Samsung B600 (SCH-B600)

Due Q2/Q3 2006
22nd June 2006

We don't usually cover CDMA phones at Mobile Gazette - but the Samsung SCH-B600 is more interesting than most.

At first glance it looks very much like a whole lot of other Samsung handsets, but turn the B600 around and you can see an oversized digital camera lens which does look unusual.

In fact, the Samsung SCH-B600 comes with a 10 megapixel camera with 3X optical zoom with autofocus and flash. When you consider that a typical top-of-the-range European phone only comes in a 3 megapixels and only a small number of those have optical zoom, then the SCH-B600 looks quite impressive.

Megapixels aren't everything though, and camera phones tend to suffer from poor quality optics that limit the picture quality. Too many phones have had a high megapixel count spoiled by compromised optics that make the photographs look blurry. The SCH-B600 is different - the lens actually moves out from the back of the handset in exactly the same way as a good quality digital camera (although you can't tell that from these photographs). Essentially, the SCH-B600 appears to be a proper digital camera grafted onto a phone.. or a phone grafted onto a proper digital camera.

The Samsung B600 also supports Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (Satellite DMB), it comes with a 2.2" 240x320 pixel display in 16 million colours, Bluetooth, multimedia support and microMMC expandable memory. As we said, it's a CDMA handset but it also supports 1x EVDO which is a 3G standard.

The Samsung B600 is a glimpse of some of the features we might see in GSM handsets in 2007. Until then, these features will presumably be for the Korean market only.

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