If it weren't for its small size (3.5 x 1.9 x .94 inches), silvery appearance and the fact that it has no fur and does not bark, the ability of Samsung's just introduced 4.4 ounce SPH-a600 to respond to a wide variety of voice commands could lead you to confuse it with a well-trained, responsive and intelligent family dog.  

At $350 retail, however, it will need every feature it has to convince a buying public that is getting used to paying $100 or less for some, but not all, of the same features in units, which like the camera-wireless combos, are being heavily promoted on television.

In many respects, the SPH-a600 is similar to a number of earlier just introduced predecessors: the SPH-500, for Sprint Vision series and the i700 Pocket PC and wireless phone combination for Verizon. By in large, except for its voice capabilities it offers the core feature set of earlier Sprint PCS Vision-enabled phones with some improvements.

It has a 500-entry phone book, a calendar, a calculator, a world clock, and picture caller ID, as well as 16-chord polyphonic ring tones in addition to the 21 included rings and vibrate mode. As with other Sprint phones, for a small fee you can download games and additional ring tones, images to use as screensavers, wallpaper, or photo caller ID. Its' got a built-in VGA (640x480 pixel) camera that  produces images suitable for e-mailing, in-camera viewing, and low res prints. And on the back of the A600 there is a tiny built-in flash that can be toggled on or off in the camera-options menu.

As with other Sprint camera phones, the a600 allows you to easily send pictures to other Sprint PCS Vision users or an e-mail address. It also incorporates the unique ability to swivel the phone's upper screen 180 degrees at the phone's midsection, giving consumers the option of turning the 65,000 color TFT main screen to face outward to serve as an external color display.

Where the a600 breaks new ground and makes the $350 price tag seem a bargain is the new levels to which it takes the use of voice technology. It moves far beyond Samsung's own earlier, and other competitive devices which use older voice-tagging technology, which only allowed users to dial 10 to 30 contacts by speaking the contact's name into the handset microphone and manually attaching a "tag" via a keyboard entry.

The range of voice command and processing the a600 responds to and performs would make a dog jealous. For example, it is capable of speaker-independent name dialing and look up. You can  look up or dial any name in the phonebook, regardless of the number of names. Being speaker-independent, the a600 allows  you to easily dial numbers and navigate the handset's menus, without first having to "train" the device. It has a voice activated phone book that allows you to dial one, several or all the names in the handset's contact list, whether there are 10 or 10,000, using a single voice command. It also allows you to dial any number, including those not in the contact list, by speaking the numbers, with no speech training required.

And it also does something your dog could not, text to speech conversion. By  combining speech recognition and synthesized text-to-speech output the a600 allows you to control dialing features without having to your hands or look at the display. Finally, voice commands can be used to launch and control any application or feature on the handset, whether phone related or not. The word "camera" launches the digital camera and the word "browser" launches the phone's micro-browser.

Fortunately all of these voice capabilities use little processing power or memory: about 100-150K of memory for digit dialing, automatic name dialing, and command and synthesized speech functions, and 600-700K for voice-to-text message conversion, minimal compared to the 16 Mbytes of internal RAM and flash memory.

What makes the performance and range of capabilities in the a600 a bit surprising is that it is based on a Samsung-designed application processor with a relatively modest mid-range 250 MHz ARM920T ARM core. To achieve sufficient performance Samsung has included a number of essential peripheral functions, including a 2D graphics accelerator, an image scaler and a color space converter. What could both reduce cost and improve performance in future such devices is Samsung's roadmap for the applications processors it uses: a 300-350 MHz ARM910 core just moving to volume production, followed by a 400-450 MHz ARM1020E with DSP and Java coprocessors and eventually a 1GHz version of the ARM1020E.

But impressive as the SPH-a600 is in responding to your voice when taking pictures, dialing a number, browsing and reading emails, it is doubtful whether it or its more powerful successors will ever be as good as your dog at fetching sticks on command or wagging its tail.  

Pricing and Availability

The a600 can now be purchased from Sprint on line or through its store outlets for a suggested retail price of $350. By the end of the year, another nine or 10 PDAs and cell phones with similar voice control capabilities will be available from other providers, including a Nokia 60 series Symbian-based PDA-phone and a new unit from Verizon that will incorporate Microsoft's Smartphone 2002 OS, instead of the current CE.NET.

(For access to more than 4,500 other hands-on product reviews on all variety of wired and wireless appliance and consumer devices, go to the iAppliance Web Portal Page. )

Manufacturer Samsung Corp. Product Name SPH-A600 for Sprint Vision Dimensions 3.5 x 1.9 x .94 inches Weight 4.4 ounces(91 g) WWAN Sprint PCS (CDMA wireless); WAP 2.0 / Mobile IP & SIP Memory 16 MB of RAM and flash Processor 250 MHz ARM920T ARM core with 2D graphics accelerator, image scaler and color space converter coprocessing. Operating System CE.NET Camera 4x digital zoom with VGA (640x480 pixel) capable of taking 27, 76, 128 photos with high, medium, or low resolution. Battery Life 180 min. talk time and  up to 160 hours standby time. Voice processing Speaker-independent name dialing and look up;Voice-Activated Phonebook;Digit dialing; browser, email, camera voice control; text to speech conversion. Other features 500-entry phone book, a calendar, a calculator, a world clock, voice-activated dialing, and picture caller ID; support for 16-chord polyphonic ring tones in addition to the 21 included rings and vibrate mode; downloadable games and other ring tones. Display 65,000-color 128X160 pixels TFT