Review: Sony Ericsson's Compact M600i QWERTY Phone

Music player

Music player

Music player

Multimedia

Based purely on its looks, it should not come as a surprise to most that the Sony Ericsson M600i is not tailored for heavy multimedia use. To start with, there is no camera at all in the design. What you do find, however, is a large and colorful QVGA (240x320 pixel) touch screen display and a respectable media playback capability.

The touch screen display is capable of showing 262k different color shades, and is every bit as bright as other high end displays found on Pocket PC PDAs. I do feel that sometimes the touch screen's calibration is off when I try to select text in an editor with the stylus, but in general the touch screen appears to work well. I haven't subjected it to anything like keys or coins, but it has stood up to a decent amount of stylus use without showing any wear and tear.

The various media players in the M600 can be used for viewing videos or for listening to music. The music player supports features such as shuffle and loop play, and comes with an equalizer function that lets you choose from a number of preset configurations. It does not, however, allow you to create custom configs as best I can tell. Like recent Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile devices, the M600's media player features a Library function that can scan the device and memory card for playable tracks. The scan can be configured to run automatically, or just when you choose to run it. An optional filter mode will have it ignore tracks based on size (less than 1MB, for example) or recording quality.

Users can create and edit playlists directly on the M600i with relative ease, which is a good thing since I never managed to get the included Disc2Phone software to run on my PC. Tracks are sorted by album, artist, or name, and can be added easily to a playlist from any of these listings. If a call comes in while you are listening to the music player application, playback will automatically pause. Depending on how you have it configured, it will either restart automatically when the call has ended, or remain off so that you can restart it at your leisure.

While the video player application did a fine job of playing back the included demo video, I had no luck at all with my own MP4 video clips that were recorded on our Sanyo VPC-5 camera. Even though the M600i thought it should be able to play them, it always failed and asked if it should retry. It never succeeded, even with 15fps QVGA clips.

I was pleased to find that the M600i supports A2DP Bluetooth stereo headphones. I was able to use my Motorola HT820 headphones with the M600 just fine, except for the one time where the media player application threw an exception and hung the entire handset, requiring a battery removal and reinsertion. Apart from that, though, it worked well enough. If you don't have a pair of A2DP headphones handy, there is a wired pair included in the box.

The M600i comes with 62MB of internal storage, of which 50+ megabytes are available, and a 64MB M2 memory card. While the 64MB card will need to be replaced if you plan on loading the device up with music and videos, the internal storage capacity is quite respectable.

 

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