Nice phone, shame about the case (Nokia 5100)

Member Name: The Harmonizer

Product:	Nokia 5100
Date:	07/04/04 (682 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of features, Shock and Waterproof, Easy to use

Disadvantages: The case

06/08/04 *I have added some comments to the end of this review.

I have been using the Nokia 5100 for a year now so I think I am able to give a fair opinion of it. I did not get it because I particularly liked it but because it was on a special deal with Singlepoint4u. I got 500 off peak minutes per month (not cross network) and 50 free texts for £21 per month.

The first thing I had to do when I got the phone (of course) was to install the battery and sim card. This is not as easy as on some phones because the plastic casing can be difficult to remove. Inside there is a flap that you need to lift up so that you can insert the battery. These precautions have been taken so that the phone can be as waterproof and shock proof as possible. More about the case later.

The phone has a full colour screen, polyphonic ring tones and wallpaper.

The phone has a lot of features which in my opinion make it good value for money and I will cover them in detail as follows:-

Storing names and numbers

The phone allows you to store several numbers for each person, for example you can have a home, mobile and business number you can also store their email address and home address. In addition to this each person can be placed in a caller group, so you can have a group for friends and another for businesses etc. There are various options that apply to ?caller groups? and these will be mentioned later.

Messaging

You can send two main types of message, text and multimedia, the latter allows you to send emails and attach pictures. The inbox and sent items can store up to 50 messages each and you can also have additional folders if you want to. Messages can be deleted one by one or a whole folder can be deleted. I ended up transferring special messages to a separate folder and then deleting the rest in one go. You can use the now obligatory T9 predictive text or, unlike some other makes of phone you can turn it off permanen
tly. One thing that I found to be a problem was that you press the star k
ey to change the spelling of a word or hold the star key down for punctuation, this some times resulted in the word being changed if I pressed the button too many times by mistake. You can easily add words to the dictionary and have predictive text in other languages (useful if you want to text your French pen pal!)

Profiles

You can choose from 5 profiles and these can be personalized and renamed in any way you want. The options are ?Incoming call alert?, ?Ring tone?, ?Ringing volume?, ?Vibrating alert?, ?Light alert?, ?Message alert?, ?Keypad Tones?, ?Warning Tones? and ?Alert for?. This last option relates to caller groups and you can set it so that, for example the phone will only ring for friends and family and not when your bank manager calls! One feature I found very helpful was that the profiles can be timed. This means that, for example, you can set the phone to be silent while you are at work to return to normal when you go home at 5 o?clock.

Radio

The phone includes a stereo FM radio with stereo headset that I found to be very good. You can store up to 9 channels and these can be changed either from the headset or the phone. It would have been useful to have had a volume control on the headset but you can have everything. You can have radio playing through the phone?s speaker but you still need to connect the headphones as they act as the aerial. One thing I found annoying is that you can?t do anything with the radio (such as checking what frequencies you have stored) without having the headphones connected. The headphones also work as a hands free kit and if the phone rings or you have a message the radio cuts out.

Gallery

This is where your wallpaper and ring tones are stored. It?s nice to have a place to store these but it can be a bit irritating when you need to change one of these and have to go to the gallery rather than
just selecting them from a list.

Organiser

This has a calen
dar and ?to do? list. The calendar allows you to select various types of appointment and reminders. I use it mainly to remind me of hospital appointments etc. and it does come in handy. It is fairly obvious what the ?to do? list does and you can mark your items low, medium and high priority.

Games

The phone accepts Java games in colour and has three games built in, ?bounce?, ?skydiver? and ?triple pop?. For some reason Vodafone doesn?t support games on this phone but you can download them from Nokia and all the other numerous companies that advertise in the papers and on the net.

Applications

The phone comes with a conversion program but other applications can be downloaded.





Extras

The following extras are included, calculator, stop watch, calorie counter (estimates the calories used for a particular activity), sound meter, and thermometer. All of them seem to work OK but the thermometer becomes inaccurate as soon as you pick the phone up as it reacts to your body temperature.

Connectivity

The phone includes infrared so that you should be able to communicate between two phones but I haven?t had this working yet. You can also have an ?always on? GPRS connection which means that you can connect to WAP without having to dial up. As GPRS only charges for what you download this is quite useful.

Services

This is for WAP. You can choose your homepage, connection options, bookmarks etc. WAP is in colour and you can also see some graphics. I have tended to stick with Vodafone and found this very good.


Other points

I haven?t mentioned the navigation keys. These are underneath the screen in the centre. In standby mode they allow direct access to writing a message, the calendar, the phone book and the light. I also haven?t mentioned the light, this is a built in tor
ch and can be useful if you?re trying to open your front door at night etc.

I said earlier that I would come back to the subject of the case and in my opinion this is the only week point of the phone. The idea of the case is to protect the phone if it is dropped or gets wet and it certainly works well from that point of view, but the problem is that the rubber parts come away from the case and also tear very easily. In addition to this the plastic parts inside the keypad become bent so that the keys won?t work properly and I did find at one point that I had to remove the case before I could switch the phone on and off, as the button simply would not work. I am on my third case in just over a year and don?t think that?s a good thing. Maybe I have just been unlucky.

Summary

Overall I think this phone is excellent and has some very good features it?s just the case that lets it down.

Added 06/08/04

I have read a lot of good things about this phone since writing my review but I stick to my opinion. The case broke again and so I put on a new one and swapped it for my step-son's Nokia 3330. The first thing he did was to break the case trying to open it!!!!!

Summary: