Recent times have seen a number of 5.0megapixel phones being launched in the Indian market from the likes of Nokia, LG and Sony Ericsson. Now, Samsung has joined the bandwagon with its G600. The device is also known as Metal 5 and with good reason its appearance brings back memories of the earlier offerings from the Metal series. Just like other phones in this series, the upper panel of this handset is made of metal whereas the back panel is of plastic. After the relatively bulky devices offered by other manufacturers, the G600 comes as a at first glance, it does not look like a camera phone the 5.0-megapixel camera lens is hidden at the back of the upper panel and is visible only when it slides out.

On the upper panel, a speaker is added above the display whereas the circular navigation D-pad and regular selection keys are just below the display. Volume control keys that automatically turn into zoom in and zoom out keys are added on the left edge of the lower panel, while a dedicated camera key and a hot swap card slot are on the right. The alphanumerical keypad is comfortable to use and the three columns are differentiated with metal lines . It's not just the megapixels that matter, a good camera phone needs to have other features like zoom, flash, effects, editing software and memory. And all of them are present in this handset.

The 5.0-megapixel camera with flash is placed at the back of the upper panel, which protects the lens from getting scratched. This also means that for accessing the camera, one needs to slide out the phone. Pictures can't be captured by selecting different megapixellike 5.0, 3.2, 2.0, 1.3 or VGA but users can choose between different resolutions such as 5560 x 1920, 2304 x 1725, 2048 x 1536, 1600x 1200, 280 x 960, 1024 x 768, 800x 600,640 x 480, and 350 x 240. One can capture multiple shots in different categories 6 shot normal, 6 shot high, 9 shot normal, 9 shot high and 15 shot normal. An innovative feature added is the mosaic shot, which divides the screen into four equal parts.

The device comes with some editing software that allows one to adjust the brightness, contrast, and colour of the image. Apart from that, you can tweak the image by going to the 'Effects' option and selecting one from filter, wrap, style and partial blur. Also added are some common features to resize, rotate, flip and crop the image. If you are looking for a video recorder in the phone, you might just feel lost for a moment, as Samsung refers to its video as a 'Camcorder.' The name may be different but it works exactly like a video recorder, and offers great image and sound quality.

Although the G 600 is a camera phone, Samsung has not missed out on other features like music player, FM radio, voice recorder, and Internet access. The sound quality of the music player was rather impressive but a slight disturbance was felt while accessing radio signals. The interface was a pleasant one, with options from the menu sliding out, in a Mac-like effect. Unlike Nokia, Samsung has a common port for the charger, headsets and Bluetooth cable that restricts one to access one function at a time. And we were very impressed at the speed with which we could transfer data over Bluetooth. All this is topped off with some impressive battery life a single charge used to last for a day and a half.

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TECH SPECS:-
Size: 102 x 47.8 x 14.9 mm Weight: 1 05 grams
Memory: 55MB, microSD
Battery: Li-ion 880mAh Screen: 16 million colours
Talktime/Standby: up to 3.5 hoursl up to 300 hours
Bluetoothllnfrared: Yesl No
Phonebook Capacity: 1000
Speakerphone: Yes.
Camera: 5.0 megapixel.