Not that we haven't ever seen a mobile get that mildly interesting SRS WOW badge slapped on it before, but Philips is becoming the next to do so with its M600. This oh-so-sleek candybar makes a play for the music lovers heart -- well, so long as said adorer is in China, anyway. Aside from providing one click access to your stored tunes (not to mention easy access to volume / track controls), the handset packs a 2-inch 220 x 176 resolution display, 1.3-megapixel camera, microSD expansion slot, Bluetooth, a very welcome 3.5-millimeter headphone jack, support for MIDI / MP3 / WMA / AMR files, USB 1.1 connectivity, dual-band GSM / GPRS connectivity and a number of preset equalizer settings to boot. Best of all, Philips keeps its tradition of providing ultra-longevous phones alive by giving users up to 40-hours of music playback on a single charge. 'Tis a shame there's no information on pricing just yet.

If you have a misbehaving P990, your last chance at firmware salvation will be in version R6D23 released June 15th. Either Sony Ericsson has decided it really has gotten it right this time, or has decided it just can't be sorted, but either way the aforementioned mobiles development has ceased. There is some clarity available from a developer post at Sony Ericsson's developer forums, and the picture we wrangled is that due to memory limitations, not much more can be done, it's a hardware problem. It's a bit of a shame that the oft delayed, eagerly anticipated upgrade to the venerable P910 seems to have left so many feeling a bit burnt in the end. So if you have a P990 (the others in the list apparently aren't such troubled creatures) and can't get no satisfaction, upgrade it to the newest FW and if that's still a bust, move on to a P1.

[Via Just Another Mobile Phone Blog]

Is your straight-laced M600 getting you down? Fear not, with some sort of magic -- we have no word if this is real magic or simply some tomfoolery disguised as such -- you can add a dash of Walkman flair by converting it to a W950. We have seen similar conversion efforts in the past, and while some functionality is gained, some of course can be lost -- converting a K800 to a K810, for instance, results in the keyboard backlight no longer working. The user who reported performing this alleged trick on his handset didn't share any details about how this was done, so there isn't any way to check the credibility of this feat, so color us not too convinced on this one.

It's hard for us in the new country to get too worked up over the successor to a phone we never got in the first place, but alas, we still wouldn't mind putting Sony Ericsson's creative text entry system through its proper paces. This here is allegedly the "Lizzy," successor to the M600i UIQ smartphone that's been kicking around overseas for a while now. We're digging the looks, but with HSDPA and a camera both still missing in action, the internals seem to be only marginally upgraded at best. If this is all legit -- and it looks legit enough for Sony Ericsson's latest round of offerings -- we can apparently expect it to drop later in '07.

phoneArena's been recently blessed with the opportunity to put E-TEN's upgraded M600, the M600+, through its paces -- and they appear to have been left with a pretty lukewarm impression of the company's latest Pocket PC Phone Edition effort. While it's hard to argue with 256MB of internal flash and a 2-megapixel autofocus shooter (by Pocket PC standards, anyway), sound quality was apparently awful via both earphone and speakerphone, a lack of soft keys made one-handed operation tricky, and its GPRS data speeds are so 2002. The device's 400MHz Samsung core, while not necessarily anemic, wasn't breaking any speed records either; add that to the 2.5mm jack and there's not much to love here. Sorry, E-TEN -- we know the M600+ is quad-band, but we're going to have to pass. Better luck with your G500, mkay?

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]

Hot on the heels of their M600 (and the M500 before it), Taiwanese manufacturer E-TEN has announced its M600+, essentially an M600 with the addition of Bluetooth 2.0, 256MB of flash (up from 130MB), and an extra 0.7 megapixels in the shooter (2.0, up from 1.3). They're throwing in MSFP as well, which likely means all of AKU2 will be coming along for the ride (A2DP included, hopefully; the inclusion of Bluetooth 2.0 is a good sign). Not a shabby upgrade considering the quick turnaround time, but in the unlikely event you have an M600 in the US, you might want to keep your wallet stowed since AKU2 should be just around the bend for ya.