Samsung SCH I600 Smartphone
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- Processor: 200 MHz Intel XScale PXA250
- Installed Memory: 32 MB
- Design: Mobile
- Style: Smartphone
- Network Type: CDMA 1900 CDMA 800
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decent phone-first PDA/phone convergence
Pros
Good phone functionality; good sound; speakphone; good reception; syncs with Outlook
Cons
Not so great battery life; email application needs work; volume controls are troublesome
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
If you need a phone that is a good phone first but also carries a wallop of other features, check this one out.
I bought this phone three months ago and have been extremely happy with it. For years, I either carried a PDA and a phone or went without the PDA and was left stranded without my calendar and address book. I've always want to carry one, small device that was a great phone and had PDA-like functionality.
This is it. The phone is very small. It slips into my back pocket or my shirt pocket easily and I never feel that I'm holding a giant PDA to my head when I talk. It has a nice feel in the hand when talking and when closed.
Operating System
This phone is based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, which is essentially an extension of the PocketPC platform. It's definitely scaled back from PocketPC but it's also better oriented towards phone usage. When first opening the phone, a customizable (though, not entirely easily customizable) home page is present with a variety of information from number of messages to your next appointment to the usual phone information like battery charge and signal strength.
Dialing Numbers
Dialing a number is very easy. From the home page, you can either just begin to dial the number or you can start typing the buttons associated with any part of your contact's name. You don't have to "multipress" to get to a specific letter (e.g. tap 2 twice to get a B) -- the phone performs a smart lookup on all letters represented by that button. So, if I press 262 it will match AMBer Smith, BOB Waters, and Michael COBb. You usually only have to press three numbers to narrow the search down to where you can locate your number. The screen is a large number input area that's easily readable as your walking down the street. Once you locate the number, you can click the right arrow button to scroll through all the contact's numbers: mobile, home, office, etc.
Address Book and Calendar
Your addresses and calendar are best synced with Outlook. The functionality between the built-in address book and calendar and Outlook are very similar -- some minor fields like spouse name and birthday are left out but the important ones are there. The calendar can be viewed by day, week or month, though the latter two only show that time is taken up during a day, not what the actual appointment is. Also, the homepage only shows the next appointment on your calendar -- it will not show a full day's appointments or even more than one. This is annoying but may be fixed with future Windows Mobile releases.
Web Browsing
I only really use the web browsing capabilities on this phone. It's useful but not for any hardcore surfing for two reasons: one, text entry is a little slow, and two, the speed of the connection is a little slow. The phone uses predictive text entry which it calls T9 that's useful in some places but entering a web address usually does not use dictionary words. However, there aren't a ton of web pages that work well on a phone anyway. It's better to research good sites, create bookmarks to them, and then upload them to the phone. This way, you only have to select the bookmark.
The sites I use most often give me baseball scores, driving directions, maps, news from all over the world, I can buy stuff off Amazon, look up words in the dictionary, check traffic, plan a trip on public transit, check movie times, track a FedEx package, use Google -- there's quite a bit out there. You can visit any site on the web but only some will really be usable on the phone because of the screen size.
Email
I really don't use this much because downloading or dealing with downloaded email is a pain. I get a lot of email everyday (a lot!) but I keep up with it on my office or home computer. However, I leave it on the server for a few days in case I need to download it again. The phone has no way to avoid this already-downloaded mail and instead gets everything currently on the server. So instead of just being able to check what's new, I have to sift through everything. Thankfully, I can set it to only get headers which is faster but it still doesn't work well. Also, given the amount of mail I receive, I'd like to be able to delete it all in one fail swoop. Unfortunately, I have to delete each mail independently, and it takes 5 keypresses to accomplish each delete. Yuck! Hopefully, Windows Mobile 2003 will help this problem.
Games and Other Applications
The really truly great thing about this phone is that it's just a little computer. You can download and install all kinds of software onto it. There are great games, reference utilities, books, start charts, photo viewers, movie players (for smaller movies), music players, instant messaging programs, and pretty much anything else you can think of. A lot of the programs are free but if they're not, they usually cost only $2-15 and you can try them out first.
