Samsung U600 Review
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 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 (now beaten by the Samsung E840!). 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 or choose the newer Samsung G600, which are
very safe choices.
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, so we've decided not to award the full
5 stars for the U600. 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 has been sky high since 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).
The U600 is now available on Pay as you Go too.
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