Unlikely to win many prizes, but still a decent phone (Samsung SGH-U600)

Member Name: Nichelette

Product:	Samsung SGH-U600
Date:	15/03/09 (126 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can be picked up quite cheaply, memory can be expanded

Disadvantages: Camera is a bit rubbish

I have to say, I'm not one of those people who is obsessed with having the newest, best phone on the market, but I am a fan of Samsung mobiles. Having owned a Samsung D500 for three and a half years, and after having my friends constantly telling me to get a new phone, I finally caved in when it got so broken I didn't really have much choice but to replace it (having broken down & okay buttons isn't any fun).

Having graduated in the summer I'm not particularly flush, so I headed to ebay. I knew that I wanted another Samsung phone, and managed to get a month old U600 for a total of £43 which I didn't think was too bad. I believe a new one of these is usually just under the £100 mark.

*Looks*

Visually this phone is quite pleasing. As the box is keen to tell you, it is just 10.9mm thick, 10cm tall, and 5cm wide. The thinness of this did worry me slightly when I first got it, but it is perhaps surprisingly sturdy so my mind was put to rest quite quickly. The screen is large enough for anything you would need to use this phone for, and as I read in a review before I bought it, it is so reflective it doubles up as a handy mirror should you need one! The number keys are the same as on a standard phone, and there are two touch screen buttons at the bottom of the screen. It is available in dark grey, blue, pink and purple depending on which network you have it on.

*Ease of use*

I only really tended to use my old phone to call and text, so getting this with all of its functions was quite exciting, but I had two main concerns with getting a new phone. Firstly, although this is thinner that my old phone, it is wider and taller. I thought that as I have quite small girly hands I might fumble with it a bit, but that hasn't been the case. Also, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to slide the touch screen up easily and would hence miss calls. My old phone had a little rubber lip for you to slide it up, but this doesn't have anything of the sort. I soon found out that this was because it doesn't need it. The slide on this phone is really nice and effortless, so needless to say that wasn't a problem in the end either.

One thing I think it is worth mentioning though, is the the 'back' button when you're writing a text message. It may just be my mindset, but whenever I wanted to delete something I'd written I'd always press the back button. Unfortunately 'back' doesn't mean to go back in the text, it means to go back to the previous screen. There isn't anything you can do once you've pressed this button, your options are to save the text and faff about retrieving it, or to start all over again. I found this particularly annoying when I first got the phone as I was doing it constantly, and even now I still do it quite frequently.

This is also a quadband phone which is quite handy if you need to use your phone abroad a lot, and it has bluetooth connectivity.

*Accessories*

Inside the box you will find a CD which you can use to put music on to your phone (however you don't need to use the CD to do this, it will sync quite happily from windows media player). There is also a pair of headphones which are pretty standard, to be honest if I was going to listen to music via the phone on a regular basis I'd probably want to use my own head phones, though they connect in the same slot as the charger does, so I'm not sure if it's possible to buy 'decent' headphones with that connector. Inside the box you'll also find the charger and the regulation instruction booklets. Personally I thought that although these covered the basics there were some questions I had which they didn't hold the answer to.

*Functions*

There are plenty of functions on this phone. Apart from the camera, music player, Java games and internet access the phone has a calender, bluetooth, a voice recorder, FM radio, image editor & stamp, world clock, calculator, converter, timer, stopwatch, memo function, and an alarm.

*Music*

This phone is capable of storing a small amount of music, but this can be expanded with the addition of a micro SD card which you can pick up on ebay for around £3. It isn't a huge criticism as 2gb is still a decent amount of music, but this phone isn't compatible with one of the larger 4 or 8gb memory cards.

Adding music to this phone through a computer is a very simple process, and you don't even have to install the CD which comes with the phone in order to do so. The speaker is reasonably good quality so I'm happy to listen to music through it.

*Camera*

The camera on this phone is 3.2 mega pixels which will give you a reasonable quality photo, however I wasn't that impressed with the camera function. This is mainly due to the time it takes from me pressing the button to take the photo, to it actually being taken. There is quite a delay which quite often leads to me moving my hand and getting a blurred picture. I don't think the camera on this phone is as intuitive as the one on my old phone, but that may just be me.

Should you be one of those people who like to edit their photos, there are several effects that you can play around with including black and white, sepia and so on. The image editor also has some other filters and transform tools, along with the ability to crop images. This is a fairly easy feature to use.

All things considered I'm surprised how happy I've been with this phone, and knowing me like my last one I'll probably keep it until it breaks!

Summary: If you like Samsung phones this is a reasonably good one

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