NOKIA 6100 - Treat it very gently if you want it to survive! (Nokia 6100)

Member Name: Richada

Product:	Nokia 6100
Date:	17/10/05 (469 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tiny. Very Light. Good Battery Stamina.

Disadvantages: (For me!) Too Small. Flimsy Plastic Case. Very Expensive Repairs.

I am a Nokia fan.

For me a mobile phone is just that - a phone which I can carry about with me to speak to people whilst away from home or my desk at work.

A mobile phone (for me) on the other hand is NOT a Gameboy, a hi-fi music system, TV or video camera.

Grudgingly I can see a use for a digital still picture mode on a phone, after all you do not carry about a camera with you all the time, whereas most of us these days do not leave home without a mobile in our pocket or bag.

Over the years the texting feature has come in handy but on the whole I could even live without that.

What I do need is a compact phone that is built to withstand around three to four years use without being particularly cosseted. That is why I'm a Nokia fan.

My first Nokia was the brilliant (in its day) 5130, big by todays standards but it did exactly what I expected a phone to do and very little more. It is still in perfect working order today, seven years later, never cost me a penny in repairs, nor has the battery been replaced.

The main reason I replaced it with the still unique 7110, was that the newer phone had a slide cover over the keypad (I would never buy another phone with exposed buttons) and a much larger screen which I find extremely useful when mounted in the hands free kit in the car.

That phone is now almost five years old and again apart from having been replaced under the Orange Insurance scheme (it took a swim in a paddling pool one afternoon and, well, drowned!) I have been using it continiously, again without so much as replacing the battery.

That is how I expect my mobile to perform!

Here comes the subject of this review!

My wife, when she came to England four years ago, inherited my by then little used 5130. She liked the phone well enough but found it very heavy in her bag or worse spoiling the line of any jacket she put it in due to its size and weight.

Looking at Nokia's in shop windows and reading about them from time to time, she fancied the look of the tiny 6100. Not only of diminutive proportions, but also very light in weight - 77 grammes - we just weighed it!. The fact that it was available in a very attractive metallic blue and silver colour scheme probably aided her choice too.

Whilst my Orange phone is used for business and pleasure and is on contract, hers we left on the Orange Pay as You Go tariff. This left us looking around for a competitive price last year just as the 6100 was being replaced. In May of last year we were told all sorts of conflicting stories by various shops and suppliers as to this phone's availability, finally calling the Orange shop in Eastbourne who had no less than 18 in stock. He was selling it on Pay as You Go at £99.99, that including £10 call credits, a bargain for a phone which had cost twice as much a few months previously.

The Orange shop - we turned up at 5.25, as they were just closing - was extremely helpful, the manager even transferred the old phones memory for us. My wife walked out with the phone of her dreams and I thought that we had purchased a real bargain.

OK it had a colour screen and goodness knows how many other superfluous features that we are never going to use, but it did exactly fit my wife's criteria for the ideal mobile phone.

In terms of reception and speaker clarity, the 6100 is the best phone either of us has used. My wife even uses the hands free mode, although it does pick up a fair amount of background noise.

We also managed to download a polyphonic ring tone for it. As you have already gathered I am the old fashioned sort, I like my phone to ring and on my 7110, Nokia provided a perfectly acceptable ring ring tone.

However the 6100 arrived without such a tone, we went through all of this phones melodies and disliked all of them. My wife, being a fan of "Sex in the City", heard the theme tune on a moblie in a shop one evening and then found it advertised in a TV magazine. £2.50 later, we had it downloaded onto the phone thanks to the net, the phone even makes a fair fist of playing it too! Trouble is she's too amused listening to the tune to answer the phone quickly which can be a little frustrating sometimes!

The most impressive feature (others have commented on this too in their reviews) is the incredible battery life. Quite how Nokia have managed to pack such a powerful battery into this tiny casing I will never know. We hardly ever seem to charge it - maybe once every 10 days, it also charges remarkably quickly (in less than 2 hours) which is handy.

Very occasionally when we go out socially rather than carrying the much larger and heavier 7110 (or Green Godess as we call it - due to its simply beautiful case finish) I will leave mine at home and take the 6100.

It was on one of these occasions when disaster struck, or at least we think it was. I pulled the phone from the mobile pocket of my (very thick) leather jacket to see a strange site on the 6100's colour screen. A perfect pair of red "lips" had appeared seemingly overnight. Pressing the buttons lit the screen but the lips remained, you could not see any of the data displayed on the screen. The phone was still fully functional in every other way but obviously the screen would have to be replaced.

Being only two months old at the time, we thought that it would be a simple case of back to the Orange shop to get it exchanged for a new one.

No such luck!

They simply refused to have anything to do with it, claiming that the phone had been subjected to "impact damage". There was no mark on the casing and we know absolutely that the phone had not been dropped, knocked or in any other way "abused".

The best they could do was refer us to a Nokia repair agent, who very conveniently turned out to be located just around the corner from where we live.

He took one look at our 6100, laughed and said: "oh yes, the lips!" He went on to say that these tiny phones are very fragile, he had lots of colour screens in stock. His own 6100 was now on its third screen, he told us that he had a habit of leaning on bars and that the phone twisted in his pocket.

We were about to discover how a Nokia agent can afford a new Porsche 911!

That'll only take 5 minutes, pop a new screen in and Bob's your Uncle. Well, we had a fully functioning 6100, two months old and an impressive looking VAT receipt for £50.

Yes, £50, more than half the cost of the phone!

My liking for Nokia took a big hit that afternoon. If I finish up having to replace the 5 year old 7110, its replacement, if of similar dimensions to the 6100, will have to have an aluminium case or be of "flip phone" design which should prove to be more robust.

This is a very good mobile telephone, but after our experiece with it we would not reccomend it as a practical purchase, which is a pity because all it would need is a stronger, but then presumably heavier, case.

After all that my wife still loves her little Nokia 6100. Although unlike mine it has not gained a knick name!

Summary: A very good mobile phone - let down by flimsy build quality.

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