Small, good-looking and 3G-enabled; could the Sony Ericsson K600i be the phone that at long last brings 3G to the masses? Join Sindre Lia as he endeavours to find out.
Smaller than most any smartphone and not much larger than your average GSM handset, the Sony Ericsson K600i makes its entrance as the one of the first 3G handsets capable of sitting unnoticed in one's pocket. Sindre Lia takes the K600i for a ride, truly excited about its mission to provide 3G to the masses.
The Sony Ericsson K600i weighs 105 g and measures 104 x 45 x 19 mm, yet despite its petite size manages to support GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz networks as well as WCDMA 2100 MHz networks for high-speed data connectivity. A 0.3 MP camera placed in the upper right corner is the only hint of this being a video call handset, with a dedicated hard button on the left side of the phone providing a simple, yet well-working, interface.
The K600i's recessing keypad, unfortunately, didn't perform nearly as well as expected, which was rather surprising given Sony Ericsson's high usability scores in recent years. While the 5-way navigation and action buttons worked well, the numerical keys were outright useless with regard to text input. The user interface and the icon based menu system of the K600i, on the other hand, is of the same caliber as that of recent Sony Ericsson models including the K750i and W800i; very good indeed.
Sporting a bright and clear 1.8" 262K colour screen with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels, the image quality of video calls were significantly better as compared Sony Ericsson only other video call-enabled handset, the bulky Z800i. As a consequence of the relatively small size of the screen, however, we found ourselves forced to dedicate the entire screen to the incoming caller's video stream. Further on a visual note, the 1.3 MP camera of the K600i finally delivers the goods in a small package with excellent colour reproduction and lower noise levels than previous attempts.
With a non-volatile internal memory of only 30 MB and no memory card slot, the K600i's audio offerings are in reality limited to its FM radio despite the inclusion of an media player supporting the MP3 file format. On the other hand, the media player works great when streaming episodes of TV series via a 3G network, although the picture quality of the content offered may vary between the different TV channels. Furthermore, the K600i features Infrared, Bluetooth and mini-USB Type B connectivity, polyphonic and MP3 ringtones, SMS and MMS, instant messaging and e-mail, and lastly Java MIDP 2.0 as well as WAP 2.0 support.
Reception and voice quality for the Sony Ericsson K600i both proved excellent, while its battery offered approximately 4 hours of talktime and 5 days of standby time as compared to the claimed 8 hours of talktime and 15 days of standby time operating on a GSM network. As for video calls, our test maxed out at one hour as opposed to the claimed one and a half hours.
Availability
The Sony Ericsson K600i is at the time of writing available in Europe, selling for approximately €375 EUR without subscription.
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