 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Smartphones Sony Ericsson Sony Ericsson M600i | Sony Ericsson M600i |
|
|
|
Table of Contents
The Sony Ericsson M600i is a very compact, tri-band 3G phone that teams a Symbian 60 UIQ (touchscreen) operating system with a large, portrait orientated QVGA screen, and a unique two-key per button QWERTY keyboard. This aesthetically pleasing package is the elder sibling of the Sony Ericsson W950i, and there is much in common between the two phones. The most noticeable difference between the two units is that the SE W950i gains a 4 gigabyte internal capacity, and loses the M2 memory expansion slot and QWERTY keyboard. (A Which Smartphone? review on the W950i is coming soon.) Both the M600i and the W950i lack a camera feature—but this is commonplace for a business targeted phone like the M600i. Sony’s heritage in smartphones is quite solid, with the P800 from 2002 leading a line of innovative communicators that later included the P900 and 910. These provided a much needed market alternative to Windows OS driven devices, and attracted a devoted following. Now Sony offers the M600i, which alongside the chunkier P990, is possibly the best messaging unit that they have offered to date. The unit measures 107x57x15 mm. The 107x57mm component of the dimensions certainly makes this one of the smallest and perhaps the narrowest QWERTY equipped smartphone device on the market. The unit even takes up slightly less of a footprint than the very small Samsung Blackjack (at 113 x 59mm). Where the M600i loses out in comparison with the Samsung is in thickness. The Blackjack’s “standard” size is 11.8 mm thick: but when it has its extended battery and cover fitted, it ends up almost exactly the same width as the M600i. The Blackjack battery extension also brings the Samsung up to roughly the same battery performance of the M600i in its standard form, and hence it is a valid comparison. The Samsung loses a lot of its elegance when it takes on its more corpulent form, and the M600i then wins on aesthetics. The weight of the unit (at 112g) is held centrally, if not a little towards the lower end of the device. This is a case of personal preference and many people will not even notice a difference: but some will find it is a bit less balanced in the hand as compared to units such as the Blackjack or Nokia E61, where the weight resides towards the upper end of the phone. It is likely that such differences will rapidly become subconscious for anyone who uses the phone for any reasonable length of time.
The stylus for the touchscreen resides at the upper left hand corner of the phone and towards the rear. In practice this is exactly where it should be and doesn’t get in the way, though left handers will perhaps find it slightly more beneficially placed than right-handers.
The keyboard is certainly an improvement on SE’s older P910 unit. The double button approach is similar to that seen in RIM’s 7100 series. Being one of the narrowest smartphones available, perhaps that is the reason for the two-function, one button approach by SE. The limitation is not the technology but one of ergonomics: the useability given the varying dimensions of users’ fingers must be accounted for by designers, and so we are unlikely to see QWERTY featured phones getting narrower than the M600i, at least in the (near-candybar) simple block format.
In addition to the QWERTY there is a thumbwheel and back key (as in the Blackberry) on the left side, and a “hardware button” on the right that can correspond to a user selected choice (activity menu, internet, main menu, media player, sound recorder, and task manager). Using these with the left and right arrow keys at the base of the keypad can access most functions of the phone without the use of the touchscreen. Power is a tiny button on the top right hand side, besides the infrared port.
The M600i completely relies on the backlight for visibility, and when the backlight goes off there is no way to see the screen. It is not as user friendly as the other type of screen (common to most Nokia smartphone units) that, depending on theme settings, can be read in direct sunlight without any backlight. SE is not alone here and this type of screen also exists, for example, on Palm and Samsung units: it has to be said that Nokia really has an edge here.
I find that inputting handwritten text direct with the stylus is a frustrating experience: not just with the M600i but with all such technologies, which are at present too limited in their ability to be really accurate. Hence the function seems to waste more time than it can save. My experiences of the technology go all the way back to the old “Ebookman” days, and with the M600i my opinion has not changed. I spent some time with writing SMSes via the combination of recognition and auto word completion, and admittedly was able to get a reasonable time in entering the message, but it still feels uncomfortable to me. You may be a fan of this method of input, and have legible handwriting for the character recognition of the phone—and this phone will then please you greatly. Personal opinion states to me that QWERTY input is still the most useful. And that leads me to a similar complaint regarding word completion function (like iTap, not predictive text T9) on a QWERTY keyboard. The M600i has this word completion function, which it calls predictive text. But to quote Wikipedia; One of the main differences between iTap and T9 is that iTap is able to complete words, phrases or even full sentences. T9 is unable to guess a word until the user has typed out a number of letters equal to the full word length. iTap will guess the best match based upon a built in dictionary, including words sharing the typed prefix. This dictionary also contains phrases and commonly used sentences. This way the predictive guesses iTap offers are enhanced based upon context of the word that is being typed. I found that trying to type with the predictive text was not helpful. Predictive text’s utility will depend upon how fast your rate of input into the QWERTY keyboard is. If you have a reasonable speed with the keyboard, then improvements to speed can only be made if the software guesses pretty long words, if indeed it manages to guess them. The intuition shown by the software is simply not that good most of the time.
