A smart-phone, a very smart phone indeed!
Written: Sep 23 '03 (Updated Dec 15 '03)
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Pros: Head-turning design, excellent reception and sound quality, tons of features.
Cons: Menu system can get confusing, phone has to be on for PDA, camera to work.
The Bottom Line: An excellent combination of phone, camera, camcorder and PDA. I can't see how you can go wrong especially with the price I paid for it.
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| balajithegreat's Full Review: Nokia 3650 |
Now, I will admit before you have to guess: in my heart of hearts, I am a gadget-freak. But I am also a very cheap gadget-freak and that is why I don't actually own too many gadgets. When I started shopping for a new cell-phone and plan, this phone immediately caught my eye and the fact that it is available for free after rebates at most retailers sealed the deal for me. The excellent reviews this product has received in this forum and others did not hurt either. I chose T-Mobile service with this phone because my brother is happy with his service with them (AT&T also supports this phone on their GSM network).
A few comments about the form factor: this is not the smallest or lightest phone on the market. But it looks bigger in most pictures than it actually is. Go to a retailer and hold one in your hand to judge for yourself your level of comfort with the size and weight of the phone. The phone seems to be well-balanced in terms of weight distribution and I have found it very easy to carry it in a belt clip and work on it with one hand.
Let us talk about the phone first: it is a GSM phone capable of operating on 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz bands, so it is a true world-phone. It has a large 2" diagonal screen which is quite bright and is clearly visible in all light conditions (no problems with direct sunlight). The keypad is backlit when you use the phone, so no problems using it at night. Nokia claims 200 hours of standby time and 4 hours of talk-time on one charge. I haven't tested any of this rigorously, but the numbers look believable to me based on my experience. You will be recharging your phone quite frequently initially when you get it because you will be playing with it quite a lot! The signal reception is very good even without the external antenna and the speaker and microphone are very clear and can be quite loud. The speakerphone is passable, but nothing to write home about. The phone has other features such as a voice recorder that enables you to record a phone conversation. The phone also maintains cumulative logs of minutes used, numbers called, calls received etc. The phone came with a handsfree headset and the sound quality of the speaker as well as the microphone on the headset was quite remarkable.
The phone was very easy to set up and I was making calls within 10 minutes of opening the box because the battery came fully charged, and the phone came already activated. All you have to do is insert the SIM card and battery into the phone and power it on (instructions for doing these is very clear and easy to understand). The phone works just like any other cell-phone, you just have to be careful if you are used to dialing by touch or with both hands because of the circular layout of the keys. But the tactile feel of the keys is very good and you are never in doubt as to whether you actually pressed a key or not.
Now to the other features: the phone is a PDA, camera, camcorder and phone wrapped in one surprisingly small package. The PDA runs on the Symbian OS and has a calendar, to-do list, notepad etc. The phone comes with a built-in dictionary of common words and has a feature called predictive text input that enables you to take notes or make calendar entries quite easily. The phone has a built-in alarm clock that will sound even if the phone is not on at the preset time.
The phone comes with 4MB of internal phone memory and a 16MB memory card that can be used to store applications, images etc. If you don't plan on using the phone as a gaming platform, this should be more than enough memory for all practical purposes.
The camera has a 640x480 resolution and is not in the same league as the best or even run-of-the-mill standalone digital cameras. But it is adequate for taking photographs that look good on the phone's screen. And it is certainly better than lugging a phone and a camera separately wherever you go!
The camcorder is not very hot either, but takes passable video. Unfortunately, while the camera pictures are in the industry standard JPG format, the video clips are in 3GP format and most PC's are not equipped to play the video clips.
One word of warning is that the form factor of the phone and the placement of the shutter button are not conducive to taking good pictures or video. It is very difficult to hold the phone absolutely steady when using the camera and I have sometimes had to retake a photograph a couple of times before being satisfied with the level of blurring in the picture because of shake.
The phone is web-enabled and if you subscribe to the right optional services, you can surf the web (it is not very fast, so it is better to restrict yourself to largely text-based sites), send and receive email, send and receive pictures and videos (to other phones or to email addresses) using a messaging service called MMS (multimedia messaging service) and also do the GSM-standard SMS (short messaging service). The phone also comes with realOne player pre-installed, so you can stream audio from internet radio stations directly over the phone, making the phone a sort of FM radio!
