The F700 is pretty much where it all began for Samsung and large touchscreens. It was their first mobile phone to feature a three-and-above-inch touchscreen display while back in the day 3 megapixel autofocus cameras were still high-end stuff. As time went by Samsung F490 and the Samsung Armani phone loomed into prominence, and there are a few more coming up. And guess what, none of them has the bulky QWERTY underside. That should tell you something.

Anyway, we ended up reviewing the first full touch Samsung handset last among its kin. F700 packs the same touch user interface as the recently reviewed F490, but the old dog is clearly the underdog. Nevertheless, bear with us as we take on this slider for a ride.

Stylish looks and high-quality build

Tri-band GSM and HSDPA support with video calls

Large 3.2" touchscreen TFT display of 240 x 440 pixel resolution

Comfortable QWERTY keyboard

3 megapixel autofocus camera

Touch haptic feedback is present

microSD memory card slot

Stereo Bluetooth

Standard 3.5mm audio jack

Office documents viewer

Snappy user interface

Intuitive music player

Fast screen autorotation when keyboard is revealed

Bulky size

Awkward and slow web browser scrolling and panning

Video recording maxes out at QVGA@15fps

Unable to play widescreen user-encoded WMV and H.263 videos

Slow image zooming in the gallery

The three Java games are trial versions only

The microSD slot is accessible only with the back panel off

What we have here is another handset, which gets defined through how it handles the load of being an iPhone look-alike. We don't mean to say that every touch-operated handset wants to be iPhone when it grows up. It's just sometimes the comparison forces itself even on the most neutral observer.

The quality construction and glossy finish can make you forgive the bulky size of Samsung F700, or sort of. The bodywork changes hues from violet through dark blue to black depending on how light falls on it. Once you have the Samsung F700 in your hand you can really tell it's an expensive high-end device. It didn't manage to win us over though. You can see why in the pages to come. Join us right after the jump.

We should note before we get under way that the device we are working on is Vodafone-branded. Softwarewise the only difference to the original version is the web package - the web menu of our Samsung F700 is teeming with links to Vodafone online services. You will also notice that the Web browser icon has been swapped with a Vodafone one. So that's pretty much it - enjoy the review.

The Samsung F700 has a plastic body of rounded edges. The high-gloss materials and the chameleon paintjob do manage to pull off high-end looks. Just for the record, the Samsung F700 was originally known as Samsung Ultra Smart, but that name was eventually dropped.

The Samsung F700 measures 112 x 56 x 15.9 mm and weighs a good 139g. Overall, the F700 is a chubby fellow and that would be the first thing to notice when you see it for the first time. In fact, it's almost as big as the HTC TyTN II, which is anything but pocketable.

Above the display there is a video-call camera and a discrete earpiece grill. Balanced in design and proportions, the F700 features a grill at the bottom too - it hides the loudspeaker. The bottom part of the front also hosts the hardware key that opens the Croix shortcut cross.

More on it to come later, at this point we would only say that we prefer the F490 solution where the center key opens the main menu. The F490 also has receiver keys below the display, which makes call management so much easier.

The right side of the F700 is home to several controls. The hardware keylock enables or disables the touchscreen functionality. The volume rocker is here too, along with the dedicated camera key.

The right side of the F700 holds no controls at all. The bottom part has only a tiny pinhole for the mouthpiece. On the top we find both the universal connectivity port and the 3.5mm audio jack. The universal port is of the new type used in all recent Samsung handsets. 

Interestingly enough, if you plug a headset in the connectivity port and then a set of headphones in the 3.5mm audio jack, you will have sound output to both. What's more, the sound quality is one and the same, as we managed to confirm in our test - more on that later.

The back panel of the F700 looks dark blue on the following images, however it had the ability to change its color to dark violet or black depending on how light falls on it. Fancy, ain't it? All the same, it's all plastic and you would tell that straight away just by touching it. And, speaking of it, fingerprints are all over the place with this shiny cover.

The only highlight on the back of the F700 is the 3 megapixel camera lens and the accompanying LED flash.

The back panel gets easily removed - and you'd better learn to enjoy that. You'll be doing the drill quite often if you are the kind of person to load their memory card with files using a card reader. It's something we like to do - it's that much faster and offers compatibility that's beyond different cellphone platforms. But we digress.

The thing is the memory card slot is only accessible when the cover is off - it's still a hot-swappable microSD port though. The 1000 mAh battery of Samsung F700 is quoted at up to 300 hours of standby time and up to 4 and a half hours of talk time.

