| Product: |
Nokia 3510 |
| Date: |
29/12/03 (428 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Modern design and good weight, Accessories readily available, Everyone knows how to use it, and price depreciation is low
Disadvantages: Green backlight looks very old-fashioned, Styling rather too outrageous, Far too big and low on features for the price
Sometimes, I find it hard to get enthusiastic when friends get new mobile phones. This is particularly the case when I have owned one of the models in question, and found it to be below average in key areas, and when the phone is a Nokia. Every year, the model range of this Finnish manufacturer gets more and more complex, and I get more and more confused. Despite this, the phones attract a massive market share, and one only has to look at network websites, such as O2 and Orange, to find that the maker which has the largest number of handsets available is, of course, Nokia. It always intrigues me that, unlike Ford and Vauxhall, the two best-selling makes of car in Britain, Nokia always commands a higher price for its handsets than everyone else. Rich or poor alike, it seems to make no difference, Nokia has something to suit everyone, including my mother, who has loved her 8310. The difference is, however, that more and more of my friends have now started to leave behind their Nokias, and choose something different. My mother now hankers after a new Samsung, and another friend has abandoned his 8310 in lieu of a T100 from the aforementioned Korean manufacturer, and yet another has just got a new Sony Ericsson T610 after owning an 8210 and 5210 in succession. My sister abandoned her beloved 3330 this year to upgrade to a Sagem MYX-5, which offered more for her than the other free upgrade on her contract, the ubiquitous 3510i, and my housemate sold his 7110 in favour of a new Sagem MYG-5. Is it just that Nokias have been the same for so long that people are, dare I say it, bored of having the same thing for so long? Or is it just that other makers have moved the game ahead, and Nokia is struggling to keep up in a cost-effective fashion? One way to find out is to own one of the handsets in parallel with those of other makers and do a direct comparison of what one can obtain for the same sort of money. I was able to do this when I needed to buy a Nokia for a friend, as he
simply cannot use any other phone menu system, and I held onto my own Siemens C55. Let us start from the beginning.
The 3510 was obtained on Ebay for 52.50 pounds, which is significantly more than I paid for my C55. This particular handset came neither with a box nor a manual, and had a slightly tired appearance about it, not helped by being clothed in quite the ugliest mobile phone cover I have ever seen, the bright red Nokia 3510 gaming cover. Of course, I had to get this replaced right away before giving it to my friend! The C55 was absolutely new, and was a comparative bargain at 46 pounds. Since its ups and downs are more fully discussed in my own review of this particular model, I keep the comparison to a minimum, but suffice it to say that I was distinctly unimpressed with the phone even before I had switched it on. No matter, however, since it was to be sold on. Upon pressing the stiff lime-green power button, I was greeted with the standard type of green display that has been present in Nokias, and many other phones, for a number of years. At the time, I was using my old Siemens MT50, which has a blue backlight, and it certainly took me back! Things were, however, to get better.
The weight of the 3510 is commendable for what is ostensibly a large phone (it is actually bigger than the 3310), and this is partly helped by the standard lithium-ion battery. Although this appears to be the same unit fitted to the 3410, I could not make any kind of dent in it after a full charge, despite half an hour of playing with the games and ringtones, so Nokia must have made a perfectly reasonable decision to stick with the old-style battery. This is even more impressive since the 3510 has seven charging and signal bars, whereas the 3310, 3310 and 3410 have only four, so a drop in battery level would be a lot more noticeable. I did not get the chance to test the 3510 in particularly poor signal areas for the particular network with which I was using it at
the time (Orange France), but I would imagine that it would be perfectly acceptable, due to the not inconsiderable overall size of the handset, and therefore the aerial, and also the fact that Nokias generally do have good, steady reception. Now that the basic practical specifications of the phone have been taken as read, I can now move onto the more interesting features of the 3510.