I just got back from a trip to New York and brought a little application called Tube with me. It had a full, searchable street map of New York plus a subway trip planner. It was essential on the trip. Also, there are full street map programs that will tell you where the nearest restaurant, ATM, gas station, etc., from your location is.
Call Volume and Reception
Great, great, great. I've been extremely happy with this. People on the other end of my calls have frequently not known that I was on a cell phone. I can hear them quite clearly as well. Before this phone, I was using a Nokia phone on non-GSM AT&T and would rarely make calls on it because I couldn't hear them, they couldn't hear me, and reception was spotty. But with Verizon, I rarely drop calls and almost always have three or more signal bars.
Other Features
The voice memo feature is useful for times when you're driving in the car, think of a brilliant idea, and need to get it out of your head quickly. On the other hand, the voice dialing feature is clumsy and rarely works. The speakerphone works well, is very loud, and people on the other end could hear me pretty well -- like any other speakerphone. However, turning it on is a bit cumbersome. I frequently have to select it twice and there's no way to turn it on before making a call.
Battery Life
This could use work. The phone comes with two batteries -- slim and extended. Both can be charging at the same time, one attached to the phone and one in the auxiliary battery slot. The slim battery lasts about a day, depending on your usage. I can squeeze two days out of it if I don't make many calls but it's a stretch. The extended battery lasts much longer but is also much larger. I like my phone small and so I simple charge it frequently. When I come home at night, I just drop it in the charger and it's ready to go the next day. However, it'd be nice if I didn't have to worry about battery life so much. From what I hear, the next version of Windows Mobile will help battery life a bit.
Other Features
The phone also takes Secure Digital cards (which you might see as SD or SDIO cards). These can be storage cards (up to 512Mb, last I checked) or cards that add hardware functionality like Wi-Fi, GPS, or Bluetooth. The latter of these isn't very supported but hopefully will be with Windows Mobile 2003. The extra storage is excellent for keeping lots of music with you or pictures or other applications or whatever!
Speaking of Bluetooth, I think it highly overrated. I have not missed it once and, unless I had a Bluetooth-enabled car, can't think of anything I would use it for. It's an interesting protocol that will get some good usefulness in the future but it's certainly not the end-all-be-all of phone functionality. Make sure you need it before you write off a phone that doesn't have it.
In all, this has been a very enjoyable phone to own and I'm extremely glad I bought it. If you're considering it, you should also look at the SPH-I500 which is based on the Palm operating system and uses graffiti text input. I thought the phone features of that model weren't great and decided on this one instead but your mileage may vary.
Here are some essential links if you do get this phone:
Good forum for smartphones:
http://smartphone.modaco.com
Tons of applications to download:
http://www.handango.com
An essential application for the phone:
http://xetranet.free.fr/xbar2/?lang=eng&project=xBar%202
UPDATE TO REVIEW:
Having owned this phone for over a year, I have a couple new things to say about.
First, it's really great to have all my contacts and all my calendar appointments with me wherever I go. Someone's always asking me if I can do something on this day and I'm not terribly good at remembering my schedule in my head. Plus, having access to a subset of the web (you can see most everything but very little of it is very useful on such a small screen) is quite handy. There are quite a few Internet applications you can download to do things like check the weather any where in the world. or watch a baseball box score as the game goes on.
Now on to the complaints. The biggest so far is the volume control. This is extremely problematic. When I hit the volume up or down, the screen changes to one that says "Audio Volume" with a fill bar. It sometimes takes a while for this screen to appear and when I'm done changing the volume, I have to either wait for a delay to clear the screen or hit Done. During this time, I can't do anything else including end a call. The response time to volume changes is very slow. So if someone's talking quietly and I turn the volume up, it may take a few words for the change to kick in. It doesn't sound that bad but in practice, it's extremely frustrating.
The next thing I've had trouble with is the placement of the controls on the right. Down the side of the phone on the right are two buttons -- one to start up the web browser, and one to change the phone's ringing option or turn it off all together. I always hit one of these buttons when I'm opening the phone with one hand, which I do most of the time. It's very natural for me to pick up the phone right where those buttons are.
