Introduction
It sometimes happens that you take the phone out of its box and even after reviewing over 500 different handsets you can still say something that I would not like to quote right now, but it starts with an f and ends with a k. Samsung J770 made me say this, but not in the negative meaning. Astonishment and pleasant surprise were mixing in me and the phone’s design is not the only reason, but I also know (and now you will know as well) how much the phone costs. But it would be foolishness to judge it based on the first impression, and this is indeed true in the case of J770.
It’s about 100 euros in prepay package. What can you get for this? Well here’s the great L700, or the other nice Sony Ericsson K770, or Motorola V8, maybe Nokia 6300. That’s a powerful pack, and Samsung’s new phone arrives here. The contents of the box we received from GSM Takács might be average, as besides the handset it only has a charger and a headset, but this headset is worth the attention, as it can be taken apart and it’s an in-ear type.
It seems that Samsung has decided to start making metallic phones in the mid-range as well. Nice, very nice, they have all my support, it’s really a different feeling to take such a phone in your hand instead of one that’s made fully of plastic. The feeling of quality. We might have a completely average phone, but the metallic case improves it a lot. J770 is just like this. If we consider its features, there are better choices. If we analyze its quality, it’s the best in its category, at least based on current models. But let’s see the details, as they can matter a lot.
Hirdetés
Exterior
Looks good, elegant, cold and low-keyed. I haven’t been alone with these words. The silver-black colors are a great match for the angular shape of J770, metal surrounds the whole handset, it’s cold to the touch and it “stores” every fingerprint. It’s not light either, J770 can really pull your shirt’s pocket, according to the Vodafone website it weighs 68 grams (hahaha), while other sources mention a weight of 98 grams.
There is a 2.1” display on the front, and in this case the Samsung site is the one to write foolishness, as they mention QCIF resolution (which means 176 x 144 pixels), but the real resolution is 176 x 220 pixels. The navigation keys below the screen are made up of two function keys on the sides and a five-way d-pad. In the case of the d-pad the horizontal directions and the middle key turn into playback control keys when listening to music. The only problem with this control is that the middle button takes the user to the WAP from the standby screen, it would be really high time to forget this idiotic feature. My other problem has been that the upper edge of the navigation button is lifted and forms a kind of rim, probably someone has thought that it would be comfortable when sliding the phone open, although no one, but really no one would ever put his or her finger here. But it’s a real annoyance when browsing the menu.
On the left side of J770, below the volume control keys, we can find the music player’s hotkey and the microSD slot, while on the right there is the proprietary Samsung data connector (they could swap this one out too with a standard microUSB) and the camera’s exposure key. The top and bottom are completely empty, while on the metal back we can only see the manufacturer’s logo, but as we open the phone…
…we get to see the numeric keys. The labels, being placed on a single panel, are separated by a grid. These labels are large enough and the white backlight also helps readability.
The camera also appears as we slide the phone open, there is a mirror besides the 2 megapixel module, but there is no flash. Unfortunately the slide won’t open very smoothly and it doesn’t fit its place perfectly, there is about a 3-4 mm of difference. We can push it back completely to its place afterwards, but we’re not used to such a thing from Samsung. As far as we know J770 is one of the first Samsung models where development and manufacturing have both taken place at the Korean manufacturer’s premises in China. It would be a prejudice to say that these little Chinese hands are to blame for this slide, it might happen that only we have been unlucky to have such a piece, but anyway, it’s not worthy of Samsung.
Menu, basic functions
On the inside this Samsung is also like any other. So we again have to experience the wonder of the center key taking us to wap from the standby screen. There are three themes on the phone, a simple white (this is the best from the point of visibility), a white on blue and a yellow on mauve combo. It might be that this is not mauve, but purple-blue or rotten fish color, but since I see the world in 16 colors I can’t really judge it. The main menu with 12 icons has a logical layout, it looks cool, has nice animations, it’s fast and remembers where we have been in the menus, which is a pleasant feature and it’s easy to get used to it.
The phonebook has the usual scheme, it displays SIM and internal contacts on the same list, this latter one can store 1000 entries. Searching is fast, contacts can have quite a lot of extra information assigned to them (multiple numbers, email address, note, image and ringtone). Messaging will be no surprise either, we can store 300 SMS messages and we can have MMS messages and emails until there is free internal memory. The email client is rather simple, but it’s good for the basic tasks, although it doesn’t support attachments.
