At this year's Mobile World Congress, Sony Ericsson announced a handful of interesting devices and we're now having a closer look at one of them, the G700 UIQ smartphone. Now that the event is over, we are back home and ready to hit you with a full preview of the G700, of which we had a quick test ride in the comfort of our office.

The Sony Ericsson G700 has a 2.4" 262K-color TFT display of QVGA resolution. The compact device features a touchscreen display and smartphone capabilities.

In an attempt to bring smartphones closer to the people, Sony Ericsson have set to produce a smartphone that doesn't look like one. Instead, the handset has the Sony Ericsson run-if-the-mill design that's even used on EUR 100 phones. Whether you like it or not is a matter of personal taste.

The Sony Ericsson G700 also comes with a 3 megapixel camera. It doesn't have auto focus, but offers image and video stabilization, which is not that great a deal actually.

3G support with video calls is also on board, along with stereo Bluetooth and an M2 memory card slot. Sony Ericsson also made a big deal of their Notes applications that allows you to organize your life with electronic yellow Sticky Notes (they come in other colors, too).

The Sony Ericsson G700 also has a bigger brother - the G900 - that we are previewing tomorrow. The Sony Ericsson G900 outperforms the G700 with a 5 megapixel autofocus camera and Wi-Fi connectivity support, packed in a slightly different design.

Well, that about sums it up for today's celebrity - let us cut to the chase and take it out for a spin. Be right back after the break.

The Sony Ericsson G700 measures 106 x 49 x 13 mm and weighs only 99 g, which is not bad for a smartphone. It's relatively compact and when you first set your eyes on it, you probably won't notice that it's one of the latest Sony Ericsson power gadgets. Under the everyday disguise however hides a full-fledged smartphone with touchscreen functionality.

The Sony Ericsson G700 is powered by a 208 MHz processor and has 128MB of RAM - Sony Ericsson used the same powerplant in their Sony Ericsson W950, W960 and P1 smartphones. The user interface clicks quite fast and turning off the available transition effects makes it even faster.

Along the bottom and the right side of the display there are markings, which remind of the touch-enabled keys of the Sony Ericsson K850. This is not the case here though - they simply serve as reference points. The display however is touch-sensitive, so there's no need for touch-sensitive keys anyways. Above the display there is a video-call camera.

   

Sony Ericsson G700 surprised us with its transreflective display. As a result, the legibility under direct sunlight is great, way above any other previous smartphone by Sony Ericsson. It still has poorer colors and contrast than most high-end Sony Ericsson feature phones, but when it comes to sunlight legibility it comes really close to the all-time champions Nokia and Apple iPhone.

The keypad of the G700 is really nice. The alphanumeric keys are quite large, with distinct press feedback and prove great for typing. The navigation D-pad and the soft keys around it offer great ergonomics too.

Speaking of soft keys, with the G700 you will find something that we don't see in other UIQ smartphones. It's the two context keys just below the display. Their presence allows truly comfortable operation of the user interface without the need of a stylus. This is a real bonus point for the UIQ interface - so far with previous smartphones, we've hardly managed without pulling the stylus out.

At the sides of the Sony Ericsson G700 there are further changes to the UIQ smartphone style used so far. There is no scroll wheel for example - a beloved feature by all UIQ fans. But with the added context keys on the front and the wonderful D-pad, it is hardly needed anymore.

There is also a dedicated lock/unlock key for the keypad - the old-fashioned way of using a key combo is still present though, so the hardware key is just an option.

The M2 memory card slot is tucked just under the charger port. It has a nice rubbery cap that is easily removed and put back on (one for the connectivity port would have been welcome too). Removing or inserting a memory card without the help of a sharp pointer such as the stylus proves impossible - the card is sunk really deep.

Next to the charger slot there is a status LED - it blinks to indicate missed calls and unread messages, and lights constantly when the battery is low or while the handset is charging.

Speaking of the stylus - it's tucked in at the upper left corner of the handset. It's made of some classy materials, but unfortunately it's not telescopic and proves a little short.

The back of the phone may look a bit cheap to some, but it's really nice to touch. The highlight is the 3 megapixel camera with its dual-led setup. Removing the back cover proved somewhat hard. It's the same pry-it-open type that we saw in our recent Sony Ericsson lower mid-range roundup.

The G700 has a standard Sony Ericsson BST-33 Li-Po battery with a capacity of 960 mAh. It's rated at up to 380 h of standby time and up to 12 h of talk time. Those figures seem rather optimistic for a battery of such modest capacity, but we couldn't confirm the real-life performance.

