U600 Samsung SGH Mobile Phone 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 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.

Camera of Samsung U600

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 15pound 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.