Samsung SGH-F700 Preview

It’s an HSDPA capable 3.5G smartphone, with download speeds of up to 7.2Mbps (where supported), plus UMTS (3G), EDGE and GPRS, but the Samsung F700 does not appear to support WiFi.

The Samsung F700 will be officially announced at next week’s 3GSM World Congress, but Samsung have given us a brief glimpse of the specifications of this upcoming device in advance.

The SGH-F700’s landscape/portrait mode and slide-out QWERTY keyboard are reminiscent of HTC devices such as the TyTN, but it is quite rare to see other manufacturers with this type of form factor. The Samsung F700 has a 2.8″ 440×240 pixel display which is slightly better than most competing smartphones which have just 320×240 pixels. However, it still can’t compete with the 800×480 pixel display in the Nokia N800. The screen is touch-sensitive, which explains the lack of external controls (apart from the keyboard, of course).

Samsung haven’t said which operating system the SGH-F700 uses. Normally, we’d expect a device of this type to be running a version of Windows, but Samsung’s custom drag-and-drop user interface would seem to indicate that it is something else. Samsung have been shipping Linux smartphones in China for a while, so perhaps the F700 is a Linux device. There’s a full set of multimedia software, a web browser, email client and a document viewer too.

Although Samsung haven’t specified how much the F700 weighs, they have specified its size as a fairly compact 104 x 50 x 16mm. Underneath is a tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz and UMTS 2100 MHz device with GPRS, EDGE and HSDPA data support. The F700 also comes with Bluetooth and a microSD memory slot.

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