Black beauty

There is always something about the color black that makes people think of elegance and formality. Black-tie affairs, little black dresses mean serious occasions, high art. Black gadgets were more or less the norm before funky colors invaded the tech scene, as the market focus began leaning toward the increasingly younger market.

Nowadays, it is quite rare to catch a black phone. But of late, high-end phones meant for executives and the mature set are turning black, short of saying that state-of-the-art features are best expressed in black, or as the saying goes (in advertising parlance), "because you are through with the basics."

Samsung’s opening salvo this year for the mid-range market is a black beauty that retails for P15,900 – the all-black Samsung SGH-X700. It has a black, slender body, black headset and black battery charger.

If you’re no fashionista and goes to the office in purely corporate colors, this goes well with any garb, anywhere, even on the golf course, perhaps, where it is easy to spot in a bed of greens.

Yet this one looks elegant enough without being expensive. With a 1.3-megapixel camera and video recorder, an FM radio, an MP3 player, MMS capability, Bluetooth and memory that can load up to a thousand entries in the phone book, what more could you ask for? This is about what the average user needs to participate in the mobile space.

E-mail and Web surfing, perhaps? Yes, but it’s not that easy to pull through. For beginners in the mobile Internet stuff, you have to configure a lot of things for it to work – proxy servers, GPRS network settings, and an e-mail account – and data transfer rate is not that fast, you’re better off with a standard PDA phone, BlackBerry or the more conventional notebook PC.

But once the set-up is properly configured, it can work, especially if you use the e-mail or surf the Web on a need basis and only as a back-up to standard devices. The e-mail client supports protocols such as POP3, IMAP4, SMTP, SSL, and TLS.

There is also provision for receiving push messages from the wireless Web server. The default settings, though, is set to SMS-C specific and you have to change the settings to suit your needs.

One thing good about Samsung phones is its wide, high-resolution screens, which are perfect for SMS, MMS and Web surfing. This particular phone has an LCD color TFT/TFD display with 262,144 colors.

There were extras thrown in, of course, which are also becoming standard features in most mid-range mobile phones such as world time – which allows you to set the phone in two time zones, one for the home country and another country of your choice. So, it is easy to compare time differences, especially if you have relatives, friends or business partners in another continent. It keeps track of time in two places at once.

In response to the flurry of music phones now flooding the market, the X700 is also an MP3 player and has an FM radio that can store up to 30 pre-set radio channels. If you’re an average radio listener, that is a lot to begin with. It makes for easy listening, though, as you have only to scroll up and down the 30 slots to pick your own radio program, especially if you’re in a car.

We did not get to test how many MP3 tunes it can store but tech specifications say that the phone itself has 35 MB (built-in flash shared memory). You can also buy an expansion card if you need more space to store music files or other data. The catch is you don’t need to carry your lifetime album with you. At best you can load up to maybe 10 songs you fancy listening to for the day and if you’re downright busy at work or school the whole day anyway, that is already a lot.

MP3 tunes can be downloaded straight from the wireless Web, transferred to the phone from the PC through USB, Bluetooth or from a memory card.

One accessory that will go well with this black beauty is a black Bluetooth headset so when playing MP3 tunes you don’t have to get entangled with the wires of the headphone.

The unit lent to The STAR for review carried a funky tune from Bambee entitled "Are You Online." Signs of the times? We bet it is. "In the morning, first thing I do/is to check my mailbox and hope there is/something from you." Now, if that doesn’t ring familiarity, you’re not yet a "cyber baby" which is what this mobile thing is all about.

Bambee croons: "Cyber love it just can’t replace/The facts that I can’t see your face... if only we could maybe get together all night through."

Now that is quite dated. Even the X700 already has a provision for picture caller ID. That is, instead of a name or a number appearing on your phone when you get a call, you get to see the picture of the one calling you instead. We didn’t try it out, though. But we know that a lot of mobile phone users are already using this feature. The truth is, with 3G coming it is even on its way out as 3G phones enable users to see in real time who they’re talking to. But that’s another story, another mobile phone model.

In the meantime, with the X700 you can sing along with Bambee: "Are you online I’ve been waiting for a sign/Are you online I’ve been waiting all the time." Or you can try out all the other phone features we didn’t find time to explore.