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Shortly after Apple announced the iPhone, Samsung announced that it had a similar phone in development: the "Ultra Smart F700". Nearly every part of it seems like a direct answer to the iPhone, from the finger-touch interface to the shape of it, right down to the streamlined front design with a single "home" button below the screen.

However Samsung seems to have developed a whole new finger-touch user interface (UI) that surely took more than a month to develop. It wasn't quite clear how Samsung reacted to the iPhone with a complete product so quickly.

Things became a bit clearer at 3GSM this week, when the Ultra Smart F520 was announced, and we had a chance to try Samsung's new finger-touch UI ourselves.

First, the new UI is a long way from being finished. While it's clearly beyond the concept / demo stage - it does really work interactively, and do many things just fine such as play music and make phone calls - there are still quite a few "dead ends" where icons and menu items simply don't do anything yet. That's not surprising, though; journalists who have tried the iPhone say the that UI is at about the same stage.

Second, of the two Ultra Smart phones, the F520 is clearly further along in development. In fact, it's the only of the two that would even power on. We suspect that the F520 is the original "Ultra Smart" phone the new UI was intended for, and the F700 is simply a new spin-off hardware model created quickly to provide a more direct answer to the iPhone.

It's tempting to compare Samsung's new finger-touch UI to that of the iPhone, but it's not really a fair comparison. While Apple is clearly trying to create a whole new UI paradigm, Samsung's goals don't appear quite as ambitious. Samsung's UI is more about trying to make a good finger-touch UI for a typical high-end phone, while Apple is aiming for a whole new platform. A phone using Samsung's finger-touch UI fits somewhere in-between a regular phone and the iPhone.

 

The home screen, menus, and options within Samsung's new UI aren't that different from a regular phone. What's new are a few standard UI elements that replace certain hardware keys. On most screens, there's a row of four small icons across the bottom. They are, in order: options, home, back, and exit. The "home" function actually brings up a simple 4-way shortcut menu to the most commonly used functions.

Throughout the interface, there's a wide blue crosshair-like element. In the main menu, you can "drag" it around and wherever you lift your finger is the option that's chosen. It's not any more efficient than simply tapping an icon, but it's fun to play with. The one place where the "crosshairs" are useful is the music player. The whole screen becomes a control for the song playing. Dragging the crosshairs up or down adjusts volume, while left/right skips right to the part of the song you want to hear.

iPhone clone or not, the F700 is one damn sexy phone.

 

The F700 has a decent-feeling slide-out keyboard. The specs are pretty impressive, including HSDPA and a 5 megapixel auto-focus camera. It does have a memory card slot, but it's below the battery cover. That keeps the outside nice and slick-looking, but hinders convenience a bit.

Without being able to turn it on, there's not much else we can say about the F700 specifically.

The F520 has Samsung's dual-slide design where some keys do double-duty as either number keys or letter keys, depending on which way you slide the screen. The idea is interesting, but it creates an awkward, somewhat arbitrary blank space in the middle of the QWERTY keyboard. The large numbers also make it difficult to read the letters on the right half of the keyboard.

 

The dual-slide mechanism wasn't very solid; it felt loose and easy to slide diagonally. That could be a prototype issue, however, or due to the demo unit being abused, so it's simply an issue to look for in reviews of the final shipping unit.

Here's a quick side-by-side size comparison of the Ultra Smart F520 and F700 against the SGH-i600 (just like the i607 BlackJack):

 

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