I waited a month to get mine, four weeks! I used to have a Panasonic G520 - which was fine for all I needed; it lasted little over a year (ironically, just as the waranty ran out) and served me well.

I wanted to upgrade my phone (now it had flunked) and I wanted it to have two specific features that I had on my old phone, these were the vibrate, and the delivery reports for text messages.

I was going to buy a 3210, but they don't vibrate, so I set my heart on a 3310, and with some cash left over from Christmas, I set out to buy one.

I'll briefly mention networks here, mine's an Orange, my old one as Vodafone, I would have stayed with Vodafone, only, you can't get 3310s on Pay As You Talk Vodafone, and if I buy a £50 top-up card for my Orange phone, my text messages (which is what I used my old phone for the most) and my calls are surprisingly cheaper.

I've seen something said about the batteries on these phones on dooyoo, someone was whinging that the battery that is used suffers from 'memory effect'. This basically means that if the battery is not completely discharged before each charging, it will not ever regain its full capacity and will eventually be useless.

I did a bit of research and have found more than 10 sources claiming that this is incorrect, apparently NiCd (Nickel Cadmium) batteries suffer from this, but newer are the NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) - these are lighter and have more capacity. I've only just discovered that, although I thought NiMH batteries didn't suffer from memory effect, it's not totally gone, but it's gone more than in NiCd.

It was, however, correctly stated that perhaps Nokia should have used a LiIon (Lithium Ion) battery, which is much lighter and has a much better performance, but they are quite expensive. (More on battery types in my Buyers Guide).

Anyway, enough of the specifications, you can read about those anywhere, let me tell you what the phone is like to USE!

I’ve seen this done in this category before as well, but, I think it’s a good way of approaching the problem of describing the phone, so I’ll do it anyway. I’ll go through each of the menus and their features.

Phonebook

The usual, Search, Add, Erase, Edit, Assign tone, Send b’card, Options, Speed dials, Voice tags.

Assign tone allows you to specify a specific ring tone for each person in your phone book. Send b’card lets you send people’s names / numbers to other people with the same sort of phone. Speed dials set up the 2-9 keys with numbers that you can call just by holding down that key and voice tags are obviously where you configure your voice dialling. Options just have how you want your numbers displayed, and it tells you how many spaces you’ve used.

Messages
Obviously for SMS (Short Message Service), which is actually, not that short this time, The Nokia 3310 allows your text messages to be 459 characters long, instead of the usual 160 characters, it works by breaking the text messages down into more than one part if you send to a phone that can’t cope with it. This means they get messages that start with 'Linked: 1/3' for example.
You are also charged for each part, so if you use the full 459 you are charged for about three text messages.

You have the usual Inbox, Outbox, write and Picture Messages (now about 14 instead of its predecessors 3). It has some ‘smileys’ that you can edit and insert into any text and some templates, such as ‘Ring me at home’ and the like.

And of course the predictive text input! How could I forget?
I'm afraid I don't use it. It's probably very useful, as you only have to press each butoon once instead of three or four times to get a letter, but I'm so used to doing it the old way that I can't change ;)

Chat

A mind numbingly useless feature as far as I can tell, it’s the same as text messaging people, but you get the dialogue in an ‘Instant Messenger’ format – you get the previous texts as well. It’s the same price as normal text messages.
I've used this more recently and I have found that it's okay, as long as you are intending to have a conversation with that person, because you have to stay in the Chat screen to be able to see all previous messages.

Call Register

Things like, calls you’ve made, calls you’ve received, calls you’ve missed.

Tones

You can change your ring tone, change the volume, change the text message ring, compose your own tunes and set a vibrating alert! You can also specify a screen saver in here; a couple of points about these screen savers:
They don’t move, and therefore wouldn’t ‘save’ the screen, but…
You don’t get a burn-in effect on LCD Screens anyway, so, a nice idea as a way of showing a picture over the Operator Logo, but pointless if they were actually designed to mimic the screen savers on computers.
You can save 7 new tones on the 3310, but you could only save one on the 3210, and that’s nice.

Settings

As always, allows you to change the settings on your phone, phone, call, and security settings are the three subtitles, and if you break it you can always restore the defaults.
A hint – with the 3310s the ‘Put my language back to English code’ is Menu-6212, a useful thing to know if you get idiots messing with your phone, it’s Menu-4212 on a Nokia 3210.

Games

Snake II, Pairs II, Bantumi and Space Impact.
Snake ROCKS as always and I can’t really work out the POINT of Bantumi – it seems pretty damn boring. Space Impact is okay, but you’re likely to get RSI with your thumb if you get too addicted to any of these.
A feature I like is that you can turn the sound off and have all impacts etc set to vibrate!

Calculator

It’s a calculator with standard / * - + operations…
Need I say more?

Reminders

Advanced alarm clock, you set a date and time and a small note, and the reminder pops up and, well, reminds you J

Clock

Change the date / time, set an alarm clock, also has countdown and stopwatch features.

Profiles

Has the profiles for the phone; you can change all of them apart from ‘General’ to have a specific ring tone, volume, and text message noise, screen saver and whether or not it vibrates.



Overall, I am very impressed with this as a phone, I like it’s size, smaller than the 3210, but bigger than the 8210, it has enough weight to be noticed as a phone, and the screen is about the right size.

The phone does of course also come with XpressOn™ covers for that added bit of customisation.

I struggled, I really did, to find something that I disliked about this phone, and although I couldn't find anything that I actually didn't like, I found something that I would have liked it more for, if it has had it.
And after that exhausting paragraph, here it is: You can't store phonenumbers or SMSs on the phone itself, only on the SIM card, this is common, but with my combination I can only store 90 phonenumbers and 10 text messages, which was less than my old phone.

I would recommend it to anyone who’s looking to buy a new phone, I think the advertised cost is £99.99 but mine only cost me £89.99, which was nice.



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 170