Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Revised 20060913

There are good reviews of the M600i, some of them listed in my previous Choosing the best phone for mobile application development post.

I was adviced to give a more nuanced view of the phone, so I've removed some of the more side-tracking notes about Bluetooth etc, that don't have anything to do with this specific phone. I also removed the bug section, as I've posted the issues I found to Sony Ericsson.

As mentioned earlier I bought my Sony Ericsson M600i to try out CDC and Symbian OS, and to get a decent all-in-one business phone/PDA. It also has a bit more advanced MIDP support than my current phone (out-of-date in terms of Java after half a year). I got it with a subscription that includes free calls, SMSs, MMSs and video telephony within 3's network. My other phone has the same sub type, so now I can send myself a lot of messages (for a reason: application testing).

This is such a complex device that I will only cover things I found striking, in a positive or negative way.

The M600i and the W950i are more or less the same phone, but I find only M600i worth buying, as the W950i is kind of crippled: it hasn't got the alphanumeric keypad of the M600i, is somehow focused on multimedia (it's got a radio and 4 GB Flash built in), yet doesn't have a camera. The M600i doesn't have a camera either, but is more aimed at professional use anyway. The M600i has a memory slot that can house up to 4 GB of Flash memory, but when checking for such large memory sticks I could only find up to 1 GB. I could care less about the radio, but I slightly miss a camera.

Hardware: General

At first look I got a feeling this is a good solid phone/PDA without it sticking out at all (a wolf in sheep's clothing, if you like).

In my previous revision of the review I commented that the phone is slow. It is very slow when you start an application for the first time after a reboot, but not after that. I'm not 100% sure why it takes so long to start applications. It's of course a tough balance to have high performance yet long battery life, but this loading time probably doesn't have to do with only the CPU.

Hardware: USB

It says it's USB 2.0 compatible but strangely at 12 Mbps. That's a weird combination, and if you put 1 GB or more in the phone you'll get pretty slow music and video uploads. Even with the included memory this is way too slow. Hence this is not a good replacement for a dedicated music player, and filling up the memory in the W950i must be outright painful.

Hardware: Bluetooth

Bluetooth is very slow for any form of file transfers, yet is sufficient for headsets and other accessories. Hence, I've used USB for all file transfers and syncs.

I hope I will get Bluetooth PAN running, as that will make it possible to surf, check emails etc wirelessly without any air-time charges at home or at the office. The speed of Bluetooth is enough for that, and if it works OK it will partly make up for the lack of Wi-Fi.

For VoIP, e-mail, browsing etc I believe Bluetooth doesn't stand a chance against Wi-Fi/WLAN, so the trend that smartphones get Wi-Fi will continue. Bluetooth's saving grace is a much lower power consumption, so Bluetooth will continue to be included in pretty much all phones as a check box feature.

User Interface: General

Even though the M600i has a PDA-size and -resolution display and an alphanumeric keypad it's still nicely small. Not as small as mass market voice-optimized phones, but still works well as a pocket phone. Hence it shows smartphones can be made small and still be manageable and powerful. It's actually almost the same size as the Z800 and considerably thinner, and less heavy too.

User Interface: Output / Display

UIQ is similar to the Series 60 UI, and both run on Symbian OS (in this case the new v9.1). UIQ is though quite different in certain aspects: it supports touch screens and handwriting. Interestingly the touch screen can also be accessed from MIDP applications, for e.g. map and drawing applications.

User Interface: Input / Keypad

The M600i has a very interesting keypad design, where each button has several functions, up to 4 (or 6, depending on how you count). It's fully alphanumeric, yet lacks national characters on the buttons (easy to access via multi-tapping).

What's so peculiar about the keypad is that you can left/center/right-press the buttons to get different characters and symbols (similar to some BlackBerry models). There are also Shift and Alt buttons to get capitals as well as shifted symbols.

I'm starting to like it after a few day's use, even though I don't type very fast on it yet. The best method I've found is to use the finger nails to press on the sides of the buttons. It's definitely more convenient and secure than multitap or predictive on a normal phone keypad, yet it can actually be used together with predictive as well.

