Introduction

The Sony Ericsson T610 sparkled in both design and engineering, and helped haul the company back into profitability. Buoyed by the success, Sony Ericsson has now released its first clamshell GSM model, the Z600. Like its predecessors, the Z600 is heavy on features, which should shoot it to the top of the tech-lover hit list.

Design

Adopting the clamshell form factor is a dramatic change for fans of the T610. Many who found it puzzling that the manufacturer can pack so much electronic wizardry into the compact T610, will be scratching their head that at why they would produce a handset so much thicker than competing clamshells.

The Z600 isn't particularly broad at 48 mm or long at 90 mm. But it's on the heavy side at 110 g. However, what really hurts is its 28 mm thickness. In comparison, the Panasonic GD88 and Samsung V200 clamshells measure just 23mm. Most alarming is that the Z600 is even thicker than the massive Nokia 9210i Communicator, which is 27 mm.

Apart from the serious heft, the Z600's exterior design differs from common clamshells in another way. There's a small LCD panel near the top of the flip, while the camera lens is at the bottom. This leaves a large blank area in the middle. So plain that it may be mistaken for the phone's reverse side.

Thankfully, the Z600 supports interchangeable covers. The phone itself is extremely well made and does not feel plastic-like at all. Because its weight is quite evenly distributed between the flip and the main piece, it loses its bulky feel once the clamshell is opened.

Basic Features

The Z600 retains the same basic menu interface of the T610. This UI (User Interface) is considered by many to be the best available one in the market at present, and it shows. While providing a better view of all the functions and submenus than the Series 40 interface found in most Nokias, it has many commonly used functions appearing at many places in the menu system.

All this delivers a highly intuitive experience to the user. In fact, many handset manufacturers are now switching over to this style of interfacing, most notable being Nokia and Motorola.

A nice and large direction pad takes the place of the T610's joystick. The Z600's is powered by a 740 mAh battery. The standby and talk time of the phone is still pretty good but it is not as good as it's predecessor. Signal strength and voice quality is much better than in the T610.

Screen

Also similar to the T610 is the screen. it sports the same sized display and TFT based 65,536 color display. With a maximum resolution of 128 x 160 px. However, the display has been drastically improved and the characters on the screen can now be viewed in direct sunlight, a problem which plagued the T610.

The display is top tier, although still not in the elite league. A domain exclusively owned by the Sharp GX20 and high-end Samsungs with their latest OLED (Organic LED) displays. However, the Z600 has a great screen which is reasonably bright and colorful.

The phone comes with a build-in digital camera. It's capability still remains ordinary. The quality of the images produced by the Z600's camera is more or less the same as in the T610. The phone can capture images at a maximum resolution of 288 x 352 px. We sometimes found a slight tinge on our photographs. That said, the camera does a decent job.

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