Nokia 7250i

Maybe this review is a tribute to a sturdy (dropped many times) never broken no nonsense mobile from Nokia. You probably can't buy this new anymore, but if you see it 2nd hand and want a spare I'd buy it.

This tri band phone supports browsing the web through an XHTML capable browser. You can also use the browser to download ring tones and pictures onto the phone that can be used to customize your wallpaper background. I actually specifically do not want an Internet phone, and in this day and age, this is as close as I'm getting to an Internet free phone.

Although email is supported, Nokia doesn't include an email client on the phone so one has to be downloaded. SMS, MMS, text chat and predictive text are all there, but the predictive text doesn't seem to remember new additional words or preferred spellings of words which is a bit of a nuisance.

There's a nifty little digital camera (Nokia's first) with 4GB space ether for pictures or tunes, there's also night mode and self timer, each photo is around 12k at the highest quality mode not bad for Internet thumbnails not so good for anything else! There's no flash on the camera.

The ring tones are polyphonic and excellent with tunes coming from the speakerphone which is clear. Call reception is generally good, but sometimes in basements and the like my reception vanishes whilst friends on other models remain. There is also a radio alarm but needs a head sent to work, one can change the alarm tune without the radio. There is also a calender and to do list and reminder feature, quite useful if you hear the alarm, useless if you don't.

The screensaver is pretty dark and where there is an abundance of sunlight almost impossible to see a thing on the screen without going through "lighting a cigarette on a windy day underneath my jacket impersonation". There is no possibility of swapping the screensaver to anything than Nokia's digital clock.

Other features include the standard, stopwatch, countdown, wallet, converter(lb-kg,feet-meters etc), picture editor, tune editor, games, infra-red and PC synchronisation.

The phone is small and weighs 92g and size is 104 x 44 x 19mm. Now talk time when battery is new is supposed to be 240-300 minutes and standby 8-10 days after 7 years usage we are down to around a third of the talk time and half the standby time.

All in all the best phone I've had from 1994 till today.