Tough and light...like Gerry Penalosa (Nokia 2630)

Member Name: iamasadlittleboy

Product:	Nokia 2630
Date:	09/08/09 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's solid, light, does the phone stuff

Disadvantages: slow, limited, only does the phone stuff, slow to process, no minimise facilty

I spent most of last week looking for a cheap back up phone to use to surf certain websites and if my main phones battery ever went I could use it in an emergency as I'm paying for 2 phones (1 on contract, my C902 and 1 SIM only, which is now housed in this Nokia) I might as well use 2 phones. Now yes that's silly, I should cancel the SIM only one blah blah blah, but the way I see it I have 10 hours of calls there for £20 and using the internet well I can make it pay for it's self every month.

So finally I'd found a phone that fit inside my £35 budget, well actually there was 2 there was also a Vodafone 277 I think and this Nokia 2630 both for £30 but had to be bought with £10 top up voucher. Any one know why phone shops do that? Any way I bought that during lunchtime one day last week, and now you readers are thinking to yourselves "that's not long enough to fairly rate a phone". And your probably right, though thankfully I feel I'm a decent enough writer (big head there) and know enough about phones, and what I bought it for to be able to review it based on WHAT I WANT IT FOR as opposed to what others might want.

By the end of the day I'd managed to install Opera on it and this was the key to me, and the reason I bought this ahead of the Vodafone. The man in the Vodafone shop said he didn't have a clue what phones allowed for the Opera mobile browser, instead declaring they all used the other ones to the best of his knowledge. I was however aware the 2610 did allow the browser, so I used a bit of common sense to assume this did too, would only be logical that the step up would allow the same program to run. Opera was the only reason I was buying the phone, I have a perfect camera/mp3/browser phone in my Sony Ericsson though sadly due to the way cookies work I wasn't able to use my normal phone for the purpose I was buying this second one.

Anyway handed over the £40 (£30 for the phone and £10 top up) and eventually got it out of the box (took a hell of a lot of effort tbh) and was hugely surprised at how little and light it is. It's not like the C902 is a brick, but this felt like a feather literally you could have it knicked and not notice the loss of weight. Finally got my SIM card in it (the SIM only one, not the PAYG one they give you with the phone) turned it on and did all the date and time stuff you need to do with phones now a days. Odd really you can take photo's, make calls, browse the internet, look at your stocks and shares...but the little blighters still don't have an in built clock. Then finally got through the changing of settings (their on a default PAYG internet settings, took a little while to sort that out) by which point I had to go back to work for 2 hours before my break...

...then back to the task of getting Opera on there, traipsing through the terrible Vodafone live system to get onto Google, then mini.opera.com downloaded it and wham bam thank you mam. One thing I started to notice straight away was how slow it was, it was taking minutes instead of seconds to load pages, it was repeatedly asking me questions I'd already answered and was just genuinely difficult to use for the purpose it was bought for. It wasn't impossible, just slow and cumbersome. I wanted a mobile browser and might as well have just installed dial up for the time it was taken. I was assured it was a 3G phone by the magazine so had to believe the internet access was capable enough loading pages in the GPRS sort of speed I was used to, alas no such luck. Oh well I'm going to trudge on as it does do the job.

So onto the more normal stuff you folk want to know about in a review, the phone comes with 3 Demos and 3 games. I've only actually played 1 (Phantom Spider) and again it seems cumbersome, slow and is a cheap (and poor) clone of Space Invaders, theres also Snake which I believe was popular...7 years ago.
The phone features a 1.3MP camera, which is the sort of thing that looks poor when compared with thinks like the K800i 3MP and it shows, which is why the camera won't be used. Maybe for those with out a digital camera or a better phone this would be fine and for those who want a phone to call text and take the odd picture this quality of camera might suffice. To myself, I'd rather use 5MP of the C902. Oddly however they didn't include a cable in the box to connect the phone to the computer so can't even check what they look like blown up.

The memory of the phone is all in built and seems to be around 15MB in total, currently I have 7.8 left, which is what..2 or 3 songs? Hardly worth the effort of adding them (they'd need to be blue toothed off my other phone anyway) and with no way (that I can see) to add to it, the limitations are incredibly evident.

So for those who buy phones for normal phone features, the texting is simple, the buttons are actually better than those of the c902 though the way Nokia do T9 (predictive texts) is again quite awkward and slow, compared to the of the simple scroll menu of the Sony's I'm used to. The call quality is clear and the sound is sufficiently adequate for the job it's purchased for. The battery will last plenty of time (mine needed charging on the Wednesday and hasn't needed anything since) though this may be the fact it's hardly used other than the internet work I do on it.

With a Nokia we all know the reliability will be top notch, they make solid and durable phones, something I'm not sure I can really say about Sony's after the fiasco's I've had with a few of their W serious as well as the screen on my old K700i being broken with out any particular reason. I'm happy to say that despite it's light weight feeling, it's much similar to Gerry Penalosa (a small but infinitely tough boxer) and will never give up the ghost. I'm not throwing it out the window to test though.

Though with it being a Nokia there does seem to be a few little things I'm not a fan of, the nuances of the T9 system aside it all feels difficult and weird when I'm so used to Sony's everything feels out of kilter. The lock function for example isn't a matter of pressing the asterisks and then the right soft key, it's a matter of turning the function on then leaving it to do it's own thing, a rather odd concept I'm not used to. Also the inability to run programs in the background (meaning I need to turn the browser off to lock it) is a bug bear, and a problem I've had with some Sony's in the past (the reason I actually upgraded to the C902). Why can't mobile company's appreciate their devices now aren't bought just for calls and texts?
The headset too, it's got what looks like a normal headphone end...except it's smaller than the 35mm that we now use as a standard. Why can't mobile company's realise that if we could use our headphones in phones we'd use the Mp3 functions more. Ok they'd take a loss on the profit the headsets sell for (£5 a shot) but they could make that £5 back by selling us things we wanted for the phone, music for example of On demand TV/Movies/Podcasts. Thats not just a gripe of Nokia but all phone manufacturers.

Overall the phone is a phone first and it does the job of being a phone fine, but the additions that some of us nerdier folk need just aren't really there to an acceptable standard. Those wanting a budget back up should sure look at this but I think the K800i (if you can find one) is only about £60 now and a much better value buy. The phone lacks that extra spark to make it likeable, but if your a clubber and need to take a phone for a night out on the tile, this again is ideal. For me, it's not endearing me to changing from a Sony man to a Nokia man any time soon.

Summary: Sadly I'm doing Gerry a dis-service. This is a bit naff, he's class.

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