I would like to start by reviewing my own phone Samsung U600. This phone is totally awesome. However there are some limitations or should I say weak-points that annoyed me.
Good points:
-Nice form factor: I like the design, it's very thin and simple. The sliding mechanism 'feels right'.
- Screen: Very sharp, good resolution and just nice for a mobile phone. Provided that you encode your video before hand, U600 enables me to play video with maximum satisfaction while on the move. I use mediacoder for encoding purposes.
- Multimedia features are sensible and practical. I can play MP3 using the music player and .3gp &.MP4 video files. These are enough to serve the purpose as mobile entertainment device.
- Camera: 3.2 is a good resolution for a camera on a phone. Pictures taken from my phone look great and impressive.
Not so good points:
- Playing A/V files from the external SD card is quite slow. The internal memory is just 60 Mb. So if you are using your phone as a media player, you'll surely need an extra mocro SD card to do the trick. However, files accessed from here will take longer to be loaded by the phone player. So, it will be annoying as the phone is not as good as normal MP4 players or even the ipod.
- Camera: once you click the hardkey camera button, it takes a while for the phone to load the camera application. This is also annoying especially when you suddenly need to shoot something.
- Music player: could not play AAC files. Also .3gp , .mp4 , .aac . The phone uses other application for these files. And this other application operates in a different way to the music player. If the files are stored in the external card, you are only able to play them one by one. Continuous music playing is not supported for playing files from external memory.
Apart from the above weaknesses, U600 has offered me more than I expected. So, in a nutshell Samsung U600 is one of Samsung's best 2G/2.75G mobile phone that is available in the market at present.
P/S: A guide on encoding settings and other helpful info on U600 are available here
