Gizmo packed at a price (Nokia 7650)

Member Name: IainMc

Product:	Nokia 7650
Date:	26/11/02 (1859 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great fun, great design, feature packed

Disadvantages: large size, large price

By now everyone should have seen the 7650. It?s the new nokia phone with the digital camera and the media messaging that is being heavily advertised, but is it any good and more importantly is it worth the heavy price? (About £200 on contract).
O2 last month chose me to participate in some market research by giving 5 friends and me these phones for free so that they could get their hands on my opinion and judge for themselves and here it is.
The phone itself is larger than any of the latest phone and is about the size of the Nokia 3210, although less heavy. At first going from an 8310 to a 7650 it seems heavy but after a couple of weeks of use it just seems the same. The size is understandable when you have a glance through the phone?s menu and have a look at the features. Firstly it has a very well lit, colour screen that is around 50% larger than other mobile phone screens then there is a hidden keypad, which slides out when needed and lastly on the reverse, covered by the keypad is a digital camera. To navigate through the menu?s there?s a clever little joystick under the screen that saves you having to take out the keypad most of the time too. Overall the phone fits better into the hand than the smaller phones and is well-shaped and comfy to hold.
When you look through the menu you will find a large capacity contacts book with options of keeping several numbers and contact info about each person, allowing multiple fax, phone, mobile and email numbers as well as address?s, birthdays and notes. Then there?s a log option listing every use of the phone, detailing messages sent, received, calls missed, received and made. Next there?s the messages option, allowing you to send standard SMS messages, although easier to use and more organised than any other phone I?ve seen. In the messages option you could also send an email or send a MMS (multi media message) which is like a text message except with the option of attaching digital photo?s and record
ings too. This is being touted as the latest thing but its quite pricey as the cost of just one message is currently 40p. There is the camera option too; obviously, allowing digital photo?s to be taken. The quality of these are not great but they are fine if sending to another phone and you wont realise how much fun can be had until you start taking pictures with it. You can also rather handily take photo?s of people and then attach that picture to their name in the contact book so when they phone you, there picture flashes up on the screen, allowing you to literally see who is calling. The next option is the images section, where all the pictures are stored and organised. In here you can rename your images, delete them or organise them in folders, nothing too interesting there really. There?s a very useful calendar next which allows you to input anniversaries, birthdays, appointments, TV shows, university timetables, anything really, its something that I find very useful and have made a lot of use for. The calendar can be viewed in either a daily view, weekly view or a monthly view, depending on how you would like to organise your life. As standard now, it also has WAP access which is the best I?ve seen on a mobile phone, making use of the large colour screen and fast GPRS connection, with a favourite and bookmarks section to help with that. As standard on nokia it has a profiles option to allow you to quickly change the phones settings to whether you want it loud, silent or just vibrating when you get a call, whatever suits. Then a to do list to further organise your life that now revolves around your new phone.
To help with the phones settings you can change the connection settings in the connection folders, depending on whether you need to use the blue tooth, infrared or modem connection. Or you could mess around with the SIM card in the SIM folder or in the tools folder you can have a look and manage your JAVA applications that you probably wil
l never download. Of course with a nokia there?s games although very disappointing is the fact that there are only two. Very good games, snake EX and mixpix EX but I would have expected more although you can download them and with the free CD ROM that is included with the phone you can add another 4 if you have a infra red or blue tooth port on your PC. The snake EX game is particularly good fun if any of your friends have the phone as you can play a 2 player version over the infra red or blue tooth connections.
Then there?s an extra?s folder, which has currency converter, clock, calculator, voice recorder, ringtone composer and a note pad for things like that.
The ringtones are very impressive compared to standard phones, being polyphonic and for once they actually are recognisable as the tune that they should be rather than just annoying beeps, or you could record your own over the voice recorder and use that.
The memory of the phone is 3.6MB allowing plenty of stuff to be stored, and has been designed for lazy people like me too with voice dialling and a single button to turn on the speakerphone for hands free dialling.
So to round it up, it?s a phone aimed at people who like their gadgets, who like to have the very latest thing and I would have to say its very well designed, very useful but still cant justify that price tag! I imagine it will only take a year before they have reduced the size of this phone, improved the camera and added more features, and although its great fun to have, a lot of it is unnecessary.

Summary: