Mobile Phone Reviews

Archive for the ‘Nokia’ Category

The Nokia 5230 Ovi Music Unlimited comes with free music downloads for a year, courtesy of Nokia’s Ovi Music Store.  When comparing mobile phone deals for the Nokia 5230 Ovi Music Unlimited try the T-mobile 18-month contract at only £15 per month for a free handset, 100 minutes and 100 texts.

In addition to free music, the Nokia 5230 Ovi Music Unlimited has a wide range of useful features.  The handset has impressive functionality and is very attractive.  The touchscreen has a 3.2inch display with 360 x 640 pixels and 16million colours, while handwriting recognition is included for inputting data.  Internet access is via an HSDPA connection and Bluetooth, GPRS, EDGE and micro USB connections are standard.  There is a microSD card slot to expand memory capacity up to 16GB.

The camera is 2.0 megapixels and has 3x digital zoom and variety of shot modes.  It also doubles as a VGA quality video recorder.  As it is marketed as a music player, the handset supports MP4 and includes a video player.

The Nokia 5230 has GPS and a number of social networking options.  This is a low-cost touchscreen phone, which comes with a free mobile version of Guitar Hero 5.  The Nokia 5230 Ovi runs Symbian 1 OS and has Ovi Share installed, so pictures can be uploaded to the web.  Finally, battery life is quite good; talk time is 7-hours and you can play music for 24-hours without recharging.

When it comes to mobile phone reviews, the Nokia C6 scored a high 97 per cent for its design.  The phone is user-friendly in part due to the ‘clear black’ touch-screen, which allows for enhanced use in direct sunlight, and QWERTY keyboard.  The attractive smartphone boasts a side slide keyboard and built in navigation key.

Even though it is from the same range as the Nokia C3 and C5, this new phone model comes with a Symbian 9.4 operating system as well as the S60 – 5th edition series software that provides the Nokia C6 with many smartphone features.  Some of them include its user friendly messaging service, internet browser, 5-megapixel camera with video recording support, music player and a high quality colour touch-screen.  Other features found when using this new mobile phone include Bluetooth, memory card expansion, 3G HSDPA and Wi-Fi.

Overall, the Nokia C6 is easy to use and handle.  It is 11.34 cm tall by 5.3 cm wide and 1.68 deep and weighs in at 150 grams.  Its 3.2-inch screen offers up to 16 million colours and allows for customizable themes and home screens for a more personalized appearance.  Calls can be easily sent and received using the easy access keys, which means the user does not have to open the slide out keyboard section.  However, when the keyboard is used, one will find well-spaced keys and navigation controls on a full QWERTY keyboard.

Better than many new mobile phones, the Nokia C6 has a front facing, 8-megapixel camera built in with an LED flash that is capable of recording HD 720p video.

The Nokia E63 can be used for business or pleasure or both, and is great for texting, emailing or internet browsing while you are on the move.  It promises media and social networking features as well as serious business applications.  It’s available in black or in blue.

The E63 is obviously female as it coped with multi tasking without a flicker of an eye – even with several applications running, the speed does not falter.

The office tools are easy to launch and you can even assign particular contacts to the active notes so the notes are highlighted when you call them.

It is easy to set up and use your email account – particularly Gmail – and you can switch from business to pleasure, assigning separate inboxes to your home screen, so that you can just read your work emails while at work and your personal messages when you get home.

The media player is great and boasts internet radio, Real Player, flash player and a podcast client in addition to the regular MP3 player and FM radio.  It also comes with a 3.5 mm headphone jack, a welcome addition to any music-playing phone.

There are slightly too many buttons on this phone and the shortcuts are too many and complicated to remember.  But there were some missing too, for example a physical volume key or a physical camera key.

The 2.0 megapixel camera isn’t anything to write home about, but your shots will come out clear and colourful enough.

The Nokia 6220 Classic has GPS and a 5-megapixel camera that takes pictures almost as good as a digital camera.  It comes with a xenon flash, autofocus and Carl Zeiss optics, a company renowned worldwide for the quality of its lenses.

The video feature allows you to shoot up to 30 frames per second and you can upload your pictures to the Web fairly easily using HSDPA (3.5G).  There’s also built-in GPS so you can geo-tag your pictures and share and embed your personal photographs using a popular website such as Flickr.

