In Brief

Take the operating system that powers the Pocket PC, shrink it down, toss out the stylus, pack it into a phone, and you've got the Samsung SCH-i600. What's amazing is that it doesn't feel shoehorned in: the features that were kept are just the ones you need. If you find yourself pining for the stylus, onscreen keyboard, or other Pocket PC features, you'd probably be better off with a Pocket PC Phone Edition or a Pocket PC companion for your cell phone.

On the other hand if you want only one phone-centric gadget in your bag, the i600 provides one of the best combinations of MP3 player, Personal Information Manager, game system, instant messenger client, and phone that you can find in this form factor.

In Depth

The Samsung SCH-i600 is based on Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 operating system, which offers many Pocket PC-type capabilities in a form factor that fits nicely in your hand. In the USA, this CDMA 1xRTT phone is available from Verizon Wireless, which offers several voice/data plans for it.

As a phone, the i600 is quite usable. The backlit keypad is easy to read in dim light, and the main screen is crisp and bright. Voice dialing is not bad. However, in one of my tests, the voice dialing not only picked out the wrong name (this is excusable, especially since I was deliberately mumbling), but it picked a contact that didn't have a phone number (this is not).

Phone performance, on the other hand, was excellent, even under weak signal conditions (one or two out of four bars). I experienced no dropped calls, including on long conversations that lasted well over half an hour. The speakerphone also delivered exceptional quality sound.

One oddity about the speakerphone is that I was unable to dial using voice menus while the speakerphone was active. When I tried to join a conference call on two separate occasions, the conference call system rejected my password until I switched the speakerphone off and returned to handset mode.

As a PDA, the i600 does quite well. As with all members of the Pocket PC/Windows Mobile family, the Smartphone 2002 operating system synchronizes to Outlook using ActiveSync. ActiveSync and Outlook are included on a CD-ROM that comes with the phone. You can use ActiveSync to synchronize your contacts, calendar, and task list. While you have an ActiveSync connection, you can also open an Explorer window and browse the phone from your Windows PC. This is useful if you want to transfer files, such as MP3s and applications, from the PC to the phone. There's an SD memory card slot, with an included 128MB card, so you can fit plenty of songs and games on there.

Although Samsung does not support Mac OS X directly, Verizon includes a Mac OS user manual for the i600 on the CD-ROM, and PocketMac offers the PocketMac Smartphone 3.0 synchronization softwarefor Mac OS X users.

The messaging client supports POP3 and IMAP email and Short Message Service text messaging (SMS). (MSN Messenger is also included, but it won't work until you download an update from Samsung.) Email was easy to set up, but I ran across one problem: because I had left all the defaults checked when I configured the i600 with ActiveSync, it was configured to sync everything with the desktop PC, including email. You'll need to disable email synchronization, resync the phone, then set up your email account.

There were a couple of other frustrating glitches with the operating system. At one point, it mysteriously stopped showing me any messages at all until completely reconfiguring things. Another problem is that the Smartphone stops whatever it's doing when you close the flip cover (returning to the home screen when you reopen the phone). If you close the flip cover while mail is downloading, open it later, and return to email, you'll be greeted with an error message. We wish it would just finish downloading before turning off.

On two occasions, this "feature" led to other problems. While using Internet Explorer, I closed the flip cover, and later reopened it. From that point on, I could not launch Internet Explorer again until I shut down and restarted the phone.

This flakiness marred an otherwise excellent user experience. However, these sorts of problems are to be expected with the first release of an operating system. The second (and more polished) revision of Microsoft's Smartphone operating system is Smartphone 2003, which was not available for the i600 as of this writing (and may require new hardware). Smartphone 2003 will also bring support for .NET, a set of technologies that, like Java, allows software developers to write applications and games for the phone easily and securely.