Recently I purchased a new cell phone: Samsung SPH-A600. It’s only been 4 years since our last cell phone purchase, so we were not exactly current with the times. I liked the concept of moblogging and wanted to have a phone that could take pictures and send them along to my blog. After visiting several different cell phone dealers I decided upon the Samsung A600. It has a patented swivel display so that you can turn it around use as a viewfinder.

The Sprint Vision service cost an extra 15 bones a month (as of this writing), but it gives users of this phone the ability to do unlimited text messaging (sms) and web browsing. I found that not many websites loaded very well in the browser (including this weblog, grrr), but you could get wireless-friendly versions of some sites and of course those sites which have wap pages specifically designed for pda, pocket pc and wap-enabled phones come in good.The whole cell phone ring tone game where you basically rent ring tones is a big market and you can get ring tones for $1-3 for 30-90+ days of usage. I found the quality of the purchased ring tones, plus the ten or so ringtones that come with the phone upon purchase to be outstanding.

It comes with a demo of Ms. Pac Man which graphically was a nearly perfect replica of the arcade classic. The sounds were altered a bit, but navigating with the keypad is tedious. Good news though, a $40 USD gamepad is supposed to be coming out sometime this month. The pictures look encouraging. It made Time’s Gadget of the Week

Speaking of the keypad, typing URLs in through the phone makes palm/pocket pc users long for the ease of their stylus. It got me thinking about how to make a site with easy to use keypad URLs.

The feature that took me over the top for this phone purchase was the picture taking ability. You can take pictures in 3 different resolutions: high, medium, and low. The highest quality setting for the pictures is still a low quality setting on low to medium range straight digital cameras and check this out: there is even a built-in flash! Check out the sample picture for an example of the quality indoors.

How easy is it to take a picture? Simple, you click the camera button twice to go into Camera Mode, then you adjust the convenient swivel lens, aim, and press the button. How about sharing the picture? You push the review button then choose the picture you want, press the share button and then type in the mobile phone number or email address you want to send along to. You can even voice annotate the picture adding a short voice recorded message and it will be sent along with your picture (as a wav file). I am still learning, but I do not think that there is a way to send multiple pictures in the same email, so it’s one at a time. However, it does remember what email addresses you sent to so you don’t have to retype the emails over and over again.

I am seeing the day when I’ll be able to have my PDA and cell phone merged as one and therefore reduce my travelling tech gear. I realize there are already palm/cell phones out there, but I wasn’t ready to spend another 100-200 bones to replace my Palm VIIx, which I realize is grayscale and very outdated but something I still use a lot.

If only the Samsung SPH-A600 phone was perhaps $100 cheaper ($350 USD is a bit steep for a camera cell phone which takes OK quality pictures at its best setting), alas it is still worlds better than the previous phone we had. Grade: A-

Related Samsung SPH-A600 Articles / Reviews:
http://gear.ign.com/articles/432/432039p1.html
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/340/C1873/
http://reviews.cnet.com/Samsung_SPH_A600/4505-6454_7-21008620.html

Accessory list for Samsung SPH-A600
http://www.sprintpcsaccessories.com/direct/sp/accessory.jsp?prod=1595

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