Orange SPV M600 PDA phone

Windows Mobile push email comes to Orange

Speaking of push email, Orange is charging £6.50 for the basic email package that gives you 10MB of email, while £12 will give you 30MB, £25 200MB and finally £55 for “unlimited” data transfers, albeit with a fair usage policy. This doesn’t include an email server - it’s just the data service as this is a business-only offering, at least for now.

On the top of the SPV M600 is a slot for a standard-size SD card – the slot also supports SD IO cards – while on the right-hand side you’ll find the stylus – which is very comfortable to use, by the way - the power button and the infra-red window. At the bottom of the handset sits a 2.5mm audio jack and a mini USB 2.0 port. The camera at the rear has been upgraded from the one on the M500 - it’s now sporting two-megapixel resolution and a macro mode, but still no flash. There’s also one of those little self portrait mirrors and a loud speaker.

The processor is a Texas Instruments OMAP 850 clocked at a fairly slow 195MHz. Considering that the SPV M500 used a 416MHz Intel Xscale chip, this is quite disappointing and is a problem if you want to use Skype, although there are already reports of it being overclockable by about 45MHz, which makes Skype run more smoothly. The Flash memory has been increased from the M500's 64MB to 128MB. The RAM hasn’t been upgraded and is still set at 64MB, although a 512MB or even a 1GB SD card is cheap enough these days. I tested the SPV M600 with a SanDisk 1GB SD card and there didn’t seem to be any slowdown launching applications from this compared to the internal memory.

The phone sports a quad-band GSM radio, and the M600 also supports EDGE for faster GPRS data transfers. The M600 has Bluetooth 2.0 on board - handy for faster wireless data synchronisation and back-up if you're computer also supports that version - and it supports the 54Mbps variety of Wi-Fi, 802.11g - despite Orange's claim that the phone only provides slower 802.11b wireless networking.

The screen is still a 2.8in, 240 x 320 LCD. However, Windows Mobile 5 lets you flip the display into landscape mode, which works better with certain applications, websites and, in particular, the phone's camera application. The screen seems to collect a lot of dust and because it's slightly recessed, it’s quite awkward to clean.

The screen is nonetheless very easy to read in most lighting conditions bar direct sunlight, although you can compensate by increasing the backlight, at the cost of a reduced battery life. During the time I used the M600, the battery's charge seemed to last well and, unless you use it excessively, you should get three or four days usage out of a single charge.