Product Reviews

Orange is due to release its new SPV C600 smartphone in the autumn, but in the meantime it has updated its C500 to take advantage of its music service in the shape of the C550 music smartphone.

The first change that strikes you about the C550 is its altered keypad layout. The C500's rocking navigation button has been replaced by a joystick similar to that on the SPV E200 and E300, although it is less wobbly and more accurate than Orange's previous efforts. The two main soft keys and the Home and Back keys are far smaller than before, and are clustered under the screen to make room for four large music playback controls. The keypad is generally easy to use, but the resized short cut buttons are hard to press. The phone also has a higher-resolution 240x320 screen, which is brighter and clearer than those on previous SPVs, and a megapixel camera, but navigating the operating system is slower than on the C500.

Like its predecessor, the C550 runs Microsoft's

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Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition. The home screen is uncluttered, with short cuts to common functions such as contacts, messaging and calendar, and the rest of the programs are accessed via the Start menu. As you would expect from a Windows Mobile-based phone, synchronising your contact and calendar information with Outlook is easy using the supplied ActiveSync software and USB cable. Viewing web pages is now easier thanks to the higher-resolution screen, and Internet Explorer does a good job of resizing and reformatting pages to fit the screen.

The phone is pitched as a music smartphone, and to this end it has a large short cut button that takes you directly to Orange's Music Player service, which has a choice of around 300,000 tracks for download over GPRS. It takes around five minutes to download a normal-length song, and the phone will play the song during the download. There are large skip and play buttons to control playback, but the phone insists on connecting to the Music Player service whenever these are pressed, so using them to navigate through songs stored on the supplied 128MB memory card is very frustrating.

Aside from the improved screen, the SPV C550 is very similar to the C500. The music player buttons are useful only for navigating the Music Player portal and serve no real purpose elsewhere among the phone's functions, so they seem a waste of space on the keypad. The C500 is slightly smaller, runs faster and has a better keypad layout, so unless you're a heavy user of Orange's music portal it is a superior smartphone.