The calendar has the usual stuff: month, week and day views and it’s well structured. We can store five types of entries: meeting, anniversary, holiday, important and personal. It can store 1000 events, which will be enough for quite a long time, or if it’s not than we can set up automatic deletion, which cleans up expired reminders. The alarm clock is the usual, it can store five alarms, it has snooze and works when the phone is turned off. No surprises from the stopwatch, the calculator or the world clock (with map) either.
There are quite a lot of games on the phone, but besides the first four (Cannonball, Forgotten Warrior, Freekick, Arch Angel) the others are demos, so we can pay up if we need the full versions.
Multimedia
The camera under the slider is only a 2 megapixel one without autofocus, so it’s evident that photography is not one of J770’s specialties. Besides this we have the well-known landscape menu if we want to take some pictures and the usual features of this category (effects, frames, size, etc.) are all here. The problem is that although the shoot key on the right is at the best place if we want to take a picture, but it’s a bit hard to press it, so we press from the other side as well, where there is the music player’s hotkey, and it might not be very fortunate that instead of taking a picture we turn on music. Test pictures below.
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The musical part is fine. The phone displays three kinds of layouts during playback, and thanks to the three color schemes we have nine types in total. When activating the musical function we first get the sorted track list (by ID3 tags), and from here we go on to playback. The software support two stereo Bluetooth headsets at the same time, there is a built-in equalizer, but only with preset schemes, it can run in the background, there is a sleep timer, so it’s all right. Returning to the standby screen we can skip tracks with the navigation key, but if we close the handset and activate the keylock, it’s goodbye to this feature.
The supplied headset can be taken apart and it’s finally an in-ear one, with a superior sound quality, so no problems over here. Those who hate such a headset can choose a different one, as after taking it apart we have a standard 3.5 mm jack. The handset is also used for starting the RDS-capable FM radio, which is also a fine piece of software.
The phone has music recognition as well. This can use track segments from two sources: from the sound recorder, or the radio. The sample is then uploaded to the internet and the result displayed on the phone. It worked fine from both sources, but it just couldn’t get any useful information for the note I hummed on the phone, although it’s not by chance that I didn’t take part in American Idol, I would have had no chance at all.
Data transfer, battery
The phone has no 3G support, which is one of its greatest flaws. Currently L700 is cheaper, it’s also made of metal and although it doesn’t come with such a cool headset, it has 3G support. This way J770 is not yet competitive. But it has stereo Bluetooth, and we have an HTML browser, but we should download Opera Mini instead. BlackBerry Storm had no problem with exchanging data with the Samsung over BT.
The battery under the hood doesn’t seem a large one and it won’t keep the phone online for long. We should expect a standby time of not longer than two, or maybe three days, but then it starts screaming for energy, and it won’t even launch multimedia applications when the battery is low. In the case of the camera there is another trick as it cannot be launched when the phone thinks that there is not enough free memory to take pictures, he thinks that it’s useless to see the viewfinder, although if I decrease the resolution and take a picture of a white wall, it would surely fit on the memory… but the software takes decisions instead of me.
Summary? Well, it’s not bad, but this time it’s no use of being made of metal, it just has no place on the market at this price. There’s no 3G? Okay, here are the great musical features, but the poorly assembled slider makes things much worse, even more if Samsung is the manufacturer. I don’t know if this is due to the phone being made in China, but I am not interested at all in the place of assembly, if it’s a Samsung then make it like one. It should cost about 25-35 euros less to be competitive.
Bog
Translated by Szaszati
Samsung J770 has been provided by GSM Takács. Thanks.
The handset can be purchased online at www.gsmtakacs.hu.
Specifications
| Samsung J770 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM | |
| Size | 98.5 x 48.6 x 18 mm | |
| Weight | 96 grams | |
| Available colors | Grey | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2.1” | |
| Display resolution | 176x 220 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 262.000 | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | 300 / 295 KB | |
| Internal memory | 12 MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / none | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | none / none | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | 2.0 (proprietary connector) | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | no / no | |
| GPS receiver | no | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | yes | |
| Vibra function | yes | |
| Built-in handsfree | yes | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | no / no | |
| Sound recorder | yes (60 minutes) | |
| Alarm clock | yes, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Samsung | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / yes | |
| E-mail client | yes | |
| Java | yes, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 4 + demos | |
| Currency converter | yes | |
| Extra software | music recognition | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 2 megapixels, fix focus | |
| Secondary camera | no | |
| Video recording | yes (176 x 144 pixels) | |
| Music player | yes | |
| Equalizer | yes (presets only) | |
| FM radio | yes - RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 880 mAh | |
| Standby time | 370 hours | |
| Talk time | na | |
| Other | ||
| metal case, stereo headset | ||
