Keyboard Maestro Rocks
It
is difficult to tell whether the M600i from Sony Ericsson is intended primarily
for business users or primarily for consumers. There is strong evidence
on both sides, and it may be that this causes some reviews to flutter around
not being sure which ring to throw their hat into.
Not us. We’re happy with the business side of things and fine with the consumer side too. Only ‘fine’ on the consumer side as there is a major omission. But if you can live with that and want mobile email, we aren’t bovered if you’re not.
If you found that a bit oblique, let’s cut to the chase on the missing feature. No camera. For a 3G handset having no camera is something of a sin. It means no video calls and no shooting anything to MMS or SMS around. Which we find rather sad.
On the other hand, if you are a business buyer you might rather like the absence of a camera (as a deterrent to one flavour of industrial espionage), and the M600i sits alongside BlackBerry devices and Nokia’s new E61 in being lacking in the lens department.
The M600i does have the rest of what it takes to make a good smartphone, though. Mobile email support covers BlackBerry Connect, Microsoft Exchange and a range of other corporate systems either right now or coming soon, and for those smaller non-networked business users – and consumers - there is POP and IMAP support.
There is a large, 240 x 320 pixel screen for viewing detailed data like Web sites and such, and a keyboard for entering text of your own.
An integrated messaging centre caters for email, MMS, SMS and voicemail all from a single screen, there is a PDF viewer, and QuickOffice software for creating and editing documents and spreadsheets – including Microsoft Word and Excel.
Calendar
and contact management software can share information with your PC, and you
get the PC Suite software and a USB cable so you can make this happen out
of the box.
For music fans there is some nice quality music playback, and there are a couple of games on board – one a Tetris clone called QuadraPop, the other a golf game - Vijay Singh Pro Golf 2005 3D. This latter shows off nicely the 3D look to gaming that this handset supports.
There is 60MB of available built in memory and you can augment this with Sony Memory Stick Micro flash memory cards. These are really tiny – just about the same size as MicroSD cards. There’s a M2 slot with a hinged cover in the right side of the casing and our review model came with a 64MB card to get us started.
You can use Sony Ericsson’s Disc2Phone software to get tunes onto the device from a PC. Its advantage is that it can change the bitrate on the fly to help you cram as much music as possible into the available space. Alternatively you can just drag and drop music files either onto the built in memory or flash storage as the M600i functions as a Mass Storage Device when attached to your PC via the provided USB cable.
Music output quality was fine, and very loud from the handset speaker. The only annoyance is that you have to use the provided in-ear headset as it has a proprietary connector to the M600i (the same connector, in fact, that is used to administer mains power and connect to a PC for file transfer).
Getting back to working with the M600i for mobile email and other text heavy tasks, we have to look at that keyboard and how it works.
Many keyboarded handsets try to drop a full qwerty keyboard into place, and the result is often keys that are very small and difficult to hit successfully at speed. Sony Ericsson has taken a different approach, and there are far fewer keys here than on a BlackBerry or the Nokia E61. Just 20 in all.
More intelligent readers will work out quickly that this is not enough for a full ‘qwerty’ keyboard, and there is a lot of doubling and tripling up necessary to get the alpha, numeric and a few symbols into play.
Mostly
alpha letters sit two to a key, and you hit the left or right side of a key
depending on the one you want. An Alt key gives you access to symbols and
numbers. We found it really easy to get to grips with and quite fast to use.
The two alternatives are to write to the screen and take advantage of the
handwriting recognition or tap at a softkeyboard.
Without a camera your main use of 3G is going to be the Web and data exchange. We can report that Web browsing is superb. We set our review handsets, which was operator free, up with our Orange 3G SIM and can report that the browser renders Web pages to the width of the screen so you don’t have to worry about horizontal scrolling, and that you can open new pages in new windows, switching between them using tiny tabs. You can even switch to landscape view if that suites a particular Web page better.
If we have to come up with a grumble it is that the UIQ user interface is
somewhat complex. There are small tappable icons all over the place, and you
can tap and hold the screen at times too. These icons are often too small
to hit with a finger, so you need to use the pokey little stylus. This mars
what is otherwise a very attention grabbing device.
This review covers the above mobile phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network. The score is based on a 3G mobile phone checklist.
Copyright : You are advised that this material is the copyright of www.3G.co.uk and is our own personal view only. (C) All rights reserved 2005. Whist every care has been taken in the preparation of this review, the author nor 3G.co.uk cannot be held responsible for the accuracy or authenticity of the information it contains, or consequence arising from it.
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