Samsung SGH-i600 Ultra Edition smartphone

Would-be BlackBerry beater from the consumer electronics giant

By Scott Snowden • Get more from this author

15th April 2007 09:59 GMT

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Samsung SGH-i600 Ultra Edition smartphone

Samsung claims up to 6.5 hours talktime purely on 2G and around 3.5 hours on 3G and an average of just over 300 hours on standby. With reasonable daily use, including logging on several times a day for roughly 30 minutes or so and listening to music on the tube journey to work, the i600 happily lasted a few days without requiring charge – which is what you'd expect from a device like this.

Windows Mobile 5.0 provided no problem in synchronising successfully with Microsoft Outlook, sharing the contact, task, and calendar data. The i600 can also synchronise email. However, constantly switching the T9 predictive text input system on and off might prove to be a pain, as most emails require a response and this makes it difficult to reply with more than a couple of lines.

Call quality was superb with more than adequate volume and, unlike many similar devices, you don't feel like you're talking into a pocket calculator. The i600 is a tri-band phone supporting 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz frequencies. Depending on whether your network supports HSDPA – we were using Vodafone, which does – you can also connect the i600 straight to your laptop where it will act as a broadband speed modem. Apple users will need to purchase a third-party piece of software to allow the phone to synchronise to their Mac. Naturally.

New to Windows Mobile?

Windows Mobile is Microsoft's system software for handheld devices - phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and so on. It looks a lot like the PC version of Windows, and the two operating systems can share data, but not applications. Windows Mobile uses applications specifically tailored for it, even though they may have the same names as their PC equivalents. Like Windows XP and Vista, Windows Mobile applications are accessed via a Start menu, but there's no taskbar and Trash icon, and many of the control panels are very different. If you've used Windows XP, Windows Mobile will feel familiar but not exactly the same.