Nokia 3330 - You have to love it! (Nokia 3330)

Member Name: nboisse

Product:	Nokia 3330
Date:	25/03/03 (1089 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Ease of Use, Feature Packed, Fully Customisable

Disadvantages: Slightly Dated, Small Inbox, Pointless "Chat" Feature

If you?re looking for a good, solid, feature packed phone then this is the one for you. It may be getting a little outdated nowadays, and a lot of shops don?t sell it anymore, but if you can get your hands on one then your certainly one of the lucky ones.


To begin with, I?d like to just say about the drop retardant properties of this phone, after dropping mine many times it still works as well as it always has! Sure, the case gets a bit scratched at times, but that?s all! It?d take nothing short of a direct hammer blow to get rid of this one; it?ll be one of the surviving species, along with cockroaches after the nuclear war :D


Before the 3330, I had a Samsung T100, nice phone and everything, but once the novelty of the colour screen and polyphonic ring tones wear off your left with an average, if somewhat stylish phone with awkward text input?.T9 blows, Nokia?s predictive text is far superior!


It?s small, but not too small; its light, but its not too light. The buttons are perfectly sized for fingers of all sizes (though sadly no keypad solves the problem of drunken texting mistakes.) Physically, it?s the perfect phone for anyone.
It features Nokia?s X-Press On covers and can use covers from the older 3310 model. Official covers cost around £20 but are rather bland, and look rather professional while cheaper, unbranded covers can be bought for about £5 or so. These come in many colourful and generally offensive designs. I personally prefer the original Grey/Blue cover that came with it.


The screen is a basic dot-matrix mono-tone with 84x48 resolution which gives a nice amount of detail and is large enough not to have to strain your eyes over. The 3330 features animated screensavers which the 3310 was not capable of, they?re fairly basic but a nice touch and you can download new animations from the mobile phone cash-in sites all over the net, although I personally recommend spending £15 on a data cable and
downloading your own anims to it, rather than forking out £1.50 a minute on a premium line. The main ?title? screen of the 3330 displays signal strength on the left, battery power remaining on the right and in the middle can be a logo or screensaver of your choice.


The phones menu is very easy to navigate with the menu and scrolling keys. Each menu option has a series of sub categories that lead you to the various features. To make things faster, each menu can be accessed by pressing a number on the keypad; the number of each menu option is displayed in the top right of the screen. Its helpful to know how to get to the languages menu and change it back to English if one of your friends decides its ?hilarious? to set your phone to Arabic or something dumb.


The features in the menus are:

Phonebook ? Commonplace in every phone, the phone itself will hold 100 names in the internal memory and up to 250 names can be held in the SIM, depending on what network you?re with. The names and numbers can be displayed in a variety of ways to suit your preference: Name Only, Name & Number etc.

The 3330 lets you assign up to 8 voice dials to your favourite mates. The voice recognition works well in quiet areas but gets confused by anything too loud, like a truck going past or when you?re in town.

Finally, you can assign 11 speed dials to the 3330, from key 1 to 0. These are accessed by holding the number down for a brief period of time, it?s really very helpful. You can also assign birthday reminders to each contact which saves a beating from your girlfriend!


Messages ? Sending a message with the 3330 is one of lives great experiences. Its so easy and it?s a great relief from the T100?s clunky workings. Its still based around the T9 system, so when you type (6,3) for ?me? you get ?of? and have to cycle through it with the * key, a minor annoyance, but with the Nokia you can add your own words to your dictionary, l
ike all your favourite shorthand as well as the swearwords no Nokia comes programmed with; it really helps to speed up the process!

The 3330 supports large message sending, which means you can type around 440 characters in one text. When you send it, it will be split up into 2 or 3 separate text messages, depending on how many characters you?ve used, although if you stay under 130 or so you?ll just send the one, unfortunately, you?ll be charged for each text, so only use this feature if you have the cash! A helpful counter in the top right of the screen tells you how many characters you have left to use and also how many text messages will be sent. If a long message is sent to another phone that supports them, the message will be re arranged into 1 big message like it is on your phone; otherwise it will arrive as 3 separate texts which can be confusing.

Just like the 3310 you can send picture messages to other phones that support them. The default images you get are satisfactory, but if you want better ones, look around on the net or on WAP. Each picture message costs 30p to send (network dependant) and you can send a little message along with it. They?re best for sending someone a birthday ?card? if it managed to slip your mind.

The 3330 can hold up to 10 messages in the inbox which is a little small and I would?ve liked a larger capacity, like with the 8310s seemingly endless Inbox and folders but it doesn?t cause too many problems.


Chat ? This is really the only redundant feature on the 3330. Chat is like a little SMS chat room where you can send short messages to each other, but at 10p a message you better be rich. I recommend talking on the phone or a long text, not this!


Call Register ? This is where you can check all the calls that you?ve missed and received, as well as call durations and total call time, which is useful if your on a contract. If you are a prepay user you can check the amount of your rem
aining credit although this is network dependant.


Tones ? The ring tones of the 3330 are what you?d expect from a phone, single, ?monophonic? beeps, and this is how it should be. When I had my T100, which has polyphonic tones, I got really embarrassed when it rang, it sounded like I?d turned up my headphones too loud or something, it didn?t sound like a phone ringing but saying this, it was a cool feature. I much prefer the 3330?s simplistic take on ring tones, and I certainly don?t feel embarrassed now.

