A closer look at the Sony Ericsson G700 smartphone

By Erika Tapalla
INQUIRER.net

MAKATI City, Philippines – It is light, supports 3G and comes with a touch-screen.

Sony Ericsson’s G700 belongs to the newest line of smartphones aimed at the mass consumer. And although it costs less than the high-end mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), the G700 is built with most features found in most PDAs.

Watch this quick tour of the phone’s functions.

So if you’re looking for something more economical and savvy, the G700 would probably fit your standards.

The smartphone is 4.2 inches long, 1.9 inches wide and about half an inch thick wide. It weighs 99 grams, making it easy to misplace or even drop since the actual casing of the phone is smooth.

It sports a 2.4-inch touch-screen that works with you fingertips, stylus or even your fingernail. But because of the small screen, people with large fingers may find it difficult to use, probably the same reason why Sony Ericsson didn’t remove the traditional keypad controls.

The camera function of this phone would gain two plus points from me.

It’s equipped with a 3.2 mega-pixel camera with an image stabilizer, red-eye reduction, panorama stitching and four effects allowing you to take or edit photos in black and white, sepia, solarized, and negative. After which, you can tag, create new albums, and select one of those built-in thematic slideshows complete with sound and transitions for fun viewing.

Another reason why I truly enjoyed the camera function was because of the photolight enabling anyone to take pictures and film at night. So, when using the camera on this phone, you’re not dependent on the daylight or any available light for that matter.

The processor is fairly fast and the overall operating system experience is smooth, jumping right in to video and plays video with no major lagging. After which, you can send photos and videos via Bluetooth, MMS or directly onto your blog.

The Sony Ericsson G700 has functions that allow you to configure your blog and use the phone to live blog when you’re not in front of your PC or laptop. This is very smart considering people are becoming more and more mobile-oriented and gravitating towards social networking and personal blogging.

Apart from the blogging feature, the G700 allows you to create word documents and presentations using QuickOffice, which you can send as an attachment via email you can set up or via Bluetooth.

However, it does not have infrared or wireless fidelity support, but it allows you to browse the web and subscribe to RSS feeds from selected websites and blogs.

From what I gathered and experienced, the G700 phone is big on “organizing your life.”

The drop-down ‘Today’ menu on the homescreen is detailed from the calendar events you’ve placed, to the tasks you’ve written, and to the notes and alarm you’ve scheduled.

The calendar doesn’t merely indicate what you need to do and what time you need to do it. You can actually synchronize it with the alarm, your contacts, and the notes function so that the phone can notify you about your meeting or appointment, give you a breakdown on the people attending, and remind you on little things you’ve jotted down on the notes.

The notes function is also not the typical lined screen or blank screen like on most phones. The G700 boasts of a very elaborate notes function that allows you to scribble, type, or draw notes which is then displayed like little colored post-it.

One thing I didn’t enjoy with the G700 was the handwriting recognition software. Ideally, it’s supposed to make writing faster by transforming the configured scribble into its corresponding letter on the keyboard. But I found that I almost had to relearn how I write letters in order for the phone to interpret what letter it is I was referring to.

Going over to the media side of things, the G700 has a music player with superior sound quality for such a small phone. It supports mp3, wma, wav, and aac files that can be organized and viewed in various categories, and created into playlists.

It has an FM Radio player but your handset needs to be connected before you hear anything since it serves as the antennae. You can set it to sleep mode and as an alarm so you get to wake up to your favorite radio station.

But since it only works with the headset plugged in, you have to be careful when you use it while sleeping. You don’t want to twist yourself all over the wires or move too much that the earphones would come off and end up oversleeping. But that’s just me.

Nonetheless, the phone does have quite a handful of features for something so small and relatively inexpensive. But it does have hang-ups, literally.

When you have too many programs running at the same time, the phone tends to freeze and you have to restart it by removing the battery.

The battery is easily drained running on about a day and a half without charging when heavily used (including approximately a cumulative of two hours talk-time).

It has low storage capacity of only 160MB and considering its multimedia capabilities, 160 MB is too little. But since it has a slot for Sony’s Memory Stick Micro memory card, which supports up to 8GB of storage space, you can opt to purchase that memory card separately to truly enjoy the multimedia functions of the G700.

I also found that because of the small screen, composing documents, Internet browsing, and note-creating difficult as it strained my eyes as I fumbled around the features.

But, you can’t have everything and for something light, economical. The G700 does the trick.

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