Does the job (Samsung SGH-U600)

Member Name: k8eh

Product:	Samsung SGH-U600
Date:	17/01/09 (62 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: nice buttons, cool background.

Disadvantages: rubbish battery life, damn touch sensitive keys

So my contract was nearly up and I was fed up of my weighty, bulky, brick of a phone so I was looking for something new. What did I choose? Samsung U600. Was it the right decision? Meh, I'm sure I could have opted for something better.

Appearance:
The U600 is ultra-slim at only 11mm thick. It slides easily into a pocket without making you look like you have some odd growth on your leg...or that you're excited to see somebody haha.
The colour is quite attractive, blueish and looks quite stylish.
If I was to rate this phone on appearance alone I'd give it 5 stars... but there's where most of the praise ends.

Battery Life:
Now this, quite frankly, is shocking. After having such a long lasting reliable battery with my old phone, I was horrified at how often I had to recharge this one. The most annoying thing is how it severely vibrates when the battery is low, every few minutes. Hello phone? you're dying, conserve your remaining power! I might need it. Hmph, as you can tell I am not impressed with that.

Camera:
The camera is 3.2 megapixels, which will get you a decent quality picture. The only complaint I have is how long you have to hold the button in to get the picture to take... by the time it's taken my hand has started shaking so my lovely "picture moment" is now a blurry mess. If you are patient with it though, you can get a decent picture. It of course also has other snazzy effects for the more creative but personally, I don't bother with all that.

Texting:
One advantage of this phone, I think are the buttons. I can text with ease and as I text alot I find this important. The buttons are much better and easier to press than my old sony ericsson. I do though, of course, have a complaint to make. I don't know if it's just me or whether I have fat thumbs (which I don't think I do) but the touch buttons (start call/end call) often get accidently pressed when I'm texting and start to ring the recipient so I have to hastily slide the top down to end the call and then annoyingly go back to writing my text. Not the best.

Other features:
For phone and technology fanatics, there are plenty of other whizzy features such as MP3 player, FM Radio, Bluetooth, Web browser etc... which I get on with quite well. No complaints here :)

Navigation:
Well this took me a bit of getting used to. In the centre of the buttons there is a round button, which for some reason I thought was used to access the menu. It isn't. The number of times I've accidently accessed the internet (and I'm then charged for the connection...) is ridiculous. I suppose I am to blame and should have learnt by now, but I do still do it quite often. But then again that could just be silly old me.

Something rather cool:
The one thing I love about this phone is the background. I know that may sound ridiculous but I do. In the day you have a daytime london scene, in the evening/night you have a night time london scene. When you have no signal, you have a countryside scene. When you have a text you have fireworks in the sky and when I went to france I had the eiffel tower. I was rather impressed to be honest, simple minds ey? This sort of thing obviously isn't what you're looking for when buying a phone but I thought I'd sneak it in there...

Overall:
Well to be honest, this phone didn't live upto the hype, not for me anyway. But as I use it for calls/texting, it does everything I want it to do, so I can cope. The price was reasonable but I'm sure there's better models out there. This might just be my bad experiences with it, as others have rated it highly, but in my opinion, it's not brilliant.

Summary: not brilliant, not awful

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