Orange SPV C600 mobile phone

Posted by T3 Online on Tue 30 Oct 2007

Orange's smart phone evolves.

Orange's last smart phone, the C550, boasted a great screen, but this one looks better yet. Continuing its love-in with Microsoft, Orange's follow-up is the first handset to run Bill Gates's new operating system, Windows Mobile 5.0, and the result is improved performance and a modern, icon-based interface instead of the 550's dated-looking text lists.

While this feels chunkier and more robust than its predecessor, it's actually a shade lighter. Controls have improved, especially the joystick, which is now more solid and responsive. The hi-res screen sparkles with colour and provides a high enough resolution to display a typical day's worth of appointments.

Windows mobiles are notoriously sluggish, but applications are now much more responsive - once they're running at least. The first time you go to send a text message, for example, the dialogue box takes six seconds to appear, but after that it appears almost instantly.

You get a free copy of Outlook in the box and the syncing features between the phone and the software are speedy and easy to use. Picture syncing is now included as well, so once an image is associated with a contact in Outlook on your PC, it's copied across automatically, ready to pop up when that person rings.

Battery life is unremarkable, lasting a working day in our tests, and the camera takes almost unusable snaps. Less serious, but still annoying, is the fact that certain menus, such as the set-up screen, revert to text lists instead of the icons used elsewhere.

Despite that, this is still one of the best smart phones around. If a total lack of organisation is your disease, then this might well be the cure.