To upgrade or not to upgrade? (Nokia 8210)

Member Name: skaterfreak

Product:	Nokia 8210
Date:	22/01/02 (251 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Size, Covers available, Weight- very light

Disadvantages: Size, Voice Activated Dialing

I bought the Nokia 8210 to upgrade my phone from a Nokia 5110.
The first problem I encountered with the phone were the services which were, or should I say weren't available on my network. My Nokia 8210 is on Pay As You Go One-2-One and I found that the section ''Services'' on the phone was useless to me as my network doesn't support them.
The second problem was the life of the battery my 5110 used to last me 4 - 5 days without needing to be charged, whereas I find the Nokia 8210 needs to be charged every 2 days even if you don't use it al that much, this doesn't particualrly bother me but if you accidently forget to charge it then your in trouble.
The amount of space on the sim card for phone numbers is very handy, with having 250 spaces compared to 99 on the old Nokia 5110 it is obviously very useful.
The phone also comes with an infra red option, this allows you to connect your phone to another 8210 to play Snake as a 2 player game, to share phone numbers and other data on your phone. You can also link it up to an infra red printer to print out text msgs, phone numbers and other such data, you can also link it up to a palmtop, but if you have non of these other items then the infra-red is obviously just another useless item on the phone.
The predictive text messaging system can be quite useful and easy to use to write a text message, although a lot of words which are often used are not in the dictionary or if they are the predictive text messaging system brings up the most, unused word out of the list!
The voice activated dialiing is totaly useless!!! It wont accept short names i.e. sam, because it can't recognise it because the name is too short. For the voice activated dialing to work you would have to be in a sound proof room and use the exact same voice tone, which is often impossible. I also often get an error when trying to set it up which can be very frustrating.
The size of the phone can al
so cause problems as it is very small and easy to lose and the keys can often be quite fiddly. I would still upgrade to the Nokia 8210, after using a Nokia 5510 for two years the size of the 8210 is a lot better and the new functions available which weren't on the Nokia 5110 (such as predictive txt msging) is rather useful.

Summary: