Samsung A701

3G is here. Hello mobile Foxtel, goodbye 45 second gaps spent standing around aimlessly.

The A701 is a sleek looking phone. It feels it too, as all of the edges have been gently curved and at 98 x 51 x 17.3mm (WDH), it fits snugly in your palm. It’s also one of the first phones to support Telstra’s Next G network.

As such, it supports a host of subscription services, such as video on demand and music downloads. The video is provided by Foxtel, and although it’s viewable, it’s too compressed to make out fine details like CNN’s news ticker.

The same is true of any Next G phone though. Other than CNN, Fox Sports, MTV, The Disney Channel, Discovery Channel, Fashion TV, E! Entertainment, The Comedy Channel, Fox 8 and Sky News Headlines and Business are available as a subscription.

It boasts a two megapixel camera and a VGA camera for photos and voice calls, and has a slot for a MiniSD card (up to 2GB) to complement the onboard 24 MB.

There are three external media keys which come in handy for controlling music, however once you start the media player, you won’t be able to use the phone’s other functions at the same time. The quality of the included wired headset is passable, although if you want it to sound better you can stream music to a Stereo Bluetooth headset.

The menu system is concise and straightforward. It doesn’t weigh itself down with tabbed menus, and if you hover over an option it will display the status without you having to open it. For example, looking at the message screen displays both the options and the number of messages in your inbox, outbox, email and drafts folder.

It could use some work though: to add additional numbers to a contact, you have to first wade through a menu system and specify what type of number you want to add, be it home, work or other. Yet the default options let you add the contact’s birthday, homepage and two email addresses right off the bat.

There are times when you’ll feel as though the phone is making your life unnecessarily difficult. If you are editing a name in the phone book and press the end call button, it will ask you if you want to save, then quit, without giving you the option to cancel and continue editing.

The entire package is capped off with some large, tactile keys, accompanied by a series of unnecessary, annoying key tones. The only thing holding the A701 back are a series of little annoyances like this. Once you learn to live with them, or learn how to disable them (whichever comes first) you’re left with a solid phone that does the job with a fair bit of future proofing thrown in for good measure.