Honestly, we didn't like the bulk of Samsung F700. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard simply doesn't justify that lump in your pocket. But overall we are pleased with how the F700 handles - top-notch performance and great user-friendliness and ergonomics.

Samsung F700 combines smooth touch navigation and full text input capabilities with the QWERTY keyboard. The handset is fully operable through the large 3.2" 262K color display, with the QWERTY keyboard a nice enhancement to have at hand for some heavy duty typing. There's a virtual Multi Tap keypad providing a back-up input mode.

Samsung F700 is not as good under direct sunlight as the industry top dogs - Nokia N-series handsets or the Apple iPhone, if you like a full touchscreen device. The fingerprint smudges don't help things either.

The F700 QWERTY keyboard is really comfortable - the keys have quality backlighting and enough elevation. They also provide nice press feedback so overall we are talking a really nice keyboard here. Only the top row is sometimes causing trouble, as it's really close to the edge of the slider, which hosts the display.

The excellent overall performance of the QWERTY keyboard is further enhanced by the fast auto rotation. The screen switches to landscape as soon as you slide the keyboard out. Almost instantaneous, it's faster than anything a PocketPC can pull off.

It's here where the Croix UI was first implemented

We've already looked at the Samsung award-winning Croix user interface in our Samsung Armani phone review and Samsung F490 review (though Samsung F700 was first to come with it).

The Armani phone proved way underpowered for the rich graphical experience the user interface is trying to deliver with real time transitions and animations. The Samsung F490 has hardware as capable as the one of F700 and so it offered seamless execution of every possible task. Essentially, the F490 combines the best of the F700 and the Armani phone - capable hardware and fashionable looks, plus some software enhancements over F700.

Back to the F700 experience, every tap on the display is accompanied by a slight vibration - just so you know that your command has been accepted. That's a feature we would've loved to have on the iPhone. The level of the vibrating feedback is adjustable within a scale of 1 to 5.

On the main standby screen there are four functional areas - a slim clock/calendar bar at the very bottom, a larger clock/calendar bar above, crosshairs in the center and a shortcut bar on the top.

The whole Calendar/Clock band toggles on and off if you click on the lowest clock bar at the bottom. A finger sweep on the large bar toggles between the clock and the calendar. If you have set up the world clock, it will show two time zones simultaneously. When the music player is running, the track is shown on this bar, along with the album art if any.

Unlike the Armani phone, a double tap on the Calendar opens the actual calendar applications, while a double tap on the clock displays the World time application (it's the way the F490 operates too).Then, like the Armani phone, a tap on the crosshairs in the middle of the screen opens the Croix shortcuts rather than the main menu like F490. The hardware key below the display does just the same. To put it short, we prefer it the F490 way.

The top shortcut bar in standby mode features three shortcuts. The first one activates the Silent mode after a touch-and-hold, the second one opens the main menu and, finally, the third launches the Phone dialer. Now, the F490 setup was way better, with a shortcut to the phonebook available.

Another feature of the home screen is the available landscape mode - toggling between the two by simply sliding out the QWERTY keyboard is seamless - Windows Mobile has never been able to achieve that speed of display rotation.

We complained about the Armani phone specially styled icons that were hard as hell to recognize unless you activate them. The icons used by the F700 are far more understandable and intuitively designed.

The main menu displays as a 3 x 4 grid of icons (2 x 6 in landscape view). There are no alternative color versions. Sub-menus are shown as lists. All sub-menus have a numeric shortcut, so you can access them using the hardware QWERTY keyboard.

Scrolling up and down the listed menus is intuitive enough, as all it takes is several finger sweeps. However, it's nowhere near the iPhone handling - sometimes it scrolls more, other times less. Furthermore, the tall body of the F700 might turn out to be a scrolling nightmare for users with shorter thumbs.

The special cross-like shortcuts menu is always a touch away. From this menu you can open the music player, phone dialer, message editor and web browser. Touching the center opens the main menu.

To dial a number, you need to use the fullscreen Phone dialer. Unlike some of the other Samsung handsets we've reviewed recently, the Samsung F700 doesn't suggest contacts, whose numbers contain the digits you have typed.

The phonebook of Samsung F700 offers space for 1000 entries. The row at the bottom of the contact list gives you access to frequently used features: call a contact, add a contact, view groups, speed dial. To search the phonebook you need to tap on the search field, which opens the fullscreen alphanumeric keypad and then type the first letters of a contact's name. Contacts can be synchronized with a remote server.

