Nokia 8600 Luna review

Like the shiny silver Sirocco which it launched in 2005, Nokia's 8600 - dubbed the Luna - is a stylish and solid slider built to appeal to the fashion market. It's the natural heir to the Sirocco, a phone that will attract admiring looks as soon as you take it out of your pocket.

When the Luna's tinted glass case closed, you only see the navigation pad and five function keys, enough to call a contact or change menu settings. Slide it open and the keypad emerges from its smoked glass shell, lighting up in the process. When you close the phone, the keys stay lit for half a second or so before slowly dimming. The key light will then pulse every few seconds, making sure that the phone grabs everyone's attention.

The Luna certainly isn't a lightweight. The sliding mechanism feels spring -loaded and clicks into place with confidence, and the phone itself is the heaviest we've used in a long time - at 140 grams even heavier than its perceived chrome-hued rival, the LG Shine.

The interface is a stylised version of Nokia's Series 40, with the colourful menu icons replaced by grey buttons. There is a choice of four stylish themes that complement the Luna's casing and show off the stunning 16.7 million-colour, 240x320 screen.

Despite the weight, the Luna is a very small phone, similar in dimensions when closed to the Nokia 6300, although not as slim thanks to the slider casing. In fact, the comparison with the 6300 is very valid - under the stainless steel casing, the specs of the two are almost identical.

Both have 2-megapixel cameras, although the Luna's is protected by the slider. Neither have 3G capabilities but support quad-band GPRS and EDGE, and both come with the usual wealth of multimedia features.

Where the 8600 does let itself down is in its keypad. the keys are nice and large and respond with a positive click, but the 2mm lip of the slider makes it difficult to press the bottom two rows comfortably. The navigation pad suffers from the same problem - you really need to dig your nail in to press the Up key with any kind of confidence.

Another criticism of the Luna's glass casing is that it does tend to attract fingerprints like a gold bar at a burglars' convention, although the phone is supplied with a polishing cloth.

The other downside is the lack of memory card slot, meaning you're saddled with the mere 128MB of on-board memory, making the music player all but redundant.

We loved the 6300 for its neat size, stylish design, ease of use and talent for doing the basics brilliantly. The Luna is effectively the same phone dressed up for stylish pockets. At a premium of up to £440 (for a 12-month £20 contract with Orange, though it's free with a £45, 18-month Orange deal), you'll have to decide whether it's worth paying extra for the bundled leather pouch, neck strap, polishing cloth and of course the envious glances of other fashion phone fans.