I still enjoy the phone, but mostly because of the convenience of having information with me at all times. It's a bit large and the user interface is a bit clumsy. I'd recommend it if you a phone/PDA convergence device that looks and acts more like a phone than a PDA. But hopefully, there will be some new phones coming out soon that are more the size of a Razr and work more like a good PDA.
This is it. The phone is very small. It slips into my back pocket or my shirt pocket easily and I never feel that I'm holding a giant PDA to my head when I talk. It has a nice feel in the hand when talking and when closed.
Operating System
This phone is based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, which is essentially an extension of the PocketPC platform. It's definitely scaled back from PocketPC but it's also better oriented towards phone usage. When first opening the phone, a customizable (though, not entirely easily customizable) home page is present with a variety of information from number of messages to your next appointment to the usual phone information like battery charge and signal strength.
Dialing Numbers
Dialing a number is very easy. From the home page, you can either just begin to dial the number or you can start typing the buttons associated with any part of your contact's name. You don't have to "multipress" to get to a specific letter (e.g. tap 2 twice to get a B) -- the phone performs a smart lookup on all letters represented by that button. So, if I press 262 it will match AMBer Smith, BOB Waters, and Michael COBb. You usually only have to press three numbers to narrow the search down to where you can locate your number. The screen is a large number input area that's easily readable as your walking down the street. Once you locate the number, you can click the right arrow button to scroll through all the contact's numbers: mobile, home, office, etc.
Address Book and Calendar
Your addresses and calendar are best synced with Outlook. The functionality between the built-in address book and calendar and Outlook are very similar -- some minor fields like spouse name and birthday are left out but the important ones are there. The calendar can be viewed by day, week or month, though the latter two only show that time is taken up during a day, not what the actual appointment is. Also, the homepage only shows the next appointment on your calendar -- it will not show a full day's appointments or even more than one. This is annoying but may be fixed with future Windows Mobile releases.
Web Browsing
I only really use the web browsing capabilities on this phone. It's useful but not for any hardcore surfing for two reasons: one, text entry is a little slow, and two, the speed of the connection is a little slow. The phone uses predictive text entry which it calls T9 that's useful in some places but entering a web address usually does not use dictionary words. However, there aren't a ton of web pages that work well on a phone anyway. It's better to research good sites, create bookmarks to them, and then upload them to the phone. This way, you only have to select the bookmark.
The sites I use most often give me baseball scores, driving directions, maps, news from all over the world, I can buy stuff off Amazon, look up words in the dictionary, check traffic, plan a trip on public transit, check movie times, track a FedEx package, use Google -- there's quite a bit out there. You can visit any site on the web but only some will really be usable on the phone because of the screen size.
I really don't use this much because downloading or dealing with downloaded email is a pain. I get a lot of email everyday (a lot!) but I keep up with it on my office or home computer. However, I leave it on the server for a few days in case I need to download it again. The phone has no way to avoid this already-downloaded mail and instead gets everything currently on the server. So instead of just being able to check what's new, I have to sift through everything. Thankfully, I can set it to only get headers which is faster but it still doesn't work well. Also, given the amount of mail I receive, I'd like to be able to delete it all in one fail swoop. Unfortunately, I have to delete each mail independently, and it takes 5 keypresses to accomplish each delete. Yuck! Hopefully, Windows Mobile 2003 will help this problem.
Games and Other Applications
The really truly great thing about this phone is that it's just a little computer. You can download and install all kinds of software onto it. There are great games, reference utilities, books, start charts, photo viewers, movie players (for smaller movies), music players, instant messaging programs, and pretty much anything else you can think of. A lot of the programs are free but if they're not, they usually cost only $2-15 and you can try them out first.
I just got back from a trip to New York and brought a little application called Tube with me. It had a full, searchable street map of New York plus a subway trip planner. It was essential on the trip. Also, there are full street map programs that will tell you where the nearest restaurant, ATM, gas station, etc., from your location is.
