Nokia 6650 review

People who buy Nokia mobile phones have often done so for years. Much like a Volvo, fans know they are boxy, predictable, reliable and reassuringly familiar. So I suspect those fans may be rather surprised by this...

The '6650' shares only one immediately obvious touchstone with the multitudinous Finnish handsets that have gone before it, Nokia's penchant for naming by numbers. Aside from this the key characteristics are all rather alien.

For starters the 6650 is a clamshell, a format Nokia adopted kicking and screaming years after its rivals when market pressure forced it to expand beyond its cherished candybar. Then there's the keypad and few would disagree it could have come straight from a Motorola brainstorming session with its flat seamless keys and metallic tilt wheel. In fact, when the whole device is looked at from afar it could easily be mistaken as the latest in the Philips' Xenium line - and no designer should want that.

So the 6650 may initially struggle to make friends and influence Nokia diehards, but there is more to it than petty aesthetics - remember, this is a Nokia! What this means is we get a handset of substance. Its design may not win any beauty contests, but its build quality is excellent and it feels good in the hand (even at a hefty 99.7x47x16.2 mm and 112g). The QVGA 2.2in main screen may be small, but it is bright and vibrant while the secondary external LCD may sport just 128x160 pixels but with 256k colours it looks immaculate.

The plus points continue when you delve inside the 6650 too with 3.6Mbps HSDPA connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, FM tuner, an intuitive multimedia player that supports MP3, AAC, M4A and eAAC+ audio formats and even GPS which can utilise the company's excellent free Nokia Maps software for easy navigation. A ubiquitous microSD expansion card slot also means cheap and capacious memory expansion on tap.

Even the battery life brings a smile with Nokia quoting a potential six hours of talk time and 350 hours of standby. Now I haven't spoken for six hours on the 6650, but in my spell with the handset I have yet to charge it and feel confident those figures will stick.

So - perhaps to much surprise - the Nokia 6650 comes out smelling of roses, right? Wrong. Sadly things are rarely this simple in the convoluted world of Finnish mobile phones and while the 6650 does indeed do many things well it also has a number of potentially deal breaking flaws which tarnish its good work elsewhere.

Perhaps most obvious is the entry level two-megapixel camera with poor LED flash which is quite frankly useless for shooting anything other than the most simple shots in perfect conditions. They may look fine on the small screen, but viewed at full size they make a Monet painting look detailed. Then there's that age old, continually self inflicted injury that manufacturers insist on making time and time again: the absence of a 3.5mm headphone jack. Instead we have a rather less useful 2.5mm connector (was saving the extra 1mm really so important?) and worse still, no adaptor in the box.

For a handset with such impressive connectivity, the absence of WiFi is also something of a disappointment and even the most untouchable of Nokia staples, the interface, suffers from some overly small icons for key indicators such as battery life and signal strength which present a genuine challenge for even the most sharp-eyed owner in anything other than optimum light. The 6650's 30MB of native storage isn't going to thrill many either.

There are even some basic layout errors. The volume keys would be far better situated on the body of the 6650 rather than the flip itself because whenever you wish to make an adjustment while on a call, your ear is poked. Likewise the keypad rather ironically succumbs to an age-old Motorola problem of style over substance with its central buttons (2, 5, 8 and 0) unfeasibly larger than the rows of keys either side making dialling and general operation far less sure-fingered than it should be.

For those who can live without a decent camera, 3.5mm headphone jack, WiFi, sensibly placed volume controls and keypad spacing and a large screen with sensibly sized status icons you will find a lot to like about the 6650. Unfortunately, there will be many more who ultimately find one or more of these a deal breaker.