Nokia 6210 Navigator

I bought this phone after owning a couple of Nokia 6110 phones for more than two years. This review is written from the perspective of upgrading from this phone, for when I am making comparisons. I have not owned anything but a Nokia but have used other people's and am convinced they are a clear market leader.

And this phone strengthens that. Plenty of advanced features, some of them similar to the 7110, such as the greatly enlarged and enhanced phonebook and the WAP support.

The first thing you notice is the high-resolution screen, with up to 6 lines of text (although you normally see only 5, one with the soft-keys' names, one for the menu name and three in a larger font with the menu or information). The screen is very easy to read.

The phone is as with all Nokia's easy to use through extensive menus and plenty of shortcut keys and different ways of doing things. It has plenty of buttons (I personally dislike the Nokia "Navi-key" phones with only the up/down and select/cancel buttons because you often have to go back out and through different menus to do things). Lots more ways of doing things are added, such as sending a message from the phone book or adding a phone number by just typing a number when a name is on the screen.

The memory is one of the greatest features - I always used to run out of space, both in the length of names (I like to store several numbers for people, eg, home, mobile 1, mobile 2, work etc.. and once you have added some kind of code to the small capacity of a SIM/card or normal phone memory there is not much space for the name, which needs to be quite long to tell the difference between however many "Sarah"s I know! And the number of entries is greatly increased - I have 27% used and this would have easily filled my old 140 on the SIM and 50 in my phones memory.

The phonebook memory has also been taken a step past previous ideas. You can store several numbers and even text notes under each name. So no more of those stupid codes after peoples names, and no more searching through 30 names to get to anyone with a name starting S because there are 6 people each with 5 numbers stored before them in the S section...

Many more text messages can also be stored. I found 60 in my inbox the other day (although this could be seen as a disadvantage as it took me a while to erase them all!) Text messages can also be stored into different folders so you can save all your animated texts in the same place. These, BTW, still work despite my initial fears, because the phone can be set to emulate the old Nokia font and they then work perfectly.

Other features of course include WAP - although the useful of this at the moment is, I feel, limited. But the support is there and AFAIK fairly similar to the 7110's WAP system. It is fairly simple to use, but the only useful functions I have found so far are train times, weather and horroscopes ;). This is more of a comlpaint against WAP services in general than this phone, however.

Games are of course included, Snake II, Opposite and Memory II, none of them amazing but you can pass a few hours with Snake, or play against your friend with a similar phone on infra red.

The infra red port of course has more useful functions. One is to transfer phone numbers to your friends easily, although this is of course limited to other Nokia + infra red phone owners. I have also managed to connect a friend's laptop to the internet using this. Just stick the phone pointing at the laptop, set up the infra red port as a Nokia modem and you can type HAYES commands in as normal and it connects! No wires needed. Of course, I only managed a connection at 9,600 but I think networks are working on this...

Another feature I appreciate is profiles - you can define groups of settings for ring tones and volumes. I have one for work, for example, where the phone beeps once for an incoming call so as not to create a scene! These can also be used to customise your phone, as the active profile name appears underneath the operator logo on the main screen.

Callers themselves can also be grouped and graphics and ringtones assigned. You can even select which groups can get through to your phone and the rest will be diverted to answerphone.

Minor features are the calendar - useful for setting timed alarms and birthday reminders but not something you would be likely to use to organise a busy diary; and the calculator - again useful for a quick calculation or currency conversion but I wouldnt do my accounts on it.

The call register is good, upgraded from previous Nokias in that it will record the date and time of a withheld number. The phone stores 10 each of dialed, received, and missed, grouping multiple calls from/to the same number.

As for the size, shape and appearance of the phone, no problems. My 6110 was very small when I first bought it (Oct 1998) but it seems to have grown and now feels huge compared to this. The 6210 is smaller and lighter, has no sticky-outy arial (and therefore no broken arial), and the phone is much lighter. The batter life has also improved substantially. I can go to work on a Saturday morning, and not get home till Monday night, adding a couple of hours talk time, and the phone copes with no problem on the standard battery.

A vibrating alert is also included in the phone - nice! Definately an advantage for anyone who takes their phone out, although I don't notice it unless I have "tightish" trousers on...

On to disadvantages - the phone has crashed on me a few times, requiring the battery to be removed to reset it. This has normally ocurred while using WAP, but also when using the phonebook etc... This is disappointing because my old 6110 crashed only a handful of times in the whole time I have had it, whereas this manages it at least once a week. Hopefully these bugs will be resolved in future software versions...?

To summarise, I would recommend this phone to anyone who is prepared to spend a little more than the minimum and doesn't want their phone to feel like a toy. If, however, you want a cheap phone with changeable covers and a space invades game then you might try the 3310 instead.