The Sony Ericsson G700 offers great ergonomics and user-friendliness at the expense of design. In general, it's really comfortable to work with.

Sony Ericsson have put a great deal of effort in optimizing the UIQ user interface for thumb use. Some controls have gotten bigger - especially the multimedia and camera ones. You have a vast array of user-configurable shortcuts at your disposal to make everyday tasks easier. The Notes application has also received an upgrade and is now among the phone's main organizing features - a welcome change as we prefer notes over to-do lists for keeping track of our daily schedule.

Now straight to the important stuff. Among the biggest changes are the new organizing shortcuts on the Home screen. You can scroll horizontally through them with the flick of a finger and they are user-configurable - you can add more as you wish. Those tabs make life easier for repetitive daily things such as calling home, sending messages or adding to-do tasks. The possibilities are hardly limited.

The Notes application has been upgraded with the Sony Ericsson G700 and now it's pitched as a serious organizing application. It has even got a dedicated shortcut key on the keypad.

The notes you create now resemble the sticky notes some of us like to stick around their desk or on the fridge. They can combine drawings, written or typed text and they can change colors for easier sorting.

The options don't end here - now you can add alarms to your notes, send them via MMS or Bluetooth, upload them to your blog or file them in separate folders, such as Business, Personal or Urgent.

Those upgrades are welcome but the need for a dedicated Notes key on the keypad still remains questionable to us.

The task manger that comes with the UIQ interface has also been changed. Previously, opening it presented you with a list of recently opened applications, and the actual list of running applications was hidden on a second tab. Now the recent applications tab has disappeared, and the list of running applications appears as a pop-up, really neat and convenient.

Sony Ericsson G700 comes with the Media Center that we've seen on some of the latest Sony Ericsson feature phones. It provides one-click access to your photos, music, and video. You are able to sort music by filters as year, genre, albums, tracks, playlists, podcasts, etc. If you want to find a particular song, but know just a part of its name, don't worry, just type it in, and the phone will automatically find and display it.

The Media Center also supports changing the screen orientation.

The video player has large controls that allow easy thumb operation.

Browsing images is as fun as on the Sony Ericsson K850. The Meida center photo gallery is a convenient tool for managing a vast collection of camera photos with great customization capabilities. Photo Tags allows you to tag an image with a custom tag of your own thus making filtering easier.

The slideshow function is readily available as soon as you open any image fullscreen. Before they start, you are asked to pick a mood and the handset plays the animated slideshows with background music to suit the chosen mood. The transition style of the slideshow also varies according to the mood.

The UIQ camera interface we've come to know from previous models was poor on user-friendliness. The Sony Ericsson G700 however comes with a brand new camera that is really intuitive, it's full of helpful hints and most important of all - it's optimized for thumb operation.

Unfortunately the G700 3 megapixel camera doesn't have auto focus (macro is impossible) and some camera settings we are used to are missing - such as the Scenes mode. Other than that, you can find Panorama and Multi-shot mode (BestPic is reserved for Sony Ericsson G900), flash settings with Forced On available, and several white balance presets.

The most important settings are available straight from the viewfinder, the additional settings menu gives access to options such as picture size, effects, storage location, and shutter sound (can be turned off).

We are quite pleased with the camera performance of the Sony Ericsson G700. Firing it up takes about 2 seconds, while the shot-to-shot time at high-quality is about another 2 seconds. That's with the auto preview option set to off - and of course you have to remember that the lack of auto focus speeds things a bit.

Unfortunately the camera of our G700 prototype is not yet finished, but it seems promising to an extent. Cameras usually are the last things that get tuned properly before the release of the handset. This is the reason why we are only offering few camera samples - the following two are downsized to 1024 x 768 pixels. No other photo editing has been done on the samples.

The G700 web browser performs fast and has enough configuration options to make mobile web browsing real fun. You can move the current page around by dragging it with your thumb but it's even faster with the D-pad. With the D-pad, the browser offers supreme speed when scrolling and panning. You can also use the fullscreen or tabbed browsing to make your life easier.

Final words

The Sony Ericsson G700 is a nice try by Sony Ericsson to make a more affordable and more intuitive smartphone for users looking for a phone with good organizing capabilities. They don't build their marketing strategy on the smartphone capabilities, so they come as a nice bonus for users that can make the best of them.

Besides, the Sony Ericsson G700 offers conservative looks, ease of use, easy to thumb interface and touch screen functionality all-in-one with a price tag of around EUR 250. If you are into auto focus camera and Wi-Fi, you might as well go for its bigger brother the Sony Ericsson G900 for about EUR 300.