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The Samsung SGH-G600 is a 5 megapixel camera phone, and it's Samsung's first device of this resolution to be launched outside the Korean market.

Joining a somewhat small club of 5 megapixel phones, including the Nokia N95, Sony Ericsson K850i and LG KG920, the Samsung G600 looks interesting. But like most Korean phone manufacturers, Samsung have chosen to illustrate their new handset with a picture of a pretty girl, rather than giving us the full technical specifications.

Still, what we do know the is the Samsung SGH-G600 comes with a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash.. if our interpretation of the Korean press release is up to scratch. It also has Bluetooth, an FM radio, USB 2.0 and presumably expandable memory and an MP3 player plus a QVGA (240x320 pixel display).

The sneak preview shows the 14.9 mm slider phone with a 5 megapixel camera that has 4x digital zoom and LED flash. USB 2.0, Bluetooth 2.0 and microSD card expansion.

Quadband GSM enables you to take this 105 gram piece of kit all over the world and enjoy reading news from your home town on a 16 million color 320 x 240 resolution display.

Prices and availability are not yet know. Hopefully cheaper than Nokia’s N95 and Sony Ericsson’s K850i.

Samsung G600 user reviews

What users like:
Being able to download pictures easily, The music player, the slim design, the ability to create your own themes, The screen, the radio, A fantatic camera phone.

What users don't like:
Taking photos as it shakes to much, and thats with anti shake on, and texting, The slider starts getting a bit loose with use, Some interface aspects are sub-par, The screen quality!

Review:
(a) Negatives
- When i try and listen to music on the mp3 player it wont read whats on the memory card and finaly when it does it will play for about 5 seconds then either freeze or turn its self off.

- Hardly ever opens my pictures or plays my videos because it keeps saying not supported content. how can it not be supported content when the pictures and videos have been taken or filmed on that phone!

- For 5 mega pixels i think the camera is really poor i also have a sony ericcson k810i which has a 3.2 mega pixel camera which i think is stunning compared to the 5 mega pixel on the g600 thats if what they put in it is actually a 5 mega pixel camera!

- Half the time im on the phone to someone the phone wii either freeze, turn its self off or put the caller on hold n then makes it impossible to retrieve the call

- Irritating, non-intuitive text messaging (eg when adding a word it always goes to capital letters; when you hold down "c" it deletes the whole message).

- The alarm has no "snooze" function.

- You can record the radio, but not voice calls.

- You can't view photos while listening to the radio.

- You can't take a photograph while on a call (you can with Nokias and Sony).

- The camera is deeply average. Quality is lower than the Nokia N73 (itself a totally infuriating phone); its ergonomics as a camera are poor - difficult to hold when taking a picture; the flash is set to "off" as default, and reverts to this even when you change the setting.

- The quality of the screen, it is really poor compared to my samsung d600. It's supposed to have 16 million colours but the sharpness and colour quality of the d600 is a lot better. I compared two identical pictures on both phones and the g600 was dull, blurry, unsharp.

(b) Positive
- A fantastically designed mobile phone. Very solid feel, contructed of metal (front facia) and solid plastic for the back and keypad. This provides the perfect balance of feel and inability to record fingerprints. The buttons all have a very solid feel to them, the navigation pad works effortlessley. Texting and dialing is perfect. The slide mechanism is holding up very well, despite constant use. The screen is well sized at 2.2 inches and seems to be quite resistant to scratches (none yet despite a week long camping holiday). It is supremely sharp, although hard to read under direct light.

- The phone also has a well specified mp3 player which works well as a standalone player, a very good fm radio with clear reception and recording ability (not RDS), standard application list and a well thought out web browser. Unfortunately, the phone has no 3G/HSDPA or WIFI, although why you'd want to spend excessive time surfing the web on such a small device baffles me.

- The star of the show! A fantastic 5mp autofocus unit featuring LED light, iso adjustment, 3 metering modes, panoramic mode, macro mode and several photo effects. The performance is as good as a standalone camera, albeit a cheap one. The autofocus is fast and effective and pictures have excellent colour, contrast and sharpness. Low light performance is decent thanks to the iso 800 mode and bright LED flash. The unit also records video at 640x480 resolution at 30fps (i believe). The videos look smooth and sharp with well synced audio.

- The phone works extremely well in all standard applications such as texting, phonebook, clock/alarm etc. The music player is excellent, sorting tracks by artist, album, song and genre. Playlists can be constucted on the phone, and there is also a section for podcasts, last/most and recently played songs. The player can also be minimised when using other applications (same goes for the radio). The image viewer unfortunately is not quite as good. When photos are stored in the 'my photos' folder, they can be used with slideshows and viewed fullscreen. However, this folder uses the phones memory so is restricted to 70mb. When photos are placed in the memory card folder these features can not be applied. The phone is also slighlty slow at viewing photos, due to insufficent proccessor speed and RAM.