Sony Ericsson S600 / S600i / S600c

Cancelled
13th June 2005

The Sony Ericsson S600 is a rotating phone very much like the S700 handset, the primary different being a lower resolution display at 176x220 pixels as opposed to the 240x320 pixels panel on the S700. It's a fair bit smaller than the S700 too, at 93x47x23mm.

It's a little difficult to see where the S600 is trying to position itself.. it is a media phone or a gaming phone? It does play back MP3 and AAC files through it's inbuilt stereo speakers, plus is has an FM radio. As a gaming phone it has a wide display and 3G graphics acceleration. Or as a camera phone, it has a 1.3 megpixel camera on the back. It's a little of everthing - not as game focussed as the N-Gage QD, lacking the removal memory you'd expect for a music phone, and the 1.3 megapixel camera isn't as good as some recent Sony Ericsson handsets.

Technically though, the Sony Ericsson S600 is pretty competent. Internal memory is 64Mb which is pretty reasonable, there's Bluetooth, infra-red and USB connectivity, WAP browser with Flash support, email client and good PIM functionality. The rotator at least gives the S600 some character, and the handset overall seems to be fairly distinctive.

Maybe the weakness with the S600 is that it's a bit of a jack of all trades - it does a lot of tasks reasonably well, but doesn't excel in anything. In addition, the rotating display might put some people off - so in effect it's a combination of the good but bland specification with the wacky physical design which may not appeal to many. We rather like it though.

The Sony Ericsson S600 is expected to be available from Q4 2005 as the S600i for worldwide customers and the S600c for mainland China.

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