Nokia wins hearts, minds with breakthrough mobile

Had to laugh

All the way through I went, at last a replacement for the 6310i...bugger, no such luck !

Best phone they ever made.

cut it

You're just bitter you got no E51 to review.

So what about the Motorola F3

Those Nokias were good but what about the F3? It seems to do all that the Nokia did way back then but in an even more retro styleee.

U HV 2 SHOUT 2 TXT!

I know how you feel..

For all I love the nifty features on my 6100 I still miss the robust, bulletproof simplicity and ease of use of my old 7110 for business use.

As a phone or as a media player, or as a camera or as a handheld games console or a mobile communications platform the 6100 is 'ok' at best but the 7110 was an awesome phone.

All convergence means is that we can carry about a lot more mediocre tools more easily. Bugger that. Give me the best tools for the job and I won't mind carrying them because I'll only carry them when I actually NEED them. How often is a picture taken on a mobile-phone actually worth anything to anyone over the age of 14 anyway?

Bring back awesome phones and the Unix philosophy of "one job - one tool" - just make the tools able to talk to each other (via bluetooth is fine) and I'm happy.

I have two, they are great phones

Yes, I have two, one on contract and one bought from e-bay as a spare, running on payg as a backup on a different network.

They do everything I need - mobile voice/txt, bluetooth, link to PC, calendar, alarm clock, e-mail.

Battery lasts 10 days and I can swap over the charged spare battery in about three seconds, if I've been careless.

Vodaphone keep telling me that I can have a free upgrade, I keep telling them 'no thanks'.

I recently got a case kit from e-bay for £8 and now my silver one looks as good as new. If they reintroduced it I'm sure it would do well.

nice article

Yep, spotted this one, i like the "divergence" idea.

I just got mine refurbished by Selectric in Germany, good as new with new display, keyboard, case. its bizarre how many engineers carry one of these, professionals of all sorts actually.

never did understand why everyone ran away from this pinnacle... ?

Brilliant phone

I miss my 6310i - it really is the best phone that Nokia ever made. I succumbed to a newer phone in the end. After a lot of research I went for the 6300 and have therefore been reintroduced to the annoyance of having to keep an eye on the charge and make sure I have a charger in every car and one at work.

My 6310i would go all week without a charge sometimes.

Nearly

I would agree, except for one thing - there's one area of convergence that *does* make sense, to me, and that's music playing.

Yes, cell phones make mediocre music players. But this is outweighed, for me, by the convenience factor.

The major problem with carrying a cellphone and a separate music player is phone calls. When I'm using my music player (a super-old school Neuros) and carrying my cell and someone calls me, I have to dig out the Neuros, hit pause, take out my earphones, get out the phone, hit the answer button, have my conversation, end the call, put the phone away, put my earphones back in, and un-pause the Neuros.

Ew.

Using my cellphone (a recently acquired Nokia 6300) as a music player, yes it carries a lot fewer songs and the interface is not as good, but when someone calls me, my music pauses, I talk, conversation ends, music resumes. Without me having to lift a finger. (Using a 2.5-3.5mm adapter with mic and my earphones plugged into that).

Win!

Of course, if someone would actually finally *implement* a Bluetooth headset, dedicated phone, and music player that all worked together nicely so I could do the same thing with separate boxes, fine. But then you have to deal with all the finicky stuff associated with Bluetooth headsets, and the crappy audio quality they generally have (compared to my Etymotics canalphones).

So, yeah, I'll suffer the crappy battery life of the 6300 for this convenience. To me it's definitely worth it.

I'd rather have my old 6680

than the N73 I have now. If the camera was better I'd use it instead. Waiting for the N82 to replace the 73 as I don't like sliders and the N95 wouldn't last 5 minutes in my pockets with the amount of abuse I give to my phones. The 6680 was a bit clunky but very robust. Dropped a thousand times and never had a problem with it. Dropped the 73 on day 2 and needed a new screen.

oh hell

i'm gutted now. i've just sold my 6310 to a mate for a fiver. yeah, really!

if i'd shown her this article first, i probably coulda got £20 for it.

As the proud user of an 8910...

...all I can say is that I heartily agree. the 8910, of course, is a 6310 in a flash titanium slidey case. I'll replace my pocket pal with an iPhone as soon as the price comes down to a reasonable level.

I still have mine! :-)

I promised myself (and the guy responsible for buying cell phones at my company) that I would stay with the 6310i until I could have a model which was just as good a phone, but which also included a camera good enough that I didn't need to drag my big Olympus Z8080 around everywhere.

My current 6310i is the fourth I've had, I've had to replace them (with phones other people have traded in) as the display glass got too scratched to read easily, but they still work as backups of course. The last time (this spring), one of the phone guys called me and said that he'd found a brand-new box in the bottom of a cupboard!

:-)

Terje

Nokia 6210i

This IS the best phone - ever for all the reasons outlined in the article. I had a 6210 bet damaged the display (line of broken pixels) and then bought the 6310i - superb for ease of use, reception etc.

My convergence? A Psion 5MX running Phoneman to integrate contacts, adding appt to the phone memory and as a modem for the 5MX. For laptop covergence - swap for Psion netBook running the same. Now there's two long (battery) lived packages esp with a netBook Pro battery (16hrs) and a spare Pro battery as well..

