Review: Samsung U600 mobile phone

Samsung loves to come up with mobile phones that make a statement.

So the SGH-U600, the latest in its Ultra range, is exceptionally thin (10.9mm) and can slip into the snuggest shirt pocket with scarcely a bump.

This trick is achieved partly by flattening the buttons: the number keys, hidden inside the slide mechanism, are traditional buttons, although with very little room to travel when pushed. On the outside there’s a raised direction button and four touch-sensitive buttons that don’t move at all, as on LG’s Chocolate phone, or Samsung’s own E900.

The problem with touch-sensitive buttons is that when you put the phone to your face you risk activating them with your cheek. So the phone locks after a second or so to prevent this.

However, it's intelligent enough to know that you might need to press keys to enter a Pin or respond to automated prompts, so it allows these, but it's not possible to hang up a call by pressing the End key. This gets disabled while in a call, so you need to slide the phone shut instead.

Despite its thin profile the U600 still manages to squeeze in a 3.2-megapixel camera, helpfully placed at the top of the slide so it’s protected when the phone is closed but out of the way of fingers and thumbs when snapping.

The Samsung music player can call on the 60MB of embedded memory and a microSD memory card (not included) to save tracks on. It also allows stereo reception over Bluetooth so you can listen to those tracks on cordless headphones, or use a wirefree headset to talk on the phone while the handset is stashed away in a pocket.

It comes with Samsung’s neat screen savers – city landmarks which change automatically according to where you are in the world, updating the time zone at the same time. So when in France the Arc de Triomphe will appear while in the UK it's an animation of the Houses of Parliament, with birds flying gently past a cloudy sky (or shooting stars across darkness at night). That said, the picture of the clock face on the Houses of Parliament (the Big Ben tower) is back to front. Despite that, the phone looks great.

The menus have been streamlined: for instance, previously, the alarm was hidden under the Planner icon, for some strange reason, but now has its own menu space. Otherwise, it’s as straightforward and intuitive as you’d expect a Samsung phone to be. Plus, it has borrowed an excellent idea from Windows smartphones: as you dial a phone number it offers you recent matches, a handy extra on a sleek, slim and nice-to-use mobile phone.

Vista compatible: NA