Samsung's Touch-Screen F700: Too Little, Too Late?

The long-gestating Ultra Smart F700 looked like the iPhone's stiffest competition when it was first announced back in February. But time may have caught up with the slick touch-screen/QWERTY phone, which is at last set to ship in Europe. I finally got some hands-on time with a working F700, and while it's a slick specimen, the phone's touch-screen UI isn't exactly groundbreaking anymore.

The HSDPA-ready F700 (which is set to arrive in Vodaphone's European lineup next month) sure cuts a fine figure; the jet-black phone is essentially featureless, save for its jumbo-sized touch screen and a single button just below the LCD. Switch it on and you're presented with a home screen, complete with a calendar and phone shortcuts along the top of the screen. A quick tap brings you to the main menu: a grid of icons, with thick crosshairs that follow your fingertip until you select an option. I liked how the phone vibrated with each tap, and the roomy, slide-out QWERTY keypad worked nicely for my test messages. But while the F700's cool, minimalist menus look sleek and nicely animated, they're just not that exciting anymore; besides the iPhone, we've also seen snazzy touch-screen menus from phones such as the LG Voyager, the Venus, and the new Sprint Touch. In short, the bar's been raised.

Feature-wise, the F700 packs in a three-megapixel camera, a video/music player, Bluetooth 2.0, an HTML Web browser (I wasn’t able to test browsing, unfortunately, since the demo F700 on the show floor lacked network access), an e-mail client (it sounds like POP and IMAP are supported, but not full Exchange syncing), a slot for microSD memory expansion, and a document reader. Not bad, but the F700's QWERTY keypad made me hope for an actual mobile office suite—looks like that's not in the cards, though.

So, now that it's almost here, is the F700 an iPhone killer? It's got full-on 3G and the three-megapixel camera in its favor, not to mention the slide-out keypad; that said, the iPhone's touch menus are more fun to use, and the iPhone is only about half as thick as the relatively bulky F700. Of course, the question might be academic for those of us in the U.S.; I'm getting the distinct impression that we won't be seeing the F700 stateside, although something along the same (or hopefully better) lines will probably land here in 2008.

Update: OK, so the bloggers at CrunchGear are claiming that I'm dead wrong, and that the F700 will arrive in the U.S.—specifically, with Verizon Wireless, before the year is out. No confirmation from Verizon, though.

Related:
Hands-on with the Samsung Ultra Smart F700 [Yahoo! Tech]