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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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