The tri-band M600i supports GPRS, HSCSD, 3G/WCDMA but no EDGE. The device has no Wi-Fi, but supports infrared, Bluetooth 2.0 and A2DP stereo bluetooth headphones.
The USB 2.0 connection rips along, given that your memory stick micro flash memory—if you are using it—is of a decent speed. The Sony specification is 12 Mb/s, the same as the W950i, and on that phone I had no trouble dumping four gigs of music onto the phone in a fairly short period of time.
The M600i has 80 MB internal user memory, expandable with a Sony Memory Stick MicroT (M2T). Sandisk has recently announced a 4 gigabyte micro card, and so this will bring the M600i up to the native large capacity of the W950i. On board the M600i we find Symbian OS v9.1 UIQ 3. Like the Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition OS, the UIQ 3 is not backward compatible to 2.1, having a totally new kernel and compiler. It is hard to articulate an overall statement about the Symbian UIQ. It is quite friendly, and there is more than ample control over the phone offered by the system. Perhaps it’s the just fact that to me, everything on the OS just looks so much like it belongs in a candy store. It is a stark contrast from the Nokia (non-UIQ) Symbian interface that has a much more intense graphic feel to it. Nonetheless it works on the SE phones, and gives them a flavour all of their own. Sweet, no doubt. Searching for a change of flavour, I bluetoothed over the themes from the W950i onto the M600, and whilst I could change the character of the phone somewhat, it still wasn’t what I wanted. The UIQ Technology website (uiq.com), as well as a few of the big theme bank websites have some alternative downloadable themes that can reduce the calorie intake. You can also individually customise wallpaper, as well as each icon to display your own choice of picture, and resetting to default is made easy by the OS. The UIQ interface provides a control panel, and this nicely integrates the major phone control functions. One disappointment with the UIQ system (sure to rattle any previous Nokia user) is that there is no provision for profiles. In Nokia for example, standard profiles include normal, meeting, silent, and so on, so that you may rapidly change settings such as tone alerts. SE has not chosen to implement profiles in any of their smartphones, and there are currently no 3rd party applications of the M600i that enables this feature.
The telephone signal is good quality both ways, and the reception in marginal areas is comparable to other high quality units. A neat feature of integration of call logs with PIM is found when entering into the menu for calls made or missed, where you can specify a follow up call and it automatically sets itself into the tasks list with whatever parameters the user selects, such as time of task, alarm time, priority, completed check box and a folder where it is to exist. You can also add a note to the call log corresponding to the conversation. Users on the web forums are quite enamoured with the PIM functionality of the M600i. Shuffle through the calendar, task lists and notes areas and it is easy to see why. This unit is right up there with the Palm OS in terms of user friendliness and functionality for PIM. Combined with activesync and exchange, meeting requests are supported and integrated between the messaging and calendar applications - accepting meeting invitations in the messaging will automatically input the details into the calendar. One extremely annoying facet of the telephony is for those who use the internal hands free speaker feature. When you are making an outbound call you cannot actually select the soft key “more” and then “speaker phone” until the call is picked up by the recipient. This means that if you prefer (or must use) the speaker phone for the conversation, you have to ask the called party to wait while you awkwardly navigate the touch screen for two clicks. It would be far better to be able to select this as soon as you have dialled the number, so the selection of speaker doesn’t interrupt the conversation. The internal speaker is adequate but the current crop of Nokia speakers are more powerful: and it is set at the rear, which is somewhat more cumbersome than a side mounted speaker.
There has been some efficiency in design of both the unit and the OS, in order that this battery (which is by no means the largest for a smartphone) gives this length of operating time. Helping this are good phone controls, where you can lock down certain battery thirsty functions. For example, accessing the control panel, you can lock the phone to GSM or 3G only. The M600i is a very capable unit in the messaging arena and supports SMS, MMS, POP3, SMTP, IMAP4 and EMS. Push email is also supported, and the M600i comes with Exchange Active Sync. (Other push solutions like Blackberry connect can also be used). Given the presence of the useful QWERTY keyboard, this is a capable email-centric unit for business use. I have seen criticism that the M600i doesn’t easily support multiple recipients via pop/imap, but this is not at all true: addressees can easily be chosen from contacts or keyed in manually and added to any email. Highly customisable scheduled download times for pop/imap are possible, and you can even set the interval to as low as 1 minute—a feature not offered in the Nokia smartphones. Google mail is also supported by the built in email client.
One of the most annoying traits of the browser is that you cannot set a home page in bookmark options. Perhaps this is designed so that Telco’s can lock in a particular page. Some users have reported that there are ways of getting around this by deleting and reinstalling bookmarks in the right sequence: but this is awkward, and simply should not be necessary on a modern smartphone. Simply attempting to delete the first bookmark did not work on the review phone, and so some hacking is obviously required.