Call Volume and Reception
Great, great, great. I've been extremely happy with this. People on the other end of my calls have frequently not known that I was on a cell phone. I can hear them quite clearly as well. Before this phone, I was using a Nokia phone on non-GSM AT&T and would rarely make calls on it because I couldn't hear them, they couldn't hear me, and reception was spotty. But with Verizon, I rarely drop calls and almost always have three or more signal bars.
Other Features
The voice memo feature is useful for times when you're driving in the car, think of a brilliant idea, and need to get it out of your head quickly. On the other hand, the voice dialing feature is clumsy and rarely works. The speakerphone works well, is very loud, and people on the other end could hear me pretty well -- like any other speakerphone. However, turning it on is a bit cumbersome. I frequently have to select it twice and there's no way to turn it on before making a call.
Battery Life
This could use work. The phone comes with two batteries -- slim and extended. Both can be charging at the same time, one attached to the phone and one in the auxiliary battery slot. The slim battery lasts about a day, depending on your usage. I can squeeze two days out of it if I don't make many calls but it's a stretch. The extended battery lasts much longer but is also much larger. I like my phone small and so I simple charge it frequently. When I come home at night, I just drop it in the charger and it's ready to go the next day. However, it'd be nice if I didn't have to worry about battery life so much. From what I hear, the next version of Windows Mobile will help battery life a bit.
Other Features
The phone also takes Secure Digital cards (which you might see as SD or SDIO cards). These can be storage cards (up to 512Mb, last I checked) or cards that add hardware functionality like Wi-Fi, GPS, or Bluetooth. The latter of these isn't very supported but hopefully will be with Windows Mobile 2003. The extra storage is excellent for keeping lots of music with you or pictures or other applications or whatever!
Speaking of Bluetooth, I think it highly overrated. I have not missed it once and, unless I had a Bluetooth-enabled car, can't think of anything I would use it for. It's an interesting protocol that will get some good usefulness in the future but it's certainly not the end-all-be-all of phone functionality. Make sure you need it before you write off a phone that doesn't have it.
In all, this has been a very enjoyable phone to own and I'm extremely glad I bought it. If you're considering it, you should also look at the SPH-I500 which is based on the Palm operating system and uses graffiti text input. I thought the phone features of that model weren't great and decided on this one instead but your mileage may vary.
Here are some essential links if you do get this phone:
Good forum for smartphones:
http://smartphone.modaco.com
Tons of applications to download:
http://www.handango.com
An essential application for the phone:
http://xetranet.free.fr/xbar2/?lang=eng&project=xBar%202
UPDATE TO REVIEW:
Having owned this phone for over a year, I have a couple new things to say about.
First, it's really great to have all my contacts and all my calendar appointments with me wherever I go. Someone's always asking me if I can do something on this day and I'm not terribly good at remembering my schedule in my head. Plus, having access to a subset of the web (you can see most everything but very little of it is very useful on such a small screen) is quite handy. There are quite a few Internet applications you can download to do things like check the weather any where in the world. or watch a baseball box score as the game goes on.
Now on to the complaints. The biggest so far is the volume control. This is extremely problematic. When I hit the volume up or down, the screen changes to one that says "Audio Volume" with a fill bar. It sometimes takes a while for this screen to appear and when I'm done changing the volume, I have to either wait for a delay to clear the screen or hit Done. During this time, I can't do anything else including end a call. The response time to volume changes is very slow. So if someone's talking quietly and I turn the volume up, it may take a few words for the change to kick in. It doesn't sound that bad but in practice, it's extremely frustrating.
The next thing I've had trouble with is the placement of the controls on the right. Down the side of the phone on the right are two buttons -- one to start up the web browser, and one to change the phone's ringing option or turn it off all together. I always hit one of these buttons when I'm opening the phone with one hand, which I do most of the time. It's very natural for me to pick up the phone right where those buttons are.
I still enjoy the phone, but mostly because of the convenience of having information with me at all times. It's a bit large and the user interface is a bit clumsy. I'd recommend it if you a phone/PDA convergence device that looks and acts more like a phone than a PDA. But hopefully, there will be some new phones coming out soon that are more the size of a Razr and work more like a good PDA.
