Samsung U600 slider phone hails form the same Ultra Edition II range. It comes with a 5-megapixel camera. The G600's camera sits at the top of the phone, hidden away when the slider is shut but revealing its lens and LED flash when slid open. Pressing the camera hotkey activates the camera application.

There's a wide range of settings on the camera application, from the usual white balance and macro settings to multi-shot mode. It also comes with an ISO setting (100 to 800) and the biggest selection of colour effects we've seen on a camera phone; they range from black and white and sepia to emboss, green and aqua. Once your photos are saved, Image editor lets you adjust brightness and contract, add effects and blur or warp images.

The camera takes good photos at all resolutions from 320x240 up to 2560x1920. It is to mentioned that the Samsung G600 also captures video at 640x480.

The stylish grey-and-black G600 model is solidly built than recent Samsung models. The slider opens with a satisfyingly solid click too.

The large keys on the keypad are very responsive and the interface attractive, right down to the dynamic home page which displays a photo of a national landmark and clouds if your signal strength falls. Fans of personalised desktops can even build their own themes based on photos or supplied patterns using a simple theme creator.

The Samsung user interface still isn't the easiest to use though, and a few idiosyncrasies spoil the otherwise well-designed menu structure. Customisation is also less than intuitive, with tone selection hidden away in the profiles section of the Settings menu.

A media player and easy-to-use FM radio complement powerful in-built speakers to complete the G600's multimedia armory, and the 40MB of internal memory can be boosted using the 1GB microSD card included in the box.

By entering this year's 5-megapixel bunfight without adding too much to the size of their offering, Samsung has created a solidly built phone that should give the Nokia N95 and Sony Ericsson K910i a run for their money.