The 3330 comes with 35 default tones, which are OK, nothing to write home about. But there is the good old ?Nokia Tune?, made famous by Trigger Happy, although that jokes wearing thin now. There is also space to add 7 of your own composed or downloaded tones which is one of the best features of the 3330. There are millions of ring tones out there for you, on the net and on premium rate phone lines (which suck and cost too much). I recommend finding a midi of your favourite song, downloading a program called ?Tone Win Midi Converter? and converting it to a ring tone file. You can then open this document in a program called ?Nokia Ring tone Converter? which will convert it to key presses which you can put into your phone through the Composer menu option. It?s all free!

As well as being able to choose and compose your ring tones in this section can set your alert type (Ring, Vibrate, Vibrate & Ring or Silent), as well as your message tone, again you can have a vibrate or silent option with this. You also can select if you want key press tones on or off and they have 2 levels of volume. Finally, change the ring volume here as you would expect and choose whether to have alert tones on, for telling you when your battery is dying etc.


Call Settings ? Here you can set up options such as your PIN code settings, call barring, etc. The PIN change is the only useful thing really. There?s the option to ?Restore Factory Defaults? whic
h is very helpful if you?ve fiddled about with the settings too much and don?t know how to get them back!


Call Divert ? This lets you divert calls to either your voice mailbox, or to another phone number, such as your home number, although the latter option is not allowed by some networks. The calls can be diverted with a variety of options, ranging from ?When Busy? to ?All Calls?, helpful for when you?re in a meeting and don?t want to talk to anyone, or feel the thing buzzing against your leg.


Games ? Now, this is the fun bit; the games on the 3330 include all of the ones from the 3310: Snake 2, Pairs 2, Space Impact and Bantumi as well as the new addition of Bumper.

Snake 2 is a very addictive game where you control an ever moving snake, your aim is to eat food and bugs to get points, when you eat something you grow in length, making it ever harder because if you bang into yourself, you?re dead. You can also choose from a variety of mazes to play in to make it that more challenging.

Pairs 2 is a basic ?match two cards? memory type game, its quite fun, but not amazing.

Space Impact sees you flying a little spaceship across the screen and defeating wave upon wave of enemy ship before fighting the level boss in a classic R-Type shoot ?em Up fashion. You can collect power-ups which give you more lives or more powerful special weapons, which let you defeat more enemies than the regular laser beam. My personal favourite.

Bantumi is a frustrating Egyptian game involving pots and peas or something; I don?t play it anymore because it beats me even on easy. The basic idea of the game is to have more peas in your pot and the end of the game. This is achieved by moving peas one at a time from pot to pot?..confused? So am I!

Finally, Bumper is a fairly enjoyable pinball game, fire the ball into the table and bump it about with the flippers; you can also jog the table left and right to make it go where you
want, but be careful not to make it tilt! Fun to pass a little time, but Space Impact still rules over it.

You can download new games via WAP although I haven?t tried this yet and I?m assuming that you?ll have to pay for them but sounds a pretty cool idea.


Calculator ? Just a basic calculator really, quite helpful if you don?t have one to hand, don?t try doing your algebra on it though.
Reminders ? You can leave yourself little notes here if you?re a bit forgetful (like me). You can set the reminder with an alarm just in case. I mainly use this feature as a ?To do? list and just type in things I need to buy or do without setting an alarm.


Clock ? You can adjust the time and date settings here, everything you?d expect. There?s also a stopwatch for all your physics experiments and a countdown timer too, to countdown the days to oblivion if you feel so inclined. Finally there?s a daily alarm to wake you up in the mornings.


Profiles ? I find these really helpful, within each profile you can set the ring tone, alert type and screensaver etc. It comes with a few preset ones, such as Discreet for when you?re in a meeting, and Loud for when your out clubbing, the choice is yours. The name of the profile will display on the title screen under the operator logo although I don?t like this, so my general Profile is just a space so nothing will show up.


Services ? This is where you?ll find the WAP facilities of your 3330 which your 3310 never had. Its quite useful for finding out on the spot information, such as cinema times etc. Some WAP sites also let you check your emails. It can be expensive at about 10p a minute on Orange so use it wisely.


I bought my 3330 through Ebay for £60 and it really was worth it. As I have mentioned at the start of this review, the 3330 seems to have been taken out of most stores, the only place I?ve seen it recently is at my local Currys branch and Carphone Warehou
se told me it had be discontinued, so you may have a bit of a search on your hands. I estimate the price in stores to be around £70 these days.


If you look after your battery, i.e. only charging when its nearly run out, you'll get excellent life out of the basic battery as it can last for over a week, although this i dependant on how many calls you make from and to it. Dont bother with the longer life battery unless you really really need it.


Overall, this is the best phone I?ve ever had the pleasure of using, it?s a no-frills mobile that gets the job done and gets it done well, its packed with features and has a selection of cool games that?ll keep you occupied while you wait for the bus. It?s easily customisable to your tastes with X-Press On covers, downloadable ring tones and operator logos. Its easily at home in the hands of a teenager with its easy to use menus but wouldn?t look out of place in the briefcase of a London Yuppie who would benefit from the feature hidden beneath that easy to use menu.


Go on, buy it!

Summary: