By Michell Bak, 2nd of July 2008.

The Sony Ericsson G700 is Sony Ericsson’s cheapest smart phone to date, and probably also the last Sony Ericsson phone to be making use of the UIQ user interface. It’s not necessarily marketed as being a smart phone, but rather being a smart feature phone.
The G700 is all about organizing your life and staying up to date with your next step - which is lucky, considering it’s good at doing so.

The G700 comes in a Silk Bronze colour variant that actually looks a whole lot classier in real life than on pictures, as well as a Mineral Gray variant for the G700 Business Edition. It’ll get even more interesting when the Sandy Brown variant as well as the blue one gets released.

Comparing the G700 to the G900, the G700 is clearly the best designed phone. While the colour theme might not be the best, I actually do like the whole form factor and feel of the phone. Especially the textured back feels really nice. The materials feel really nice as well, and even though it’s plastic, it doesn’t feel cheap in any way.

It is a bit hard to remove the battery cover, but it shouldn’t be much of a problem once you’ve got the hang of it. Removing the battery cover reveals the - you guessed it - battery. It’s a standard BST-33 battery (950 mAh), and compared to the G900, the G700 is actually a bit better at staying alive. The battery can last up to four days of average use, or well over ten days of hardly any use.

Also present on the backside is the 3-mega pixel camera and its two flash LEDs. They’re quite powerful, and usable as a torchlight if you need it.

The G700 is really a light smart phone, and it’s noticeable when holding it in your palm. It only weighs 99 grams, and its sleek body makes it feel even lighter. The official measurements are 106 x 49 x 13 millimetres - that’s a tiny smart phone á la mainstream!

The keypad is rather comfortable to use, although the soft keys and the D-pad could probably be a bit better. It feels a bit cramped together, and I would have liked just a better tactile feedback. It is, however, great that Sony Ericsson did put physical soft keys on this one, as it’s much easier to use than only the on-screen soft keys on G900.

The 2.4 inch large touch screen on the front is a major improvement in terms of colour-reproduction and brightness compared to previous smart phones. It looks a lot better, and many are fooled into thinking it’s not a touch screen - simply because it doesn’t look like one. Many will argue that the size of the display isn’t large enough. My verdict… try it. It was probably not large enough had the G700 been based on the old UIQ 3 interface, but the new one has been improved, making it easier to use on smaller screens and without the use of stylus input.

Good user interface

Sony Ericsson has improved the user interface of the UIQ 3 platform in both the G700 and G900. It has been both graphically improved as well as enhanced on the more functional side of things. The interface is generally quite easy to use, and it won’t take long to find out how it all works. It is also rather customizable, and especially the standby panels can be customized and used for whatever purpose you may have.

The user interface is generally quite speedy, but far from as fast as less advanced feature phones. It does help a bit, though, if you turn off the menu transitions.

Lots of nice applications come pre-installed on the G700, and being it’s based on UIQ, there’ll be plenty more out there to buy, download & install. Some of the pre-installed applications are Notes, calendar, advanced file manager, Converter, Torch, QuickOffice 4 (creating and editing Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents with fairly advanced formatting options available) and Pdf+ for viewing PDF documents.

The G700 comes with two games - Sudoku as well as The Sims 2. Both games are unfortunately Java games, and it would have been nicer to have two Symbian games, as these run faster and generally look better. Both games are pretty decent, though, and the Sudoku game in particular can easily be played for hours. The Sims 2 on the other hand isn’t exactly a comprehensive game - you’ll have it completed within two hours or so.

Not bad on multimedia

The PSP-inspired Media application can also be found on the G700. This is where you can your photos, music and videos, all nicely organized. The look of the Media application is really nice, and it’s not hard to be impressed. It’s finger-friendly, and there’s litterally no need for the stylus here. It’s quick and easy to navigate through the menus, although it does take too long to navigate full size photos. Hopefully this can be fixed or at least improved in future firmware updates. In the photo viewer you’ll have some nice features available such as the slide shows, fully loaded with music for different moods, transitions and cool effects. The music player is really nice, and the phone provides good audio quality. You can use the bundled headset with the music player, an A2DP-enabled Bluetooth headset or simply just use the built-in speaker, which is one of the loudest from Sony Ericsson yet.

The camera is a 3 mega pixel fixed focus camera. Here’s where it gets better, though - G700’s software actually makes it possible to do somewhat close-up photos without getting blurred photos. It may sound strange, but nonetheless that’s how it works.

The camera interface is really easy to use, and the large display doubles as an excellent viewfinder. It’s clear that Sony Ericsson wanted the interface to be clean and easy to use - and it’s a job well done. By pressing the small settings icon on the lower right you’ll have a menu flying in from the right with the most commonly used settings. Everything is displayed with large icons and you can easily leave out the stylus. If you want more advanced settings, you simply press the settings icon again, and they’ll be displayed. Simple and easy. You can switch between camera and video mode using the D-pad, as well as go into the preview mode using the D-pad. This allows for quick access to your latest shots.

Let’s get to the real deal - how does it perform? It’s a far shooter, but that’s as far as I’d go with this one. The color reproduction is generally rather good and the level of details in the photos is also pretty good, but the main issue is the noise in the camera pictures. The amount of noise is generally a bit too high, and sometimes it’s even noticeable in good lighting conditions.
Below you’ll find a few camera samples. Admittedly, these aren’t superb and a bit blurry, but I’m partly to blame for that with a set of shaky hands.

Videos are recorded in 3GP format (H.263 codec) in QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels) at 15 frames per second. The video bit rate is closing in at 400 Kbps, but the quality is far from excellent due to the H.263 codec. In my opinion the video recordings should have been upgraded long ago on Sony Ericsson devices to keep up with a bunch of the competing manufacturers. You can download a video sample by right clicking here and saving the file, or play the video below.

Conclusion

The Sony Ericsson G700 is a rather nice interesting device, and definitely one of Sony Ericsson’s finest offerings. It’s easy to use, feels very good in your hand and its feature set would be satisfying for most. In addition to that, the price tag is very competitively set, and you’ll really be getting a lot for your money. At the moment the price tag on the G700 says £240, but I can easily see this going down a bit within a few months.

The G700 is a 3G phone unfortunately with support for UMTS networks only - this means you’re limited to download speeds of up to a theoretical 384 Kbps. It supports speedy USB 2.0 file transfers (about 2-3 megabytes per second) and Bluetooth (2.0) transfers up to 75 kilobytes per second (KB/s). This is slightly speedier than that of G900.

I very much like the menus of the G700, and the fact that it’s really easy to use. The design and feel of the handset is another thing that’ll definitely win some customers. The pre-installed applications are really nice, and the Media application is one of G700’s huge advantages. The camera also seems fairly good, although it lacks auto focus.

The G700 lacks a few other features as well - the most important are EDGE / HSDPA and W-LAN. Especially W-LAN would have been nice, considering the built-in web browser in the G700 is rather good. I would have liked to see a few extra bundled accessories - one could be a memory card.

You can find our unboxing of the Sony Ericsson G700 here, as well as check out our gallery of it here.
If you feel you’re missing out on something, you can check out our large review of the Sony Ericsson G900, which is very similar to the G700.

[Preview based on firmware revision R6H815]