Samsung Diva S7070

Something for us girls here. The Samsung Diva S7070 has been designed especially your... wait for it... diva side. It's one of two phones in the Diva range (along with the S5150). Just take a look at it: white, pearly and padded like a Dior bag, with a central menu button in the guise of a fake Svarowski. While this touch phone plays the cutesy, girlie, card, its spec is reduced to a minimum. The eternal question then, are looks enough on their own?


Coquette? Charming? Over the top?

The high-tech industry has really cottoned on to the idea of producing girlie (or should we say diva) gear! Just take a look at the co-branded product currently available (Hello Kitty, Prada, Cerruti and so on). The originality of these feminine phones seems to appeal to a certain section of the market. Here, as elsewhere, everything depends on taste. We'll let you judge the Diva (S7070) for yourself. We would however say that it has a good finish and the 2.8-inch touch screen makes for an attractive, responsive, sensitive display overall. Perhaps a little too sensitive at times because you often pick up an application by mistake. While with a resitive touchscreen you need to be more deliberate in your movements, here just brushing it is enough.


Usage

Overall the Diva (S7070) behaves itself well. Navigating from one home page to another (3 in total) is easy and applications generally open rapidly. The now famous in-house TouchWiz interface has been touched-up to fit in with Samsung's target: it's... wait for it... pink! As usual, as with the Jet, the Tocco and so on, you can customise your phone with widgets on the left hand side of the screen. You even get ultra-feminine widgets such as "diet" (yes) or wish list (oh, yes) to better manage your shopping days!


While at first, you regret the lack of an accelerometer, you soon realise that this phone is mainly for phoning. You won't use it for browsing the internet (the screen isn't big enough, nor is WAP satisfactory), except for updating your Facebook status perhaps. Where you might miss the accelerometer is for texting: you have to make do with an alphanumeric pad and T9 mode. Obviously we'd have preferred a virtual keyboard.

As a camera, the DIVA can be something to fall back on but it's far from offering a decent alternative to your digital compact. You have to make sure you're not trying to take photos in anything but bright conditions of course, and, yes, get everyone to stay still! The same goes for video quality - noisy to say the least.

Battery life holds up for a multifunction phone. At the same time, you'll call on it a lot less than a true multimedia phone. This one will run for two full days before you need to recharge.