As is necessary in a modern phone these days, Nokia have considered the needs of those who have large address books and who need to easily handle multiple contacts. The C55 can only store one number under a phone book entry, which is fine for people like me who only ever use SIM card storage, as I change phones so often, but for the rest of the world who tend to have one phone which they keep for at least 12 months, this could be an issue. I believe that it is possible to store up to five different numbers under a single contact name, and this, coupled with a huge phone memory, and the ability to copy a whole list between the SIM card and the phone effortlessly, makes this an excellent choice for those with friends who keep changing their phone numbers. Text messaging is not bad, either, although with the gaming cover that I was using, it was a little difficult to get used to. Nokia still deposit the text messages received in any old order, as opposed to the more logical chronological order used in other phones, but the ability to store messages on the phone and the SIM card is a real plus from the old 3310 days when inbox deletion was a twice-daily task. I still have an issue with the prepensity to present the user with the last text message that he or she composed upon choosing the 'Compose New Message' option, which in my mind makes no sense, as it requires unnecessary text deletion, but with a character counter, and the ability to send and receive long text messages, there is no reason why the 3510 should not, with a standard keypad, be every bit as good for text me
ssaging as the 3410. It was this phone that I claimed was the fastest I have ever texted on, and I still stand by this claim today. Once I had worked out the unfamiliar (to me)punctuation layout and turned off predictive text, I had no further trouble. But such a phone needs to be able to do more than text messaging and basic contact management to merit its price, and the 3510 fortunately does have more tricks up its sleeve.
Polyphonic ringtones was one of the major attractions of this phone when it was released in the middle of 2002, and it must be said that, although the polyphonic version of the Nokia Tune is just as irritating as the standard one, it is quite a plus to find this on such a phone. Everywhere I go in Britain, I hear one of the standard 40 Nokia ringtones blurting out at me, and it does start to annoy me sometimes. Even if the selection is neither as adventurous as my Sagem MYX-6 or as cultured as the Siemens C55, it is refreshing to hear something new eminating from a machine bearing the Nokia badge. The ability to also set whichever of the ringtones one desires to be the text message alert is also a great plus, since the standard polyphonic one is almost the same as the boring old monophonic one. Something which has been missed out is the ability to change the ringtone on the alarm clock. I have to admit that I am not a big fan of the noise that this phone makes when I need to wake up, and to have no way of changing it does not especially endear the phone to me at 7am!
The other organiser features, such as the stopwatch and the personal organiser, are just as good as anything that I have experienced with my MYX-6, so a more heartfely recommendation is hard to obtain. The games are also rather good on the phone, although like many other 3510 users, I would like to know what happened to Snake II/III. Kart Racing is good fun, although I feel that Java from the 3410 would have been better used in this phone, due to its larger memory,
and the ability to add that terrible games cover! Ensure that the game music is turned off, however, since when it goes on an endless loop, it is just as annoying as an airport continuous reel! The 3510 also contains the ability to receive up to three MMS messages, and GPRS for fast Internet access, but I believe that the MMS was tacked on as an afterthought in order to differentiate this phone from the 3410, as it is pretty much useless since the phone only has a monochrome display. I did not test the Internet browser on the phone, but I would imagine it works just as well as always.
The usual array of downloadable ringtones, screensavers and logos is available for the 3510, as for any modern Nokia, but the digital clock still rules supreme as a screensaver for me and many others. Why not add a feature which enables one to see if there is reception at the same time, as on Siemens phones? This would be even better. There are also changeable covers, which can soften the blow somewhat of the terrible standard appearance of the phone. The lime-green power button (far too stiff as is usual for Nokias), transparent sides and a bright blue back cover matched with a dark blue front cover is just too much. The silver cover I managed to find on Ebay complemented the phone nicely, once I had worked out how to fit it, strangely more difficult than the 3410, but those glowing sides really do put me off. The build quality is up-to-scratch, however, and the little Made in Germany sticker really did give me additional reassurance of quality. This phone would certainly take the knocks that its target audience of young people might subject it to.
The 3510 is different from previous Nokia models. There are a good number of additional features in this handset over the 3310 and 3410, for example, but I cannot help thinking that not enough has been changed, and the 3510 was brought out too quickly in order to fill a gap between the low-end 3410 and the much higher spe
cification 3510i, which was still under development when this pair came out, so is a little incomplete. The size may put some people off, but when I compared the menu icons of this phone and the old 5110 and found them to be identical, I knew that I was not going to get on with it. At a far higher price than the C55, I can only really see that those with complicated social lives, thus requiring more than one number in a phone book entry, would really benefit from this phone. Otherwise, why not consider a different make next time?
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