Samsung U700 Ultra 12.1 Review

Home screen	Main menu

Interface:

The software reminds of earlier Samsung models but even if you have not used one, it will be easy to get used to it. From the homescreen, where you will see the time, service information and the carrier name, none of the soft keys lead to the main menu. You open it by the central position of the D-pad. The ordinary shortcut to the phonebook - the down direction is now replaced with shortcut to Google application, and you have to open the menu to go to the contacts, which is very illogical thing as you use this menu almost any time you start a call.

The main menu can be displayed as either 3x4 grid of icons or as a list. When you open it, the pointer is on the sub-menu you've last used. The icons increase in size and have colorful backlight when you go over them, but if you scroll fast they won't appear due to a small lag. The sub-menus are shown as list and if a field has other sub-options, they will display as another list connected to the first. The phone lacks visual themes and even color schemes for personalizing. The only way to do this is to change the homescreen wallpaper, the shown information and the dial-pad interface.


Phonebook:

The slim and sexy U700 is not stupid, and has enough memory to store 1000 contacts with multiple numbers. Adding a new one will shows you a few fields you will probably need most often, but "add field" option allows you to add additional information including many numbers, emails, addresses, etc. We are happy that a contact can have a few numbers of the same type, for example 3 mobile-private phone numbers. This is excellent and reminds us of the S60 smartphone system and the U700 is the only phone that supports that from all of the Ultra II devices. You can attach personal ringtone and picture for a contact, but the image is very small both on an outgoing and incoming calls.


The phonebook is displayed as vertical list, and when a contact is selected its number and small image (if one is attached) show. Searching finds results only in the first name, which is an unpleasant problem of most non-smart telephones. The contacts can be sorted in groups that allow for common image and ringtone.


Organizer:

Almost all functions of the Organizer are in the Applications menu. Here are the simple Memos, limited to 100 characters. A Task can have title, details, start/due dates, alarm and priority level (1-3). The voice recorder can be limited to 1/2/3/4/5/60 minutes or to size, suitable for MMS. It can be used for self-memos, but if you keep the phone at distance bigger than 30-40 centimeters, the voices will be hard do understand. Here also are the World Clock, the Calculator with scientific option and link to the unit Converter, the Timer and the Stopwatch and the RSS Reader. The last one uses the internet standard RSS to obtain information such as news, from feeds you've added.

The Calendar and the Alarm are as separate icons in the main menu. The calendar can be previewed for month/week/day and has settings for Starting day and Default view. An entry can be added as Appointment/Anniversary/Holiday/Important/Private. The fields allow for Title, Description, Start/end time/date, Location, Alarm (before XXX min/hour/day) with repeat option.

There are 4 alarms by default but you can create more. Each one can have different time, melody and recurrence options. The U700 can be set to auto power for alarm, if it is shut off.

The phone has 20MB of built-in memory and slot for microSD cards to increase it. The best way to use it is to store the camera photos on the internal memory and music files on the memory card.