Samsung U600 – compact yet powerful

The U600 is yet another in Samsung’s series of very thin mobile phones, the successor to the D900, and at 81g and just 10.9mm thick, it’s certainly impressive in size, noticeably lighter than the D900, and possibly even thinner. But what’s packed into such a small space?

The answer is – quite a lot. For something so small, the screen is a very good size indeed, and it even crams in a very good 3.2 megapixel camera which incorporates autofocus, although it would be been a much better camera if the shutter lag hadn’t been terrible. The camera can also take movies, of course.

It’s a quadband phone, meaning that taking it abroad is no problem, but there’s no 3G, so anyone wanting to use this handset to browse the web is going to endure slow load times for pages.

However, what turns out to be the Samsung U600’s biggest failing could have been its biggest triumph. The keys are touch sensitive – in theory, that’s fine, but in practice they’re simply far too touch sensitive; even brushing them lightly results in changes, which is not what a user wants or needs.

The U600 does have some things going for it, notably its size and its excellent screen. However, those are really cancelled out by the problems a user is going to encounter every day, with those touch sensitive keys the biggest and most frustrating offender of all.  That makes it hard to recommend this phone when there are so many others on the market.