The music player supports all the major file formats such as MP3, WMA, WAV, M4A and there is also an FM radio if want to tune in to your favourite radio station on the move.  The handset comes with 120 MB of internal memory and a microSD slot that can be upgraded to 8 GB – more than enough to cope with all your media files.

There is no Wi-Fi with the 6220 Classic, which means that you are dependent on 3G, which is not perfect when you’re uploading lots of large images to the web.

The 6220 has good features for a mid-range priced phone although the keyboard does not look or feel as classy as the rest of the handset.

Other similar phones to check out in this price range are the Sony Ericsson Yari and the LG Prada 2 KF900.

The Nokia X3 Touch and Type is a rather radical concept as far as new mobile phones go, being very much a hybrid of a standard sixteen button keypad phone and a 2.4 inch QVGA touch-screen kind of phone.  It is an intriguing and fairly radical mixture, but only time will tell if consumers will truly come to embrace it.

In the meantime, however, some things about the Nokia X3 Touch and Type are already certain.  It comes with 3G, Bluetooth 2.1 and Wi-Fi 802.11n internet connectivity, a camera with 5 megapixel resolution and a digital zoom of 4x, and is a nicely thin little machine coming in at a thickness of just 9.6 millimetres.

Perhaps surprisingly, while not at the very low end of the market when it comes to cheap mobile phones, the Nokia X3 Touch and Type is still on the pretty affordable end of the scale, set to be priced at a competitive hundred and twenty five pounds (and likely to be less given competitive mobile phone deals), something of a steal given the features and the uniqueness of the blended ‘touch and type’ design.  Nokia claims that the reason for the new blended design is to appeal more to expert texters who have “invested years” in becoming fast, one-handed, one-thumbed text-writers and who want to continue to do so, while still “enjoying the benefits of touch as well.”  It seems a reasonable suggestion to us, and given the competitive pricing, it would be no great surprise to see the Nokia X3 Touch and Type take off in a big way.

Still the market leader in the production of popular new mobile phones, Nokia appears at last to be recovering from the bumpy patch it went through back in 2007 when it incorporated its powerful new Symbian OS into the glitch-ridden early NSeries. Later NSeries models have been much, much better. As Nokia mobile phones go, the C6 is a rather ambiguous advance on the N97.

To be frank, the Nokia C6 isn’t immediately an eye-catcher – chunky, plain and slightly cheap looking (which is ironic, given that it’s not really in the cheap mobile phones end of the market), it’s a development of the N97, billed by Nokia as last year’s top of the range offering. The N97 turned out to be more of a Lada than an Aston Martin, but the C6 does have a few redeeming features if you can get beyond the slightly chubby exterior.

The chunkiness is caused chiefly by the full, slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It’s just a little congested and would have  benefited from a little more space between the keys – but this may have added to the overall ‘outsize’ appearance. The Symbian system on a not especially responsive resistive touch screen isn’t a match made in heaven either – you have to double prod icons in order to open them, a process which can lead to violent blows of frustration rather than gentle taps. But the phone does have 3.2 Mbps HSDPA for swifter surfing over wireless 3G and it has Wi-Fi, and the Symbian OS does allow you to download apps from the Ovi Store including Nokia’s superb Ovi-Maps sat-nav app. But when you compare mobile phones, the app stores on rivals like the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S are far easier to use, and the C6 is in the same price bracket as the HTC Desire, which is simply outstanding.

It may not be one of the latest mobile phones on the market, but the Nokia N86 deserves credit where credit’s due. It’s a bit of a groundbreaker in the Nokia mobile phones camp – the first handset manufactured by the Finnish giant to feature an 8 megapixel camera.

Some have decried its slide-away keyboard as coyote ugly, and it’s true that it probably wouldn’t reach the runners-up category in a beauty pageant. But it does slide away – and the contours of the phone itself are actually rather pleasing to the eye, if you don’t mind your phone being a little on the chunky side. And whilst 8 megapixel cameras are not the rarity they were just a year ago, this one is very good, especially in low light conditions: the two LED photo lights and the superlative Carl Zeiss optics guarantee some amazingly crisp and vibrant images.