Planned obsolescence

"...they just keep going..."

And there is the nail, well and truly hammered on the head.

Where is the profit in selling people a phone that will last for a lifetime? How can carriers tempt people away from their competition if they aren't supplied with a constant stream of new handsets with more bells and whistles?

Having said that, the battery life, durability and navigation on my Sony Ericsson thing are, to my mind, comparable to the 6310i, and it adds a colour screen that I've never had any trouble using, a camera, storage slot, music player and 3G to the list of features. I shall be hanging on to this one.

It Does What It Says On The Box

..I use one and have 2 spare sitting in the draw waiting for my current one to die (which by the way it refuses to do) I do not want a portable media centre, do not want menue's and sub menue's and sub sub menue's. Go 6310i!!!

Hey, Nokia! Are you listening?

Wakey, wakey, Nokia! **Please understand** There'a a big market for phones that obey the KISS principle.

Other designers of the world, listen up too! It's not just phones that should be simple: e.g. a microwave oven just needs two knobs "how hot?", "how long?" but my Dad's old one wouldn't work until he set the clock! WTF? My TV remote control had 58 buttons, and even had the fact proudly printed on it! WTF*WTF!

There is money in simplicity. Is that so hard to understand?

those were the days

Mine eventually died, I think the mic went, and I did think it could have done with a camera, but that alone would never have made me move on. I loved it. My car died completely leaving a festival, half way along a very long single track through a forest, surely full of wolves, around 1am. My phone had juice, and I live to tell the tale. That can't be taken for granted anymore.

My sodding K610i seeems best of the current bunch but I genuinely see it as a liability. Time away from plug sockets and so on must be the ultimate point of a mobile device - I even suffered misdirected sony drm software to get their 50 hour playback (well nearly) mp3 player for that very reason. It came on holiday for two week lately and just worked.

But equally, thinking about reliability, I wouldn't pay 140 quid for a refurb or be happy with an ebay buy - too much of a lucky dip. A mate's new basic nokia looked quick to use again, and I think the upcoming N82 has a bigger battery in it, and it's the right shape...

Quit the whining and get an E51

I have seen the E51 "in the flesh". In fact I own one. You have to see it to believe it. Honestly, it's THE PHONE. It's slick, it's slim, it prances & dances. Has everything. Does everything. Syncs everything. It looks and feels like a true quality item, and it's a breeze to use. Everything looks and works smart & easy, and it is the fastest Symbian device I have seen to date. I was rarely this exited about a new phone, and never did I dream I could be about a Nokia.

The E51 has the following issues:

1. It's not an iPhone, so if flicking though a gazillion photos on a giant screen is your thing, go elsewhere.

2. It's no substitute for your DSLR. The camera is not the best. It's there though and it works.

3. The side- & top-buttons are pretty hard to press

Yes, that's all. Oh, wait: I had to consult the manual in order to find out how to display the MAC address. But since that is the only thing I had to look up in the manual, I'll let that pass.

I am a bit bewildered that El Reg did not review the E51 yet. Only time will tell whether it truly is as reliable as the 6310i, but it is clearly Nokia's best effort up to date.

Oops - N90 was a breakthrough

But N95 is best. 640x480 pixel video at 30 frames per second. Bringing video production to the masses.

Phones are about communication. And that means more than chatting - it means communicating your experiences. And video is the most powerful way to do this.

Testiment to the brand...

Mine's been dropped in puddles, kicked down the street, thrown at the wall in a tantrum, and taken into nighclubs and left on tables. I still have it, it still works, and it's never been stolen.

Bluetooth, SMS, PHENOMENAL battery life; If I ever get the option of a work mobile phone, i'm telling them to just get the sim card and a headset. I'll use this until it dies. Which it never will!

E65? E51? avoid S60, old 6310i was best

I still have my 6310i which I bought 2nd had at 6 months old, and the battery life is still excellent - as a light user I charge it once a week - I could leave it longer but then I'd forget, so it was better to get into the habit of charging it at the weekend.

To replace it I bought the E65 - having rejected the N95 as too big, overfeatured - which seemed to be a good idea: quad band GSM, 3G, bluetooth & wifi (for VOIP). I had to disable 3G to get the battery life up, and if I leave WiFi on for voip the battery dies within 36 hours. Suddenly I've *had* to buy a car charger and *had* to leave my spare Nokia charger at work, and even keep my 6310i around for emergencies.

I don't think S60 is all that fantastic in itself, the suite of 3rd party apps has some use, and the camera is nice for tagging contacts with a face... but as a *phone*, the 6310i wins over the E65 and (having played extensively) the N95.

I think if I hadn't bought the E65, I'd be happy with my Nokia Tablet and the 6310i. If Nokia did remake the 6310i++ and added 3G but kept the same simple system software, kept or improved on the battery life, it'd be a winner!

This is what I want, a phone and data gateway, no PIM, no games, no bling. If you want a the big screen experience with GPS, get a Palm or Zaurus or Nokia Tablet or Kohjinsha/MiniVYE or Fujitsu U810/U1010...