Sony Ericsson M600i
Discontinued 6th February 2006
It's been an open secret that Sony Ericsson
had a lightweight UIQ smartphone coming up - and the
Sony Ericsson M600i is it.
Running the UIQ 3 interface on top of
the Symbian 9.1 operating system, the M600i is functionally
very similar to the Sony
Ericsson P990i. The large 2.6" display on the
M600i is touch-sensitive and has a 240x320 pixel resolution.
Underneath that is a hybrid keyboard similar to the
one found on the BlackBerry
7100 series.
The Sony Ericsson M600i is a 3G phone
with tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900), expandable memory
(using Memory Stick Micro cards), plus a full range
of applications including the Opera web browser, an
email client, and multimedia player. Plus the M600i
comes with a jog-dial control in addition to the touchscreen,
as does the larger P900 series.
It supports a variety of push email
applications too, such as BlackBerry and Visto, and
it comes with a range of different VPN clients in order
to connect to a corporate network. It can also edit
Microsoft Office document. These features give us a
clue as to the most likely market for the M600i - business
users. One key feature that the M600i doesn't have
is a digital camera - it can't take stills photos, video
clips, nor can it be used for video calling. This is
great for many corporate customers, but it means that
the M600i isn't as consumer orientated as some might
have hoped for. Still, it looks like a very promising
phone for business use. There's no WiFi either, but
we firmly believe that 3G is more useful that WiFi in
this type of device.
You
might think that this would be a big, heavy phone. After
all, we recently looked at the BenQ
P50 which offers many similar features - and that
weighs 170 grams. So it's a bit of a surprise to see
that the Sony Ericsson M600i only weighs 112 grams..
which would be good going for any 3G phone, never
mind a feature rich device such as this.
When it comes to battery life though,
it's clear that the 3G support drains the life out of
the battery pretty quickly. On UMTS (3G) talktime is
only 2.5 hours, with 10 days standby. Turn off 3G and
use plain old GSM and it's a whopping 7.5 hours talktime
and 14 days standby.
There's Bluetooth (of course), but here
the Sony Ericsson M600i supports stereo Bluetooth for
music playback. The 80Mb of internal memory is sufficient
for quite a few music tracks, and of course there's
Java for games and a range of Symbian applications available
for this platform.
Finally, the M600i looks the part too.
It's a classic Sony Ericsson design, harking back to
the T630i
(which we regard as one of the most attractive phones
ever made). It's relatively slim too, at 15mm thick.
The Sony Ericsson M600i should start
to ship worldwide in Q2 2006, with different keyboard
arrangements for those countries that do not use a "QWERTY"
layout. There's also an M600c for mainland China.
Subscribe
to our newsletter for more news on
upcoming releases
|
Sony
Ericsson M600i at a glance
|
Available:
|
Q2
2006
|
Network:
|
UMTS
2100 + GSM
900/1800/1900
|
Data:
|
UMTS
(3G) + GPRS
|
Screen:
|
240x320
pixels, 262k colours
|
Camera:
|
No
|
Size:
|
Medium-large
candy bard 107x57x15mm
/ 114 grams
|
Bluetooth:
|
Yes
|
Infra-red:
|
Yes
|
Polyphonic:
|
Yes
|
Java:
|
Yes
|
Battery
life:
|
2.5-7.5 hours talk / 10-14 days standby
|
|
|