Given that SE built its music focussed W950i around the M600i platform, this has to say something positive about the M600i’s capability in playing music. As expected then, the quality of the sound is exactly the same as that of the music dedicated SE—and that is excellent. The M600i does not instantly modify the sound of the music when scrolling through equaliser settings. This might be something that will change with firmware enhancements, as the W950i shows that it is possible. There is no custom configuration of equaliser settings available, but those supplied offer quite an array of settings to please the music lover, as well as dedicated mega-bass and spoken voice settings.
Aside from all of the features discussed immediately above, the phone comes with other applications such as Quickoffice, which permits you to view all of the standard office documents as well as edit the Word and Excel ones (unlike Windows for Smartphones). PIM functions are very good (as discussed above in the Telephony section). The gallery application is friendly and functional, with full screen and auto-rotate of pictures, and the display of dynamic images is handled well. There are some good games, including Quadrapop, a more complex form of Tetris; a golf game; and an elementary music sequencer called “Quadrapop”.
There are extensive 3rd party software packages available for the Symbian OS, and UIQ 3 is no different. There is a large (over 100) list of “try before you buy” programs to browse included with the phone, and accessed through a dedicated icon in the web folder of the phone. 3rd party apps that are supported include satellite navigation apps (eg CoPilot), security, business and game programs, and utilities such as Handy Safe, Mobireader and Worldmate. Amongst the language and dictionaries is a neat program from Speereo called Voice Translator, which instantly translates a phrase that you say into the phone into another language... welcome to the 21st Century. If that wasn’t enough, the program also provides travel guides, flight schedules and world weather. There are also masses of UIQ applications available at software sites such as Handango. (We are not affiliated with any of these software developers.)
The task manager on this phone is excellent and rates a special mention. It is thankfully one of a few items that can be set to quick access via the programmable (right-hand side of unit) "@" shortcut key settings. Within the task manager, there are separate tabbed pages for history and for open programs. Applications can be quickly accessed or terminated by selecting them on the open tab.
The M600i is a very capable unit that matches a good, fast operating system with one of the most compact packages available in a smartphone. The two-per-key QWERTY keyboard is something to get used to, but it certainly works more efficiently than a standard numeric keyboard with T9 or a less than well designed independent key QWERTY (and there's a few of those out there). The OS has a slight learning curve to it, and it isn't quite as straightforward as the non UIQ Symbian phones... but this could just be the voice of someone who has used the Symbian S60 far more than UIQ 3. Nevertheless, the extent of control over the phone is very good, and with the exception of a browser that could do more and allow more control in some areas, I was otherwise never left with the feeling that anything was omitted from the OS. The phone is small and light enough that dropping it into a pocket made me feel as if I was using an old compact feature phone—almost negligible impact on a tight pocket. Getting this level of features into a phone this size is a great achievement by Sony Ericsson. As is evident in Sony and Symbian UIQ phone forums around the world, I can see how anyone who spends a fair bit of time with this phone will grow accustomed to its minor quirks, and then cease to entertain the concept of using any other phone. I am sure that this choice would be a rewarding one for the M600i owner.
Pros Very compact, yet large 240x320 screen and near QWERTY Cons
Product Details and Features
  
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Screen is a big 2.6 inch, 240 x 320 (portrait) pixels, 242K coloured TFT touchscreen. It's smaller than a P910 but superior in both resolution and clarity. There were no accuracy problems experienced with the touchscreen, and it can be easily recalibrated. Though the stylus is most effective and accurate for touchscreen use, a reasonable job 
The battery is the Sony Ericsson 950 mAh BST-33, and it does give the phone a good long life, if you don’t have all of the usual power suckers constantly on (such as bluetooth and continual network search). The manufacturer quoted battery life is 340/7.5 hrs (for standby/talk respectively). As noted earlier, in practice it is comparable to the life given by the extension battery on the Samsung Blackjack. 
The phone browser is Opera 8.60 for Symbian OS (“323”). The browser is quite good, but don’t expect a user experience as good as the native browser to be found in Symbian 60 3rd edition smartphones (like the E and N series Nokias). There is no filmstrip thumb history or dynamic full page preview in the Opera browser. A good feature of the browser is that you can set videos to always open in full screen landscape format as soon as they are selected, whilst normal page browsing will not be affected and can remain in portrait. A not so good element of the browser is non-support for flash files. Strangely, setting the page browsing to landscape mode and then viewing streamed videos, you can hit an icon on the screen that is supposed to be for full screen, but it will move the video a further 90° and the video then appears upside-down. That is perhaps giving the user a little more control than the software authors intended. RSS feeds are also supported, and easily handled through the dedicated program in the multimedia folder.
Sony M600i,| < Prev |
|---|
Copyright © 2005 - 2010 Which Smartphone.
About Us Contact Us Terms of Site Use