From the Options menu you get to edit contacts. A total of 10 fields are available for each entry. Furthermore, you can repeat each field more than once, which allows you to add up to 5 numbers per contact.

The Calls Log gives you control over your recent calls. It has four tabs, Recent contacts the default one. Each type of call gets a separate tab too, plus there is also a message and a wireless data counter.

As far as call management is concerned, you can blacklist certain numbers and thus reject all their calls and messages. There is also a data counter for keeping track of your wireless data traffic.

With the Samsung F700 entering data comes natural - a single tap on the field highlights it, then a second one invokes the on-screen keypad. Or, you can just slide. Typing is never a chore with the Samsung F700 and its QWERTY keypad.

As you might have guessed, a rich T9 dictionary is also present here to help with text input. The Samsung F700 handles all four popular types of messages: SMS, EMS, MMS, and email. A single editor is used for creating the first three, while emails have their own. Messages are converted from SMS to EMS or MMS by simply applying font colors or formatting, or by inserting an image.

The message editor has two modes - the first one allows you to move your cursor around by tapping on the screen, the second one allows you to select text with your thumb. After you've marked the text with your finger, you can copy and paste it wherever you like.

A security enhancement in Samsung F700 is the Mobile Tracker (previously known as uTrack). Its purpose is to send tracking messages to pre-defined numbers in case your phone gets stolen and a SIM card other than yours is inserted. The effectiveness of this particular feature is the subject of a longer discussion, which we would rather not go into at this stage. Suffice to say, having it won't hurt at least.

The file browser in Samsung F700 is pretty much the same as in most Samsung feature phones. The F700 offers 112 MB of built-in memory available to the user, which is shared among user files, MMS and emails.

There are different tabs for the phone memory and the memory card but they have similar folder structures.

There are folders for most different file types - images, video, sounds, allowing the handset to organize the memory contents. Unlike the Armani phone, here you can drag-and-drop files to move around folders.

A flaw we have found in several recent Samsung handsets is luckily not present in the Samsung F700 - the unusually slow card reading. This time Samsung have got it right.

The Samsung F700 picture gallery is part of the file manager and not a separate application. Accessing it is as simple as opening the Images folder. Once you open an image, the rest of the images in the folder appear on a semi-transparent bar on top. You can scroll them back and forth until you find the image that you need. A simple tap will then display it fullscreen. In fact, that way it looks much like the LG Viewty gallery, but improved.

The image gallery supports landscape orientation too. Zooming on the images is available. However it is way too slow and might get on your nerves, like it did with us.

The F700 also has an image editor onboard with all the basic editing options - auto levels, brightness, contrast, color. You can even add text and clipart to your images. Unfortunately, the rich functionality seen in the Scalado image editor used in the Samsung Armani handset is not present here.

The music player is the best of the Samsung crop and allows filtering by multiple criteria. The music player controls are so intuitive that it seems it's the place where the whole cross-thing originated - the cross-like pattern is the very essence of music control with Samsung F700.

The horizontal axis on the music player screen displays the current track running time. Thus moving the cross with your finger can skip portions of the track. You can move the cross along the vertical axis too. That changes the current volume level.

In F490 and the Armani phone a horizontal sweep skipped to the next track in the playlist or album but this feature is absent in F700. You can check out our Samsung F490 video on this page to see how the feature works.

Additional options allow you to easily repeat and shuffle settings, change the current equalizer preset (there are several of them) and give tracks a rating, to later use for creating favorite playlists. Album art is also available, along with a convenient way of browsing your current playlist and changing albums on the fly.

When minimized to play in the background, the music player displays the current track on the standby screen, along with the album art, if any. And you can change tracks straight from the standby screen by a mere finger sweep on the info bar.

Generally, the audio quality of Samsung F700 is below the usually high Samsung standards. Samsung hold the first place when it comes to audio quality in feature phones.

But the Samsung F700 is still good at music reproduction and slightly better than the Samsung F490. Both the devices however cut out a range of the lowest frequencies creating the sloped frequency response you see below. It may not matter much on your regular headphones, however that might turn to be a downside if you connect the F700 to a car or home audio system that is able to reproduce those low frequencies.

You will probably also like to know that as opposed to F490 you can listen music at the highest volume level without the degrading the reproduction quality. Another interesting point is that the audio quality produced by the 3.5mm audio jack and the proprietary Samsung universal port is equal.

The video player on Samsung F700 has similar interface to that of the music player. It doesn't have many features but all the essentials are covered - it can play video files in fullscreen landscape mode and you can fast-forward and rewind videos. You can also jump to a specific scene in the video clip.

