In a nutshell: The U600 is the slimmest slide phone ever, measuring an astonishing 10.9mm thickness. Yet it's a high-spec phone featuring a 3 megapixel camera with flash and autofocus, and a fully-featured music player with expandable memory to replace your MP3 player. The only thing that may put some people off is the touch sensitive buttons - but sometimes you have to suffer a little to look good!
The Samsung U600 is the first of the second-generation Ultra phones to hit the shops and is the replacement for the enormously popular Samsung D900 ultra-slim slide phone. At just 10.9 mm it's even thinner than the D900, making it the slimmest slide phone available. As well as making it thinner, Samsung have shaved a couple of millimetres off the width of the phone, which is a very welcome improvement, as flat wide phones are not as ergonomic to use as conventionally-sized phones. It's also 10g lighter than the D900, making it an extremely lightweight phone indeed. You can hardly feel the presence of this phone in a jacket pocket! A visual makeover serves to differentiate the U600 from the D900 in the looks department. One important change is that the external buttons (the ones that you can see when the slide is closed) have been made into touch-sensitive buttons (like the Samsung E900). Touch sensitive buttons look cool, but are not to everyone's taste - read our user reviews of the Samsung E900 for a flavour of these! We feel that Samsung have made a mistake here and the touch-sensitive buttons will alienate a certain percentage of users. If you don't want to take the risk then stick with the D900, which is a very safe choice.
Inside the phone, not a lot has changed - at least from a user's perspective. The camera has been uprated from 3.0 to 3.2 megapixels. The battery is less powerful than the D900's, but Samsung claim that battery performance has actually been improved due to a new technology called OPUS (Optimized Power Usage Solution). In our experience, the battery life is only 2-3 days. User memory has been reduced slightly from 70 Mbytes to 60 Mbytes.
The camera is excellent - Samsung's best yet - with a high-resolution 3.2 megapixel resolution, LED flash, autofocus and digital zoom. It doesn't match the Sony Ericsson K800i or the Nokia N95, but it's still one of the best cameras on a phone. Our only complaint about the camera is its slowness in taking a picture - a delay of one or two seconds means that fast moving subjects are hard to photograph. There's also a good quality video camera. The display is high resolution (240 x 320 pixels) with 262,144 colours and is excellent. The music player supports a wide range of formats - MP3, ACC, ACC+ and e-AAC+ - and has very good sound reproduction. You can use the stereo headset supplied by Samsung or a wireless Bluetooth headset. You can also listen to music through the built-in loudspeaker which features a Bang & Olufsen digital power amplifier. The player is easy to use with playlists of up to 30 tracks. With 60 Mbytes of user memory, you can only store around 15 music tracks, so to use your U600 as a music player, you'll need to buy a Micro SD card - a 512 Mbyte card costs around £15 and will enable you to store over 100 tracks. The largest memory card possible is a 2 Gbyte card, with storage for around 500 songs. A PC data link kit is included in the sales package, for transferring music from a PC.
Other features that we like include the messaging options, with support for email attachments and a document viewer for viewing (but not editing) MS Office, PDF and HTML files. We like the EDGE connection for fast downloads, the quad band operating frequency, wireless photo printing with PicBridge�-compatible printers and the TV-Out connector for viewing your photos and videos directly on a TV.
Most of all, the U600 works as a lightweight, ultra-slim, look-at-me, sexy-slider kind of phone. It's got the 3 megapixel camera and the music player to back up the looks too. The phone isn't as user friendly as it could have been without the touch-sensitive buttons, but really it would be mean of us not to award a full 5 stars for the U600. Perhaps 4.5 stars sums up our real opinion. A genuine 5 star phone is the G600, which is the replacement for the U600 and has a 5 megapixel camera and no touch-sensitive buttons.
Demand for the U600 is already sky high at launch, and this has driven prices down. You can probably find the best bargain by starting a new contract rather than upgrading on your existing contract (it's easy to port your phone number to a new network). Some of the best deals are available from Dialaphone, currently offering a free U600 with with up to 12 months free line rental, or a choice of free gifts including an LCD TV or an XBOX 360. Alternatively, use our deal finder at the top right of this page to source the best bargains. Vodafone are offering half-price line rental if you buy direct from them. You might be surprised just how affordable this top-end phone is already. The U600 is now available on Pay as you Go too - the lowest price we've found is £139.95 from the Carphone Warehouse.
Features of the Samsung U600 include:
* 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, flash and 4x digital zoom
* Video camera (MPEG4 format)
* Display: TFT, 262,144 colours, 240 x 320 pixels
* Music player (MP3, ACC, ACC+, e-AAC+ formats) with digital power amp
* 64-voice polyphonic ringtones / MP3 ringtones
* Voice memo recorder
* Integrated handsfree speakerphone
* Messaging: SMS, MMS, email (POP3, SMTP, IMAP4, SSL, TLS)
* T9 predictive text
* Document viewer for MS Office, PDF and HTML files
* Mobile printing via Bluetooth (PicBridge�)
* Java games
* Flight mode
* Personal organiser functions
* Memory: 60 Mbytes plus MicroSD memory card slot (expandable to 2 Gbytes)
* Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, TV-Out
* WAP 2.0, GPRS Class 10, EDGE
* Quad band
* Size: 103 x 49 x 11 mm
* Weight: 81g
* Talktime: 4 hours
* Battery standby: 270 hours
No comments:
Post a Comment