Equipping a small business with mobile phones can be expensive, especially if you go around adding single contracts ad hoc. The most efficient choice is to go for a one-network deal - then costs come down as you add more handsets.
That's how you can lay your hands on Samsung's latest business smartphone - the C6625. It's available free (until June 6 2009) exclusively on BT's Talk Time tariff, which allows small and medium sized firms to equip their workforce with smartphones at a comparatively low cost. Prices start at an unpromising-looking £20.25 exc VAT for a single phone with 120 inclusive minutes and unlimited data, but it begins to look more tempting when you add more handsets to the deal.
For a base price of £30 exc VAT per month, for example, you get 500 minutes of call time per handset for up to five users. Adding handsets is a mere £12 exc VAT per user per month, totalling a very reasonable £78 per month for a workforce of five. It's a very good deal for small businesses, though note that it doesn't include Exchange email hosting - just an O2 POP3 email account.
The phone itself is functional, but unremarkable. The C6625 is a traditional candy bar smartphone with a Qwerty keyboard below the screen. It has a bog-standard 320 x 240 screen, where rival models such as the BlackBerry Curve 8900 boast higher resolution displays. It isn't touch-sensitive either, which means it runs Windows Mobile Standard rather Professional. The main limitations of this are that you can't create Microsoft Office documents from scratch, just edit and save them, and you can't run Opera Mobile, just Mini.
Other than this, it's straightforward enough to use, with the new sliding panel front end on Windows Mobile Standard a vast improvement on the ugly icon-based affair of previous versions. Samsung also includes its very own customisable front-end, but we found this sluggish and unresponsive. Other extra software includes Midomi - a music track recognition tool like Shazam on the iPhone - a stopwatch (unusual in a Windows Mobile device) and a unit conversion utility.
The C6625's main strength lies in how light, slim and pocketable it is. It measures a mere 12mm thick and weighs a feathery 109g. Despite these compact dimensions, the keyboard is pretty usable too, with keys that are well-separated and boast a nice squishy, clicky response.
On the features front, there's plenty to play with, though again it's not bursting at the seams. You get 3.6Mbits/sec HSDPA, GPS, an FM radio and Bluetooth, but no Wi-Fi and the two-megapixel camera is nothing to write home about. To compensate, the 1,300mAh lithium-ion battery offers decent battery life and in our real-world tests lasted an hour short of three days.
In all, this little Samsung is a likeable phone. It's light, compact and usable - and that BT Talk Time package is a very tempting option for small businesses. The Nokia E75 is sexier all round, RIM's BlackBerry Curve 8900 has a better screen and includes Wi-Fi, while the Bold, though bulkier, has a better keyboard. But, if all you need is a functional phone for your workforce it'll do the trick.
