Having previously owned a variety of Sony Ericsson phones for the last few years, I decided last December that it was about time to try the latest offering from Nokia. At first, I was entirely happy with the phone, it looks superb, and it was packed with more features than I knew how to use: eBay, MSN Messenger, video messaging, mobile TV, internet, skype, etc, etc.
I still think its amazing that you can pack all of these applications into such a small phone (although newer models seem to have managed it in something half the size), however you have to ask yourself how often you are actually going to use the majority of these. For the first month or two, I was very keen to play around on Messenger, or search for items on ebay, but to be honest it becomes a little dull after a while. Combine the fact that the web connection is very slow in comparison to home broadband, and the fact that there is no qwerty keyboard to type with, it actually makes more sense to just wait until you can sit in front of a computer to do all these things. The mobile TV is little more that a showcase of what the future may hold - currently the picture quality is quite poor, and the selection of available programmes doesn't leave me too excited.
And to a couple of other issues. If, like me, you forget most of the time to delete old text messages out of your inbox, you'll find that the phone becomes very slow, especially when trying to send texts yourself. Also, a problem which you would have thought Nokia could sort out by now is that of the phone switching itself off all the time. Especially now that my phone is a little older, I have found that it just decides to die for no apparent reason, often in the middle of an important conversation. Thirdly, whilst the phone actually has a fairly good camera (although it is useless in low light) and an mp3 player, the memory card provided is tiny, meaning that you have to splash out on a bigger one to make it worthwhile having these features.
All that said however, the Nokia is not a bad phone, especially if you're the sort of person who is going to enjoy using all of the extra features. The mp3 player may be no rival to your ipod, but it is a useful addition. Buy a big memory card and the camera becomes a potential replacement for your regular digital snapper, and you can store a lot of games and music on it too.
For me, I will most likely be switching back to Sony Ericsson once my current contract runs out, and this time I am less likely to be influenced by the possibility of watching TV on my phone and then discussing it over MSN Messenger..
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Ease of use
Satisfactory
Battery talktime
Satisfactory
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