According to the official specifications, the video player should have been able to play WMV/MPEG4/H.263/H.264 encoded video files with a maximum resolution of VGA and a maximum framerate of 30 fps.

We were disappointed with the Samsung F490 not being able to play a single widescreen video we encoded ourselves - in neither WMV, nor H.263 format. Unfortunately the same holds true for the Samsung F700.

Truth be told, both managed to play a VGA video at 30fps taken by a Nokia N95 8GB camera. However, a VGA movie doesn't have the widescreen aspect ratio that we were so excited about in the first place.

The Samsung F700 is equipped with a 3 megapixel autofocus camera, which produces photos at a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels.

The settings are extensive and include picture size, shooting mode (single shot, multi-shot, mosaic shot, frames), effects (black and white, sepia, negative), white balance, and viewfinder mode (regular or widescreen).

The additional camera settings are accessible from the menu where you can switch between camera and camcorder. Unlike the Samsung F490, there is no Scenes mode here. The available settings include picture quality (economy, normal, fine, superfine), ISO (100-400), exposure metering (matrix and spot - F490 also had center-weight), shutter sound (can be set to off), zoom sound, brightness sound, default storage memory and default naming of photos.

The Samsung F700 has a web browser that supports both fullscreen and landscape browsing. It even has a mini-map that allows you to navigate over large web pages from a bird's eye view. Thanks to HSDPA 3.6 Mbps the F700 is also able to provide relatively high-speed data transfers.

The Samsung F700 also allows full navigation with finger sweeps. However, it's a bit of a letdown due to the slow horizontal and vertical scrolling.

The touch operation is nowhere near user-friendly either. Instead of picking the page and dragging it in the direction of choice, you should slide you finger in the direction you want the page to scroll. That's just the opposite of iPhone where browsing pages blends seamlessly with the rest of the UI to give the impression of almost physical interaction as you move things around with your finger.

The Samsung F700 calendar offers three views - daily, weekly and monthly. You can choose which calendar view should be default and you can pick the starting day of the week - the options are Monday or Sunday. There are five types of events available for setting up: schedule, anniversary, holiday, important and private. You can store up to 300 schedules, 50 anniversaries, 50 holidays, 20 important, 20 private events.

There are five alarm slots, each with a variety of configurable options - snooze time, repetition, etc. You can of course choose a custom ringtone to wake you up at a preset volume level. You can also choose whether your phone should automatically power up upon alarm activation. This feature can be quite handy if you have the habit of switching off your handset at night.

Among the other organizer offerings are a voice recorder, world time application, calculator, and a unit converter. There are also a memo and a to-do application for taking down notes. A countdown timer and a stopwatch are also available. The voice recorder records in .amr format and has a sixty-minute recording limitation.

The calculator of the F700 is not as ridiculous as the Armani one. Here you have all your numbers and mathematical symbols on one page. It even supports calculating functions.

The Samsung F700 comes with an office documents viewer that supports Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF files. It's no longer a Picsel Viewer but an application by Access, who also develop the NetFront web browser used by both Samsung and Sony Ericsson. The documents viewer is quick enough when opening files, however zooming is again slow. It can also work in landscape mode, which makes reading easier with less panning.

Samsung F700 offers excellent Java support, as it seems with the three demo Java games that come preinstalled. We are not aware whether those games have been specifically developed for use with such resolution or whether they have been optimized for touch input. The fact is they work flawlessly even if the play field is not stretched fullscreen and they accept touch-based input with no problems whatsoever.

In fact, we've seen those games run on many of the recent Samsung handsets: Bejeweled, the BlockBreaker deluxe, and Kasparov's Chess.

The Samsung offers top-notch performance in every possible aspect we were able to test. The QWERTY keyboard is really comfortable to work with, so is the touchscreen display.

Softwarewise the Samsung Touch UI is a nice platform that we praised in the Samsung F490 review. You won't hear us say anything different here - it works great, except for the clumsy web browser and the incompatibility with widescreen user-encoded WMV and H.263 videos.

If you can live with that along with the bulky size, Samsung F700 is truly able to deliver, especially for those of who would like a full QWERTY keyboard and easy going interface without the Symbian or Windows Mobile fuss.

For an approximate street price of USD550 or EUR360, Samsung F700 seems a bit overpriced but if you have set your eyes on it you won't have any viable alternatives due to its unusual form factor and platform. A subsidized price tag by Vodafone would sound better. But still the Samsung F700 remains a niche product, and would hardly win a significant market share outside its limited target group.