Samsung F700 review: Tap or type

The file manager is flexible enough

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.

Browsing files • you can turn off the navigation header above the file list • opening an image • changing screen orientation to landscape is very fast

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.

Browsing the thumbnails above the image and choosing a picture to open fullscreen

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.

You can view images in landscape mode • zooming in however is painfully slow

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 Image Editor options

The cross-like music interface works well

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.

The music player has various filtering options • the music player interface is great

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.

Browsing the album during playback • changing albums • rating a track • the current track shows on the home screen with album art

Audio quality

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.

You can find more info about our audio quality test here.

Samsung F700 vs Apple iPhone frequency response graphs

Samsung F700 is compared to iPhone in this frequency graph snot because of the shared touch input, but because the iPhone audio ship is made by Samsung and is exactly the same audio chip the South Korean company embeds in its feature phones.

Downed by widescreen video

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.

"...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..."

<#AdRectangle#>

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 video playback was a letdown