wait until I'm near a connection and download email to my laptop. So you'll have to rely on other reviewers to describe that.
Games, Music, and Other Applications
My phone is woefully lacking in addons. Since it's powered by Windows Mobile, I have the ability to add all sorts of neat things to it: games, productivity apps, street maps ... there are entire sites dedicated to the software for these phones. It's a really nice idea that I haven't taken much advantage of.
The two things I do use are games (while waiting in line or on the plane) and music (though less so since I got an iPod Nano). Games are fun. Playing Solitaire with the stylus goes fast and is a whole lot less clumsy than press 6 and then 4 to move a card. There are tons of really advanced games for the phone that, again, I haven't gotten around to downloading.
Music functionality is not terrible. The sound through the included headphones (which double as a mediocre handsfree) is reasonable. Windows Media Player doesn't use the ID3 tags very well (or at all) and there is no library aside from the file name and file structure. You're limited to whatever you can fit on an SD card or squeeze onto the phone's unused memory. It's not really an MP3 player -- more like a savior when you're desperate for music.
It plays movies but not MPEG movies. You have to download another application or convert your movies to WMV. When it plays movies, the screen looks great.
Camera
It takes terrible pictures. No other way to say it. I have a feeling it was added on because camera phones are so popular, but little thought was actually put into making it a good camera phone. I've used it occasionally to take snapshots but they're so grainy that they look like abstract art. At best, it's a useless appendage.
Conclusion
I am not a fan of this phone, if that weren't obvious. I think it tries to do too much for a phone and does it very poorly. It's a decent PDA, but there are much better (and cheaper) PDAs out there. I miss the keypad, though if they had made the onscreen targets (buttons, etc.) larger and oriented towards fingernail usage, it might have been acceptable.