The phone comes with a 220 page manual. The manual is quite clear in most areas and you can also download a PDF version of it from the Nokia website. You can also go to www.nokiahowto.com and watch step-by-step animations of how to navigate the menu system on the phone to accomplish all sorts of things (such as sending a message, or changing the settings of the camera etc.). The best way to figure it all out is to play with it, but be sure not to change settings you don't understand. I shut myself out of messaging for a few hours because I made a change in the settings and did not remember it while I made several futile attempts to send a picture to a friend of mine. Luckily, I remembered the change and was able to reverse it, but otherwise, you have to call customer service.
And that brings me nicely to another "problem" with this phone: most of the customer service people at the phone company are not technical wizards and this phone requires some level of technical expertise to use correctly and also to resolve problems if and when you have them. T-Mobile has a technical support division and they seem to have access to the actual phone and can walk you through steps to correct problems etc., but it can be a long wait to talk to these people (I have not waited more than 5 minutes to get through to customer service, but have been on hold for upto 30 minutes after I have been transferred to technical support).
The phone is capable of talking to other devices using IR or bluetooth. I have tested both features between two identical phones and they work as advertised (the IR is a little less reliable than bluetooth). The phone comes with software that you put on your PC and you are supposed to be able to get the phone and PC talking so that you can synchronize your calendars, contact lists etc., but since my PC does not have bluetooth, I have not tried that yet. I have read several stories about people having lots of trouble getting USB bluetooth dongles working with this phone, so if you decide to try it, be prepared for some possible frustrations (try www.nokia3650.net for a forum that discusses these problems and possible solutions).
Obviously, I can't do all the features of the phone justice in this review. I will just mention that the phone is a full-featured PDA and you can even find lots of 3rd party software that you can load onto the phone to make it more useful. The fact that the manual is 220 pages long must give you a hint about the capabilities of the phone.
A few words of warning though: the phone is a computer and runs on an operating system. It is reputed to be a very stable operating system, but I have heard of people whose phones have crashed because of the applications or combinations of applications they loaded onto it. And some of these crashes have been hard enough to get Nokia service centers involved. So, think carefully about the utility of an application before loading it onto your phone.
Also, the phone can run several applications at once and I think it is easy to leave applications running in the background without your knowledge. For example, you pull up the contacts to make a call and when you end the call, the contact application is still open on the phone. If you leave a sufficient number of applications open, you will run into memory problems. So, you have to either remember what you loaded and then close them out or you have to periodically check the list of open applications and close what you don't need.
One major gripe I do have with this phone is that Nokia did not have the brains to cleanly separate the PDA and other functionality from the actual phone. To use any of the features of the phone (except the alarm), you have to turn the phone on. Which means you can't use any of the features of the PDA or camera or camcorder on a flight or in any other situation where a cell-phone is not permitted to be switched on. I think it is stupid of Nokia to have overlooked something this basic, but hopefully they will get it corrected in the next version.
I wanted to update the review to include details of my use of the PC software that comes with the phone the "3650 PC Suite". I recently got a bluetooth dongle for my PC and the connection with the phone was actually remarkably straightforward and simple. However, I was very disappointed with the software. It enables you to make backups of all the data on your phone and also synchronize your contacts and calendar with those on your PC. However, there are a couple of catches to the process: first of all, the PC suite by itself has no contacts or calendar unlike the PC software that comes with a Palm organizer for example. It just has the ability to store and retrieve your calendar and contact information from third party software like Lotus Notes or MS outlook which you need to have installed on your PC already. When I backed up the contacts on my phone and my wife's phone to Outlook, all the contact information got duplicated in Outlook and the contact information now needs a major cleanup. Worse still, when I synchronized my phone a second time just for fun, all the contact information on my phone got duplicated because it imported all the contact information in Outlook into my phone. So, it is quite a mess I have to dig out of.
Second, when the PC suite backs up other files on your phone, such as photographs you have taken and so on, it puts them all in a proprietary format under some directory structures that is impossible to sort out. If you lose information from the phone, hopefully you will be able to restore it from this backup cache that has been created, but I hope I never have to test it out because I don't think you can do selective restores. Also, the photos did not have the JPG extension in this backup directory, so I could not browse them on the PC.
However, as a saving grace, the PC suite does have a simple file transfer utility that is like a simple FTP connection between the phone and your PC. I was able to transfer all the photos on my phone to the directory on my PC where I store all my digital photos and this time, they retained their JPG extension and I could browse them on the PC.
Bottomline about the PC Suite: It seems to be a messy program that is very short on features. If you are having trouble getting it to work with your phone, you are not missing much.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 0.00
Recommended for: World Travelers - Works Anywhere and Everywhere!
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Epinions.com ID:
balajithegreat
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Reviews written: 32
Trusted by: 2 members
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