A year ago, the first comparison of the cameraphones that were the best on the market at that time was published. 3-megapixel was the top resolution in GSM phone for the European market and auto-focus wasn't available in all of the tested phones. At that time, Sony Ericsson K800 and Samsung D900 performed the best, sharing the first place.

Today I'm going to review the new generation Samsung slider, targeted as dedicated cameraphone – the G600 has similar dimensions to its predecessor (the D900) but packs 2 additional megapixels of resolution. The software also changed, and the new slider will offer you improved camera interface with horizontal orientation and newer generation software. The G600 is not an Ultra Series device due to its thickness of almost 15mm (0.6") and the slim slider that replaces the D900 in this aspect is the U600, which is equipped with 3-megapixel camera.

Samsung's quad-band SGH-G600 is a nicely designed slider phone that's small and neat in the pocket and has some very solid features. Its headline is a 5-megapixel camera.

While the design of this handset is not intended to be overly eye-catching, it is very ergonomic. Overall the phone is a neat fit in the hand and pocket at 102mm tall, 47.8mm wide, 14.9 mm thick and 105g. The slider has a good spring-loaded mechanism which means opening and closing the phone to get to number pad and the camera lens - protected behind the slider on the back of the casing - is no problem at all.

The front buttons are either large, as in the case of the Call and End buttons, or very well spaced, as in the case of the two soft-menu buttons, so they are easy to find and hit without accidentally pressing a button you don't want.

The front screen measures 2.2 inches corner to corner and its 320 x 240 pixels are bright and clear. We particularly like the animated screen-saver on the front screen. It is a picture of the Houses of Parliament in London, complete with animated birds flying overhead and a blue sky that gets darker as the evening draws on. It isn't enough to make us want to buy the phone, but it is quite alluring.

Don't be fooled into thinking that the 5-megapixel built-in camera is a substitute for a dedicated digital camera. It isn't. The specialised lens of a digital camera plus the many more settings on offer make it a far better bet if you want to take photos to print or to keep as computer-based memories in the long term.

That noted, there are some nice digital photography extras on this phone, not least of which are the ability to crop images and apply filters and effects, including some rather nice 'warping' algorithms that ought to make picture messaging a bit more fun.

Of course this phone plays music and there is 40MB of memory built in. Additional storage can be applied in the shape of microSD cards, for which there is a card slot on the right edge of the casing. The built-in Bluetooth supports the sending of stereo output to a Bluetooth headset.

Music fans will find the battery life exceptional. From a full charge we got almost nine hours of continuous music. Even better, after the phone decided to stop music playback it kept going for a total of 20 hours 20 minutes, and we were able to make voice calls throughout this time.

An array of additional applications is built in, including to-do list and calendar, world clock and five alarms, voice recorder, Web browser, memo maker, calculator, unit converter, countdown timer and stopwatch.

Not targeted as a luxurious device, the G600 comes in pretty plain box. In addition to the standard charger, USB cable and various manuals and CD with synchronization software, you will also find stereo headset in two parts (adapter and 3.5mm noise isolating headphones), microSD card with adapter to full SD (in our case it was 1GB) and a small Bluetooth headset (Samsung WEP210) with adapter for charging.