Sony Ericsson S700

Discontinued
10th March 2004

Sony Ericsson tend to be at their most innovative on larger, more powerful phones, and the S700 is no exception, coming with several novel features.

At first glance it looks like a PDA, with a large 320x240 pixel display in 262,000 colours. There's a directional control on the bottom plus some minimalist buttons. However, the first neat trickl the S700 has is that it rotates open to reveal a standard keypad, rather like the Motorola V80 but the S700 has a much larger screen.

On the back of the S700 is a Sony-derived 1.3 megapixel camera capable of 1280x960 pixels, a photo light and 8X digital zoom. 1.3 megapixels actually makes this a useful camera with four times the resolution of a standard VGA camera.

The S700 supports Java 2.0 for applications and comes with 3D graphics acceleration, which combined with the large screen and easy controls makes this a very tempting games platform.

Connectivity to a PC is through Bluetooth, infrared or USB cable. There's an impressive range of Bluetooth accessories from Sony Ericsson too. Memory expansion is through Sony Memory Stick Duo cards, handy because the S700 can also play back space-hungry MP3s.

It's easy to forget that the Sony Ericsson S700 is actually a phone, in this case a tri-band GSM phone with GPRS. It's a shame that they couldn't squeeze in EDGE data instead of GPRS, but really that's nitpicking.

It looks like Sony Ericsson are going to have a significant hit on their hands here, and that the S700 should carve out a sizable chunk out of the high-end handset market.

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