User Interface: Touch Screen

The touch screen works very well and is quite precise. Softkeys are activated using the touch screen, which seems odd at first but is quite intuitive (actually pressing the softkey rather than a nearby button). I haven't used the stylus much so far. Also here I used my finger nails, which might cause scratching in the longer term.

Due to the small size of the phone it's quite convenient to hold it in one hand and the pen in the other. Not that you need to use the touch screen much. Most operations can be performed using the jog dial and touching the softkeys with a nail.

User Interface: Buttons

Apart from the full keypad there's a set of other buttons of note:
* On the left side is a combined scroll and select wheel (called jog dial) that is excellent for quick navigation in menus, lists and pages, even though I found the select function to be a bit too stiff. Beside the jog dial is a Back button, which together cover most navigation needs. I would have preferred an analog joystick with select, on the front or on the side, but this works too.
* On the right side is a "@" button that by default switches to the browser . You can though reprogram this to e.g. launch the media player, the sound recorder etc, but the choices are too few in my opinion. I'd like to launch "Write a new message" for instance.

Software: General

As mentioned before it's very slow to start applications after rebooting, yet once applications have been started it's very quick to switch between them.

It was easy to find bugs in the applications, especially in the Office tools (acquired from QuickOffice) and in the MIDP implementation, yet the main applications work well, even though they sometimes crash. The software can be updated via downloads from Sony Ericsson, so hopefully there will be patches to fix these and other issues soon.

Software: System

Being a smartphone, M600i relies heavily on applications running on dynamic platforms rather than being fully embedded with the phone system software. Most applications in the phone are of course embedded in a sense (as you can't replace/remove them, except by upgrading the whole phone software) but they run on top of Symbian OS and using UIQ as the UI. There are also included some Java ME applications, and it's also possible to run CDC / Personal Profile applications on it. Hence it's a very powerful multi-platform phone indeed, optimal for corporate use. Of course most after-market applications will be either for Symbian OS / UIQ and MIDP. I was surprised how many UIQ applications there are at e.g. Handango.

Software: Activity Menu

On mass market phones this would be called the idle screen, which says a lot about what it's used for on such phones: pretty much nothing. On smartphones and PDA's it's a different story, and I hope this will move over to mass market phones as well.

M600i shows a Today list of actions, emails etc as well as a row of the most common applications and access to the Main Menu. I wish this could be reconfigured to show other applications, RSS feeds etc, but I haven't found such a setting. The Today list can be folded so you can still see the background picture.

In future phones I hope this screen can be set up for any kinds of events, feeds and applications, like a user-defined information digest.

Software: Applications

I won't go through all the applications shipped with the M600. For a business user it's got a pretty complete suite, with PIM, document viewers, email client, web browser, etc etc.

I read somewhere it supports corporate email solutions and push email. I translated that as saying "such software is included", but it isn't. The email client only supports the normal SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 protocols, yet as such does what it's supposed to do.

Software: Browser

It runs Opera 8, which is quite capable in handling normal web pages as well as mobile web pages (WML and XHTML). It also supports Javascript and frames, so most sites look good. There's no support for full Flash though. It can show pages in either 2D (as on a PC), or in vertical/narrow format, where scrolling is only vertical. You can have several web pages open. You can also zoom the page up and down, as well as turn it to landscape mode. I found landscape mode to be very hard to use with the keypad to the side and the jog dial in front of you.

On my phone it always opens 3's portal when started. This is a bit annoying as it takes time. It doesn't cost anything though, as all portal navigation is free. I should be allowed to choose any home page I want, yet this is understandable from an operator perspective.

Arguably the best solution for a mobile phone is to first show the bookmark list when the browser is started.

Software: Digital Rights Management

I jumped when I saw this in the manual for Backup (translated from Swedish): Copyright-protected files are also backed up, but the rights objects are not. ... You need to order new ones (and pay for them again) to be able to use the files. So much for customer-friendly DRM (which probably is an oxymoron by definition).