Sony Ericsson M600i shipping in UK

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jun 16th 2006 at 12:35PM

Like memory card standards, we get a little tired of tracking all the me-too text input methodologies floating around, but it's very hard to dislike Sony Ericsson's new flagship UIQ 3.0 piece, the M600. The "i" variant that Expansys UK now appears to be shipping is intended for Europe and sports triband GSM with UMTS 2100 -- not the most useful setup for us poor, smartphone-starved Americans, but we're not naïve enough to believe that'll stop every last one of you from importing this beauty for the £415 (roughly $766) Expansys is asking. If you get your hands on one of these, be sure to drop us a note on the key layout, ya hear?

[Thanks, Soven]

Filed under: Handsets, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, GSM, UMTS

Tags: m600, m600i, sony ericsson, SonyEricsson, symbian, uiq

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

Paolo Resmini @ Jun 16th 2006 1:05PM

Wow....I'm in love. If one were to buy this and ship out to the US, this will work with a Cingular SIM card right? and you should be able to connect to the UMTS network if you live in an area that has UMTS right?

Neutral

eight @ Jun 16th 2006 1:29PM

I saw this in the flesh the other day and I was amazed at how thin it is!

It's about a third of the thickness of most other PDAs!

Neutral

shaun @ Jun 16th 2006 1:31PM

Had a chance to try this out in Orlando (for about 5 minutes). Runs Symbian, but felt very sluggish to me. Size was decent, but screen seemed a little washed out.

Neutral

Anthony @ Jun 16th 2006 1:41PM

Forget just letting Engadget know when one of us received theirs.. I'm waiting for someone to buy it, carefully open the box & all the little plastic enclosed bits & then crack it open w/ a screwdriver. Oh wait, that's only for game consules.

Neutral

mroach @ Jun 16th 2006 1:50PM

#1 You could use the phone here with your Cingular service, but not Cingular's UMTS. Cingular uses UMTS 850/1900, where as UMTS 2100 is the standard in Europe and Japan (Vodafone/Softbank JP). There's a slim chance that when T-Mobile buys that 2100 spectrum, they'll be able to use some of their 1900 band for the UMTS uplink, making a network full compatible with handsets from across the pond.

Long to short: Phone will work on Cingular, but UMTS won't. Phone will also work on T-Mobile, and someday it could work on their UMTS if they do it right (which they probably won't).

Neutral

Jason @ Jun 16th 2006 2:37PM

It looks like these are on eBay for $450 shipped to the US. I want one so bad. :[

Neutral

Amin @ Jun 16th 2006 3:41PM

Got one from Ebay last week. Used it for 30 minutes then went back to my Treo.
It looks very nice (almost IPod like) but the software isn't as user friendly as the Treo's.
Absence of a D-pad makes life harder as one has to use the jog thingy on the side which after a while hurts the thumbs.
Syncing with the computer was a total disaster. It took me the better part of 5 hours when the Palm software or MS Activesync installs immediatley. After 5 hours I found that I had to completely uninstall the Palm software then reinstall the Symbian's which never happened before (I have Palm and MS Activesynce working at the same time, well I had anyway).
Even after installing the software it took another 2 hours of hard labour to let the phone connect with the computer, after that for no reason the phone connected but wouldn't sync. I got fed up and transfered my files from the Treo to the M600 by bluetooth.
Softwarewise, as I said before, it's not easy to use. Absence of soft buttons means one can't launch favourite software easily and has to use the pen (which is inconviniently situated on the left and makes right-hand users' life harder) or the pesky jog dial/thingy/thumb killer.
On the other hand the keyboard was fun to use with the middle keys living a split personality life as qwerty and number pad. You can assign speed dialing to the number pad but can't launch applications Treo style.(Does Palm have a patent that prevents other companies from launching apps via the thumb-board? Then why doesn't anyone except Palm have that wonderful idea!)
An idea that was missing from the previous UIQ models is the ability to switch off all or some of the applications. Now we can and we can do it from anywhere in the GUI. Just press the menu on screen button and chose the last option at the buttom where you'll get a list of all the running apps. Choose close all or select which app. you need to close. Simple, much simpler than the Microsoft option which forces you in submenus or the Palm which...well they don't even support multi tasking anyway.
Oh and noooooooooo Wi-Fi....no comment.
All in all the M600 is fun to carry around not to use and can't beat the Treo for ease of use.
I think I just put more than 2 cents worth of ideas.

Neutral

Paul @ Jun 16th 2006 4:44PM

Finally a phone that inspires me!!!

Picked one up on in Crystal (ipod) white on EBAY for $429 plus 39.95 shipping direct from HK. Took only a day! (Expansys is riping us all off by the way)

Anyways, the phone is everything I was hoping for...after waiting so long since the first Engadget post introducing the phone to me. QWERTY learning curve was exponential and now I type as fast as ever. Its working well on T-mobile and the GPRS is doing well enough (wish I had UMITS or at least EDGE though).

Its true that the Symbian OS laggs on the phone a little, but no more than my SDA. The one gripe that I have is the lack of applications currently abailable. I am still looking for the killer app. There is no BlackBerry connect as of yet. And I can't seem to get Google Talk to connect to the IM+ app that includes Google as an option.

The web browser works extremely well, especially with the touch screen. And the video/audio playback is great. You still have to deal with yet another proprietary memory stick format, but right now its scalable to 2gb....great for some music via bluetooth headphones.

Neutral

dan @ Jun 16th 2006 6:22PM

i'm going to do something nice:

www.computeruniverse.net has the m600 at 405E (incl.VAT), so you'll probably get it at 350E+shipping which is about 550$, i think.

you're welcome.

Neutral

Neal Saferstein @ Jun 16th 2006 11:44PM

This is a really interesting phone.

Neal Saferstein

Neutral

chilko @ Jun 18th 2006 4:12PM

it's 450 euro in bulgaria...

Neutral

Dave M. @ Jul 28th 2006 9:06AM

Ive been using and working with my new M600i for about a week now and in most ways its excellent. Syncing works a treat PROVIDED you upgrade the phone software (online) first and use the latest Sync version. The worst thing is the tiny keyboard - i find it impossibly samll - but the virtual keyboard works well.
And the tiny keyboard is not just a problme for text input but the basic phone number keypad is hard to use.
Otherwise, its a dream - but I havent tried the MP3 player and music transfer software yet.
Now Ive decided to stick with it, i need all the accesories that might have come as standard eg sync cradle, screen protector and car charger.

Neutral

Dasha @ Nov 16th 2006 1:14PM

this phone is really good,I think it is such a sexy phone. it has a very good battery life. i love having and it balances everything for me including my check book.

Neutral

JJV @ Jan 4th 2007 12:06PM

I have one, it is a very good phone. One thing it lacks is support for syncing with Mac OS X, which is bad. But the colors are great, i like the interface even though it is a bit tricky at the beginning. It has a few tehinical problems that have to do with the Symbian OS. The screen is great especially if u want to view photos or use the internet in landscape mode. The sound quality is great, quite loud. I recommend this phone, i am in Europe and i got it for about 490$. I enjoy using this phone and the keyboard is very easy to use.

Add your comments

Your comments:

Remember me

E-Mail me when someone replies to this comment

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.