Nokia 3250

3250 Nokia picture The Nokia 3250 smartphone is an excellent music player phone. It features a unique twisting design that's intended to make the music player functions of the device easy to access. Nokia's 3250 is a handset with a twist. Quite literally -- its key feature is that you can twist the number pad section through a total of 270 degrees in 90 degree bursts, providing you with controls for both music playing and the built-in camera. Only the number pad is twisted in this way. Beneath the large 176 x 208 px screen sits a mini joystick, call and end buttons, two softmenu keys, Nokia's menu key, and the clear and edit keys. Nokia 3250 Themes Free Nokia Themes download Nokia 3250 Software Free Nokia Software download Nokia 3250 Games Free Nokia Games download When you twist the number pad through 180 degrees you get music control buttons on the front of the casing, and the built-in music player kicks in automatically. Choose 90 degrees and the flashless camera, which sits on the bottom right edge when you have the 3250 in ordinary candybar configuration, is now facing outwards. Twist back the other way and the lens is facing you. Either way, the camera software starts to run and the 3250's screen turns into a viewfinder presenting a shot preview in landscape format. When in candybar mode the 3250 is a somewhat stubby handset, slightly fat at 20mm for its 104 by 50 mm height and width. This is not a huge issue, though, and the 115g of weight shouldn't cause too many pocket problems. The sides are relatively free of buttons and connectors, which makes it annoying that the headset connector is on the right side. The connector is protected by a rubber cover you'll probably lose immediately as it pulls right off. The Nokia 3250 is a tri-band handset, and it runs on the third edition of Symbian Series 60. That means you get a whole host of software goodies built in, including calendar and contacts software that will synchronise with Microsoft Outlook on your PC, and the desktop PC Suite software you need to make that happen. You also get the USB cable you'll need to make a wired connection. With the camera and music playback being so much to the fore with the 3250, memory is important. It was something of a disappointment to learn that there's just 10MB built in. That's not enough for more than a couple of MP3s. The memory expansion format is microSD, and Nokia provides a 128 MB card that you can populate with tunes. The slot has a rubber cover that needs to be prised open before you use a fingernail to push cards in and extract them. It's all very fiddly. The camera, for all its 2 megapixels of still resolution, is limited in many respects. There's no flash, and if you work with the twisting section out it's difficult to reach the two softkeys that you'll need to use to change settings. On the other hand, having the music playback buttons now doubling for zoom and shooting is rather neat. Audio quality is fine. Music playback quality was superb through the speaker and our own headphones, less good through Nokia's. We felt the equaliser didn't have a huge effect on the quality of what we listened to, which is a missed opportunity. The 3250 absolutely shines when it comes to battery life. Overall this is an excellent combined phone & music player, with plenty of extra features too. A good alternative to the Walkman phones from Sony Ericsson, and a highly recommended phone. Nokia 3250 include: Smartphone (Series60 Symbian operating system) 2 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom Video camera (176x144 pixels, 15 frames per second, up to 1 hour recording) Display: TFT, 262,144 colours, 176 x 208 pixels Music player Visual Radio Ringtones: 64-voice polyphonic / MP3 ringtones Ringtone composer Voice Features: Enhanced voice dialing, Voice commands, Voice recording, Integrated handsfree speaker Messaging: SMS, MMS, email (SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 protocols) Applications: File manager, Organiser, Games, Downloadable Symbian and Java applications Memory: 10 Mbytes plus microSD card (expandable to 1 Gbyte) Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB 2.0 Advanced web browser WAP 2.0, GPRS class 10, EDGE class 10 - download up to 236,8 kbit/s Vibration alert Triband Size: 104 x 50 x 20 mm Weight: 130g Talktime: 3 hours Battery standby: 245 hours Music playback: 10 hours

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