Cunningly, you can slide the phone in two directions. Slide the phone up and you’ll get the keyboard – although if you’ve got chubby fingers you’re going to struggle with the miniscule keys. Slide it down and you’ll find four keys controlling the games and the media player. The 2.2 inch screen isn’t huge but Nokia’s AMOLED technology means that it yields exceptionally good image qualities, and YouTube and BBC iPlayer look fine on it (you can even prop the phone up with a little flip-out stand at the back whilst you’re viewing). The music player isn’t at all bad and there’s a generous 8 GB of memory to play around with, expandable to a further 16 GB with a micro-SD card. If you compare mobile phones, the N86 isn’t as easy to use as the HTC Hero or iPhone, but when you’ve got the hang of finding them, there are countless excellent apps to add. Verdict: solidly worthy rather than spellbindingly sensational, but that’s not at all bad.

Despite its popularity amongst consumers, the Nokia X6 has never been a strong performer in mobile phone reviews. Although there is no one single fault with the X6, which is the bigger brother of Nokia’s X3 model, there are enough niggling faults with it to paint it in a bad light.

One of the Nokia X6′s strongest points is its music playback, as the ‘Comes With Music’ function allows easy downloading of tunes and a universal speaker output means that any headphones can be used with it. The camera is also of a high quality, with 5-megapixels and a flash option along with the Carl Zeiss lens which Nokia installs on its latest mobile phones. The built in 32 GB of memory also mean that a lot of pictures and songs are needed before space becomes an issue.

However, one place where the phone falls down is functionality. At times, the chassis of the phone feels cheaply made and scrappy, while the small screen means that messages have to be typed horizontally in order to use the QWERTY keyboard.

The home page layout is also cumbersome, with static icons which are far too big for the screen’s size. Even running the programmes can be problematic at times, as the X6 does suffer from a lack of processor power.

The Nokia X6 also doesn’t stand up financially when compared to other contract mobile phones, as the deals on offer tend to be expensive and offer poor value for money.

If you love Nokia mobile phones, then you are probably already familiar with the Nokia 6300 – still one of the finest basic mobile phones Nokia has ever presented us with. From looks to features, this is the epitome of the no-frills, no-nonsense handset.

Looking at it, you can tell it means business. A basic candy bar design, the exterior of the phone features clean lines and a conventional look – using the perfect combination of glossy black and stainless steel. The keypad is well-laid out and easy to use, menu keys are in standard Nokia format and straightforward, and the 2-inch TFT QVGA screen features 16.7 million colours (240 x 320 pixels) for a sharp, bright display.

The menu for the 6300 is the one found in most Nokia mobile phones and easy to navigate. The phone also includes a microSD card slot. Other features include EDGE technology for faster data transfer, a music player, an FM stereo radio, and hands free speaker capability which allows the user to get on with their work whilst having a conversation.

Because this is a very basic phone, the camera is only 2 megapixels and it doesn’t come with a flash. Also missing is GPS, Wi-Fi, and 3G.

Battery life for the Nokia 6300 is 3.5 hours of talk time or 264 hours of standby.

Despite being one of the older Nokia mobile phones, the 6300 is still quite popular today with the crowd who prefers basic, sturdy, and simple over all the bells and whistles.

The Nokia X2 is one of the latest mobile phones in Nokia’s range of cheap mobile phones. It features a sleek candy bar design with a 2.2 inch graphics display and comes in a choice of black/red or silver/blue combinations. The phone is lightweight and slim line, weighing only 81 grams and measuring 111 by 47 by 13 mm.

As far as Nokia mobile phones go, this one is tailored to the music crowd. It comes with an FM radio, 3.5 mm stereo audio jack, and two powerful speakers. One touch keys make accessing music easy and free songs are offered via the Nokia Music Store.

Also included on the Nokia X2 is a 5 megapixel camera (for 2592 x 1544 pixel resolution) with LED flash, digital zoom, and video recorder. Photos can be uploaded via Nokia Ovi Share and email.

Internal memory for the X2 is 48 MB, which is expandable to 16 GB via microSD. High speed USB 2.0 and stereo Bluetooth connectivity make for fast and easy transfer of data. The phone also supports SyncML. Web browsing is via EDGE-enhanced GPRS via the Opera Mini browser.

Other essential applications included with the X2 include a 1000 entry phonebook, calendar, calculator, currency converter, world clock, flight mode, note pad, speaker phone/voice recorder, timer, and vibrate mode. It doesn’t include a document/ PDF reader. Several pre-installed games are also included.

Currently available in India for $113, it is expected to hit the UK soon at a price of around £80.