Product Reviews

Manufacturers are queuing up to take a slice of the BlackBerry's market share. Samsung's i600 is a Windows Mobile smartphone with a built-in QWERTY keyboard that can do what a BlackBerry can, and more besides. We reviewed the Orange-branded version of the phone.

The i600 is aimed primarily at business users. It's not as compact or pretty as Orange's SPV E600, but it feels built to last. The phone feels strong and doesn't flex or creak, while the directional keypad and main shortcut buttons are large and easy to press. The phone has a soft plastic back, but the angular edges mean it's not particularly comfortable to hold.

The i600's keyboard is well designed. The keys are fairly small, but they're spaced far apart. This makes it simple to type with your thumbs and hard to hit two keys at once. The number keys are grey, so it's easy to spot them for dialling. The phone uses the smartphone edition of Windows Mobile 5, so there's no stylus.

The main menu consists of large icons, while sub-menus are arranged in numbered lists. You can either scroll through the options using the directional keypad, or use the thumbwheel on the side. The software runs smoothly, with only occasional pauses.

Orange has customised the Windows Mobile home screen

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with its own menu system, which we found made it quicker to launch common applications such as contacts, calendar and the call manager. Strangely, the network has removed MSN Messenger, which comes as standard on the SIM-free version of the phone. Orange does include an extra high-capacity battery, though, which makes the phone a bit fatter but provides plenty more charge. The phone also comes with a separate battery charger, so you can keep one battery on charge while using the other.

The i600 has built-in wireless networking, 3G data and ultra-fast HSDPA. Its web browser isn't as powerful as the PDA smartphone version of Pocket Internet Explorer, but it's fine for displaying mobile-optimised web pages and makes a reasonable job of fitting full web pages on the screen. The email client can connect to POP3 and IMAP servers, and you can synchronise your email, contacts, calendar and tasks with a Microsoft Exchange server over the phone's data connection. If enabled on your Exchange server, you can also get push email.

Unlike many phones running the smartphone version of Windows Mobile 5, the i600 can view Word, Excel and PowerPoint and PDF files with its Picsel Viewer program. This is quick and powerful. It can zoom in and out, so you can zoom out for an overview and gradually zoom in to make the document legible.

Orange's Samsung i600 isn't as powerful as Windows Mobile PDA smartphones such as HTC's Touch or T-Mobile's MDA Vario II, but it's well made, good value and great for email. It's also a proper BlackBerry rival, as long as you have access to an Exchange server with Direct Push email enabled.

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