The Samsung D600 is one of those phones that reminds of that great piece of fruit that looks sensational on the outside but when one sinks your teeth into it you find out that it's rotten on the inside. Now in Chrome the Samsung D600 is a 2 megapixel sliding cameraphone with Bluetooth. It has a large 88 MB memory capacity, which Samsung claims is enough to store 1000 megapixel photos or 20 of your favourite songs in MP3 format.This phone does look great with its easy slider big keys and a bright screen, but it is let down by lousy Samsung PC Studio software that makes connecting to Outlook difficult which ever way one tries. Then there is the issue of entering data into a contacts database.

There is no space for an address and no space for a business title. Maybe the Korean designers have never been on the road doing sales calls and have to access a phone to check an address. Key today in any phone purchased by a business executive is the ability to easily access Outlook and download contacts. With the D600 we constantly got an error message that said "The connection to the Microsoft Exchange server is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action". In the testing that we did, Outlook was  connected, yet despite this it was impossible to easily connect to the Microsoft Exchange Server both live in a corporate network where Outlook is always connected or in a stand alone setting from my home PC. 

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Then there is the issue of downloading music. This phone is slow, real slow. To download 10 songs that were on average three minutes in length took more than 45 minutes.

Another problem I found was that a user cannot listen to music and write notes at the same time. A visit to several comment Websites revealed the following complaints about the Samsung D600. All the comments came from consumers who have purchased the phone. They said:

No airplane mode "I've tried everything to try and turn the cellular functions off so I can just use the mp3 player but to no avail". Delayed ring tone "The mp3 ring tones have a slight delay before they are audible. I don't know if the secret menu can be tweaked to fix this problem".

No vibrate & ring at the same time – "Sometimes I have it in my pocket in a busy place and I don't hear it ring. It would be great if it could vibrate at the same time.

No silence button – It says that if I press a certain button it mutes the call, but it only rejects the call even when I change the option to mute the call". No automatic save and send SMS. Cannot assign mp3 ring tones to SMS tones and can't change volume of the message tone (unless you use the secret menu option). No multi tasking – "you can't listen to the mp3 player while you are text messaging someone or receiving a text message".

The feature set for this phone is very impressive. There's a Trans-Flash memory slot for upgrading the memory to 512 MB. It has stereo speakers, which compliment it's ability to playback MP3 music files and MP3 ringtones. It's a tri-band phone with Java support for games and other applications plus PC connectivity and synchronisation by Bluetooth or USB data cable.

So if you want a mobile phone that looks great and will knock the socks off any other phone in the looks stakes the answer is the D600. But if you are looking for functionality, forget it.

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Sams ung D600

Price: Changes with carriers

Rating: 2/5