Eten Glofiish M700 Review

Externally M700 reminds the first Glofiish phone (X500), as well as its predecessor from the M series (M600+), being an unusual hybrid of both. Its corpus is grey and sharply pointed, which counts to the futuristic and aggressive look, contrary to the soft and rounded shapes of M600+. In a standard ‘Pocket PC bar” this is the first Eten phone equipped with a slider – pulled sideways to reveal a hardware QWERTY keyboard.

The slider does not have a supporting mechanism, so its full closing and opening can be done solely by hand. However, that is not the main inconvenience – there is a most irritating scraping at doing so. Eten simply had to apply some sort of open/close mechanism – it is indispensable for achieving a smoother slide! Almost every time some of us used it, they involuntarily pressed the ‘Voice Commands’ key – perhaps the central location of the side buttons is not quite appropriate.

It is entirely of plastic and despite having more functions than M600+, it features the same weight and is even thinner. Disposing of a real keyboard at all times, however, comes at the price of a body, thicker than that of X500. Manufacturing is ‘solid’, but unfortunately the plastic that it is made of has a slightly ‘cheap’ feel at touch.

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Being a pocket PC phone, its main navigation relies on the touch-sensitive display. It is the same as with X500: 2.8 inch size and QVGA resolution. Its brightness is comparatively high, colors tend to have a reddish tinge, but that is not a thing to worry about. At stronger daylight it is still visible, though reading on it is rendered difficult, the more so in case there is dirt on it. As with the other models, a light sensor to automatically control the display brightness is not available. We strongly believe that this feature will soon become indispensable for all higher-class phones.

As you have already noticed, the unit has two keyboards. When closed, it features six buttons, a navigation one, and five more on both sides. At the top of the front panel there are two shortcuts (to GPS and M-Desk) with changeable functions; at the bottom – the two software buttons and the answer/reject ‘receivers’. The latter, apart from being quite small in order to keep with the shape-design (the right and left curves), are rather ‘concave’ at touch because of their location between the protruding D-pad and the rounded phone edges. It makes their use displeasingly difficult; they can be pressed by the very tip of the finger only. Manufacturers must never forget the fact that these are the most frequently used phone buttons and therefore should be most convenient to press.

Despite the small size of the navigation button, its usage is trouble-free. The effortless all-directional motion can initially deceive you that the confirming D-pad button functions as a joystick, which is not the case.


On the left there is volume control rocker and just next to it – a Voice Commands button. Their proximity often causes pressing by mistake. The option to change its functions is also a merit. On the upper right side is the Power Button and on the lower – the camera shortcut. Both are rather hard to feel at touch.



Once you open it there much more than 11 keys – 41 are added. They are all square and quite close to each other, which is compensated by their comparatively large size. A bit hard to press, they have a tactile response; the keyboard as a whole is convenient for typing. It is nicely lit in blue – but this is true for the main key characters and 3 decorative lines only. The alternative characters are not lit at all, which renders them totally unusable in a dark environment, unless one learns their exact positions by heart. In our view this is a serious shortcoming.




On the lower unit panel there is the mini USB slot and the one for micro SD cards, the latter replaceable without a restart (‘hot-swappable’). The stylus, whose telescopic structure most often enables its automatic stretching, is located in the right corner. On the lower left side there is the 2.5 mm stereo headphones jack socket. Their cable also serves as an aerial for the FM radio.