Average phone. Review on Samsung J600

I have been using the Samsung SGH-J600 since the past one year now. It's a moderately old model now. The looks of the phone are pretty neat. Glossy, metallic-grey colour, and of coure the shining polished metallic finish on the borders looks really attractive intially. I say intially because the first thing you will notice wrong with the cell after a period of using it will be the slow dissapearence of this silver finish revealing an ugly white plastic bidy beneath it. So, don't even start thinking that the silver metallic part was actually'metal' .it's only a plastic part with a polished silver coating.

The camera of the phone boasts to be a 1.3mp one.the pictures are only of average clarity. They only get blurrier once you transfer them to a computer or a laptop for a better and bigger viewing. My camera stopped working right in the third month of its life. All it shows is'check camera connections' whenever you try to access it. Since I wasn't much of a camera fan, I avoided it having repaired.

And now for some plus points of the phone. The interface(GUI) of this samsung phone is surprisingly fast. I can even say that it's much faster than the nokia interface. The deleting of messages and navigating from one menu to another takes very very less time.

The unique selling point of the phone is the soft-touch outer keypad. By'outer-keypad', I mean, the four way navigation key in the center, and the call answer and the call hang buttons. They are a little too sensitive to the touch. Most of my friends while checking out my phone for th first time, ended up dialling the last-dialled number(this happens if you as much as give two back to back feather touches to the'dial' button). That is something that took me a while to get used to.

The battery backup is not very good.initially it used to last for 3 days(without any usage of the media player).now it last exactly 24 hours. Needs charging everyday.

The phone has dedicated volume-control keys, a camera short-cut key and the power on-off cum the lock/unlock buttons on the side. The positioning of the power button(on the right side, slightly near the upper side) is a little ucomfortable. I find it uncomfortable even today. Another lame feature about the phone is that we cannot select multiple messages(sms) to delete. Each sms needs to be delted individually. This can be pretty annoying for people who delete their sms's in bulk, once a week.

The thing that impressed me the most about this phone(apart from the super-fast interface) was the sound-clarity. The clarity in the earphones is excellent, and is much better than I ever expected. But on the downside again, the phone can play the songs(mp3s from a micro-memory card) while doing nothing else. If one needs to even type an sms or navigate to the phonebook to look up some number, he/she would have to exit the media player. This gets very irritating as most other phones offer multi-tasking.

The durability of the phone has been impressive. It has lasted me through some nasty falls and bumps. The first major servicing  that my phone requried was very recently(almost one year) when the diplay suddenly went white. This was because the display strip had worn off(wear and tear).

All in all, the phone is a beautiful peice to look(initially) at and has a very fast graphical interface. The music is suprisingly clear in the earphones provided with the phone and it has proven itself as a decent performer as far as repairs are concerned. But, I'd say the phone has some major areas of improvement and personally I'd NOT really reccommend it as a must-buy over other much-better phones with more advanced features.