Sony Ericsson M600i

The recommendation of getting the M600i, specifically, came in the comments of the post “My life as not being dead”, where the conclusion was that:

The M600i sound like the phone for you. It's CRAZY thin for all the functions it carries. It's not flimsy at all. If you know what an iPod feels like, it's about the same, minus the shiny film. It has a subtle metalic finish on it that can't really be captured in product shots and also keeps it from being too slippery. I have the white one. The black one picks up fingerprints fast.

Now, I'm not the kind of person who wants to wait too long for anything. And as the black one was the only one left (and as there only was one left of those) - I went for that one.

Design

The phone itself is a standard candybar designed phone - and it’s made from plastic. That being said - it is not anywhere near as flimsy and Fisher Pricey as the product photos would have you believe. In fact, it feels a heck of a lot more sturdy than my Samsung SGH-D820... As for weight, the phone is a good 112g (=4 oz) which is just heavy enough to make it feel more like a tool, less like a toy.

Now, the big selling point of this phone is of course it’s full QWERTY-keyboard, and it's large, good quality touchscreen...

The keyboard is a joy to use, it took about half an hour to get used to - and by now, I’ve probably forgotten how regular phone-keyboards work.. However, if you don't like the keyboard, there is also a great handwriting recognition feature, and an on-screen keyboard as well. All of these features also work with a great feature, that has the phone guessing what word you're writing (based not only on the letters you are writing, but additionally based on the context) and offers to complete it for you.

Software

The phone comes preloaded with Opera browser (with tabbed browsing!), an RSS reader (which works great, by the looks of it. And with the Matt Brent-icons included..), Word and Excel editors and a PDF reader. All wrapped into the nice packaging of Symbian OS.

However - it doesn’t support iSync yet. So what you'll have to do to get your contacts from your mac is:

1. Fire up the address book on your mac.
2. Select all your contacts.
3. Go to “Card > Send These Cards...” and select your phone. Simple.

iCal is a whole other story. So far I've tried to simply exporting an .ics-file, and transferring that one to the phone. That didn't work (Error opening file). I've set up my own PIM-server, that too was to little use. “Too big” was the phones gentle reply. (I'm big in Japan!)

So now, I've fired off an e-mail to SE support (Yup. Big guy asks for help. Call me weak.) I'll let you know how it goes.

What it is, and what it’s not

Well, back to the issue at hand. The phone. Or rather. It really tries very hard to be something more than a phone. “Phone” is actually just one item on the main menu. However, just by holding the 8 cm half-plastic stylus next to the great stainless steel stylus of the Palm T|X it's easily concluded that this is still a phone with PDA capabilities, not the other way around.

But if you use your phone to read news, mail, text messages and possibly see the occasional newscast - there is absolutely no better tool for it...

...but...

There are a few things, though... As TechPages pointed out in his review - it does look like Sony Ericsson could have postponed the release of this phone a bit. It does feel a bit unfinished (now where have we heard that before?) - especially on the software and OS side of things. It seems quite random what goes into the multitasking-bin, and the whole OS can all of a sudden grind to a halt, and crash - almost like Windows.

But as far as the fingerprints go... I can't see any, even I've been eating oil-marinated feta and writing emails all night long.. And that MUST be good news... :)