The screen and backlit keys are activated

Techtalk

The screen and backlit keys are activated when the phone slides up, but it may take some time to get used to touching instead of pressing the keys.

Published on November 27, 2007

The Ultra Edition II 12.1 or U700 is a new ultra-slim mobile phone from Samsung, which looks elegant and features good multimedia performance with a super-fast 3.5G HSDPA connection.

The U700 comes with a shiny silver plastic body, making it as light as 85 grams. The slide-up phone is only 12.1 mm thick. It has a reflective surface, which turns into a mirror when idle.

The tri-band handset, which operates on 900/1800/1900 MHz + 2.1GHz bands, is equipped with HSDPA for fast data transfer and Bluetooth stereo (A2DP). For networks in Thailand, it supports the fast EDGE connection.

The U700 features a 2.2-inch LCD capable of displaying 262,144 colours in 240x320 resolution. Located under the screen are backlit touch-sensitive shortcut and Call/End keys. The screen and backlit keys are activated when the phone slides up, but it may take some time to get used to touching instead of pressing the keys.

The U700 comes with a four-way directional control, which doubles as a rotary wheel. It is also used to control the digital music playing functions of the phone.

It has 20 megabytes of internal memory, which could be expanded by a microSD card to store digital music and photos. The U700 features 3.2-megapixel auto focus and a secondary front-facing camera for 3G video calls when a 3G network is available.

The U700 also functions as a digital music player with an option to create play lists. When the music is playing in the background, the artist information and song title appear as scrolling marquees on the home screen.

The call quality of U700 is crisp and loud, and it has a good battery life, using a 900mAh battery. Samsung rates the U700 for three hours of talk time and up to nine days on standby. The U700 comes with a convenient feature, the Google menu icon, which brings up the search engine or GMail account.

The U700 has a suggested retail price of Bt14,900.

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