Overview

In their own words, the Samsung GT-S7070 (‘DIVA’ to you and me) is the Korean manufacturer’s “first mobile phone launched directly at young women.”

Up until now, efforts to accommodate the specific demands of the female mobile phone hasn’t gone much further than the issuing of “Limited Edition” pink versions.

Yet with the Diva, Samsung have visibly gone further, working feminine touches into both the design and the user interface.

We gave it a thorough 7 day road test to put the Diva through it’s paces.

Design & Specification.

For starters the Samsung Diva comes in a very attractive presentation box. Open it up and then prepare to be dazzled by the phone’s centre-piece: a faux crystal home button. The reverse is a decorative pearlescent quilted back panelling. The Diva’s call buttons sport some very fine detailing too, with etched grooves making a nice contrast to the rest of the smooth textured body.

Fashionable features aside, the Samsung Diva is a very agreeable form and size. At 2.8” the screen is a fair size and responsive enough for quick-typing and weighing is at just 94g, this adds precious little bulk to your purse.

On the inside, the Diva totes a stylised “Touch-Wiz” user interface that allows you to customise three different homepages with your own personal arrangement of widgets. The Diva-esque touches here are an italicized font and cutesy-icons which make the UI feel part bottle of lambrini, part Power Puff girl.

Now this is bound to divide opinion, but any misgivings from us were roundly over-ruled by our receptionist Emma who was adamant that ITALICS ON A PHONE ARE AMAZING.

Connectivity

Ah, so here’s where Samsung have clearly skimped a bit. This phone has no 3G connection. There. I said it.

Web access over the EDGE /2.5G network is therefore a bit of a crawl - Okay for light and occasional use, but not so for either heavy social interaction or frequent emailing.

Trying to make up for this, the Diva comes with some nicely optimized widgets that push to you live updates from your social networks. These worked fairly well for keeping up to date with friend’s activity, but weren’t suitable for heavy use.

As standard though you get a Bluetooth for small wireless transfers plus a micro USB 2.0 connection, so you can charge the Diva from your computer as well as the mains.

 Media

The Diva sports a pretty average 3.15 mega pixel camera capable of 2048x1536 resolution and QVGA video. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great either- sufficient for recording summer picnic antics but probably nothing more than a grainy blurb in the nightclub (no flash bulb!).

Boo and hiss to Samsung for failing to include a 3.5mm jack too, which makes the onboard Mp3 player fairly redundant. As it stands, you only get a pair of proprietary earphones which have to be connected using the micro USB.

With that in mind, you’re more likely to use the upgradeable SDcard slot (up to 8GB) for pictures rather than music.

Verdict

Proving a hit with most of the girls we showed it to, the cosmetically enhanced Diva appears to tick all the boxes that Samsung set out to, despite offering little extra in the way of features.

Overall the Samsung Diva is a nice lightweight handset with some very intuitive controls making it great for your basic telephone needs – calls / SMS / MMS plus the odd email.

Our main gripe using it was how easily cluttered the homepages could become – this is a problem that appears across all phones using the Touch Wiz interface however, so not exclusive to the Diva.

Style wise however, it has bags of chintzy charm – enough for someone to forgive it’s UI blunders.

Pay Monthly Samsung Diva deals start at just £15.