Pros: Size, weighs in at only 84 grams; easy to view screen
Cons: Camera with low pixels; drops internet calls
The Bottom Line: While it may not be teh best for internet, the NOKIA 6086 is an excellent phone for the average phone user, who may want to check email while out.
When my old Nokia phone became difficult to view the screen, I knew it was time to make the dreaded trip to the T-Mobile Store. I won’t go into how bad that is, that may be another Epinion someday! I needed to buy another phone, since I wouldn’t qualify for a free one. I was only moderately pleased to learn I had “earned” a discount, which included extending my current plan out 2 more years. I wandered around the store looking for “my” phone.
I have always said I would NOT get a camera phone! NEVER!! My fear is that I will get THE perfect picture with the phone camera, and then not be able to do very much with it size wise. I avoided the camera phones like they were deadly, but the NOKIA 6086 kept calling out to me. I told it to shut up many times, it was all wrong for me with its built in camera.
After many trips around the T-Mobile Store, I finally gave in an picked up the NOKIA 6086. WOW, it felt like it was made for my hand! It mocked me! It was convinced it was MY phone, despite my repeated utterings about it having a camera. I flipped the phone open, and I fell in love. The screen on the Nokia 6086 was bright and colorful, everything my old Nokia wasn’t!
I stood there holding the display NOKIA 6086, reading the description card. The card said the phone has an MP3 player! Call me technology backward or behind times, but this both excited and confused me. Then I read it has a radio! KEWL was all I could think. Oh, then there was that line that said camera…I didn’t want a camera phone!! Under the line about the camera, the card said Bluetooth enabled! Great, I always wanted a reason to have a giant beetle on my head crawling out of my ear!! Okay, so it had Bluetooth, it didn’t mean I HAD to use it!
I put the phone back on the shelf and walked around once more. This time I picked up and held almost every phone in the store. None of them felt as good as the NOKIA 6086!! The kicker was that all of the phones that felt close to as good also had cameras!! I decided the NOKIA 6086 was indeed the phone for me, camera or none!
After having the SIMS card put into my new NOKIA 6086, I headed home. While my new NOKIA 6086 was charging, I was reading and playing with it. I discovered it would hold a 2G micro SD card. I got excited about that! The card would hold all of those perfect pictures I would take and have nothing else ever to do with them! I could at least have them all in the phone and on the SD card.
I don’t remember which picture was the first I took with the camera onboard the NOKIA 6086, I only remember liking it! My worst fear was confirmed! Here I had a terrific picture, and I couldn’t print anything bigger than a wallet or locket size! Oh well, I could spend the rest of my life passing my phone around to share pictures! I emailed the picture to my Yahoo address, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the picture was fairly large, and pretty clear! Hmm, so I guess I could post the pictures from the phone on MySpace and dogster, life might not be so bad with a camera phone after all!! Then I printed the picture. It wasn’t high quality, but it wasn’t grainy either, as a 4 X 6 inch picture. I could even use the pictures from the camera phone for greeting cards if I got a really nice shot! Okay, not as bad as I was thinking after all. In fact, I use the camera on my new NOKIA 6086 WAY too often! I take pictures of everything!
The camera in the NOKIA 6086 is a VGA camera with 640 X 480 pixels. I don’t know what VGA means, so I won’t pretend to explain it all to you. The camera also functions as a video camera. Video pixels are 128 X 96, so it is not going to give you a quality recording. The video function is for those fun moments that no one would ever believe had you not gotten it on video! The video function records and plays back the sound fairly well, but the speaker of the phone is not high quality. I have been able to watch the video I record on my PC, but it doesn’t help it look better, just makes it easier to share.
As for other features of the NOKIA 6086? Oh yeah, there are a few! I mentioned earlier that the phone has a Micro SD card slot. I have pictures and music on my card right now, as well as a few T-Mobile games. Let’s talk music first. The phone will play any MPG file, except one set to play on iTunes. You need a conversion program on your PC to convert iTunes files to playable phone files. Again, it is something I do, but don’t really understand it. With these music files now on the card in the phone, they can be played for your listening enjoyment, or used as ringtones. I chose to make my ringtone as Rocky Top, and EVERYONE stops and stares when my phone rings! Any song I have an MP3 file for can be used as my ringtone, making the phone extremely fun to use and carry!
The game files are held on the card, allowing me to free up the actual phone memory for functions of the phone. The phone memory is a whopping 6 MB, a fairly large amount of memory for an “ordinary phone! Wait, the NOKIA 6086 is NOT an ordinary phone! How quickly I forget about features I never use! Remember that Bluetooth option? Most phones have that, so nothing unique there. However, T-Mobile tells me that the NOKIA 6086 is enabled to make and receive calls over a wireless internet connection. It can be done, and it won’t use your minutes, but you better not go anywhere in the middle of that call!! T-Mobile and Nokia say the phone is smart enough to stay connected if you move out of range of the wireless connection. About the only thing the NOKIA 6086 is smart enough to do, is drop the call if you move out of range! I used this function for all of an hour. It is great in theory, just the technology is horrible.
The radio was another option I liked…until I went to use it! Remember that beetle crawling out of my ear? Well I must say I DO have a pet beetle now, though he only rides on my ear while I am driving. I decided on day to listen to my phone radio though my Bluetooth ear piece. It wouldn’t work!! In order to listen to the radio, you have to have an earpiece plugged into the phone. Great, but then you can only listen through the earpiece or the wired headset that came with the NOKIA 6086. Wouldn’t be bad except plugging either of those things in renders the Bluetooth unusable! It is not a very convenient thing to have to carry so many things around with you and then have to fiddle with everything just to use the radio.
The NOKIA 6086 is enabled with internet viewing options, however they are limited. With only a 6 MB memory, you can only visit websites set up for phone usage. While there are a lot of them, you won’t find anyone writing an Epinion using the NOKIA 6086, the website is too large. The internet ability is great for using an instant messaging forum such as Yahoo and AOL. It is also great for checking email, so I do enjoy this feature…probably a lot more than I should!
The screen of the NOKIA 6086 is 1.8 inches, so it is fairly standard for most flip phones. It is a screen that is 128 x 160 pixels, with up to 262,144 colors. I find it has the best screen of any flip phone I have owned or used. The phone can be directly connected to a computer, with a USB cable, but that is both unnecessary and an extra expense. It is something for the gadget happy users.
In the end, I would buy this phone again and again, unless something better came along. It would really take a lot though for me to give up my NOKIA 6086, even with its flaws. My NOKIA 6086 goes with me everywhere, and everyone who sees it has to play with it. It may not be a Blackberry or an iPhone, but for ordinary users like me, the NOKIA 6086 is an ideal phone!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 75.99 Recommended for: Professionals On-the-Go - Internet and Email is a Must!
Clamshell phone with Wi-Fi capabilities for T-Mobile's Hotspot @Home service for unlimited nationwide calls Compatible with T-Mobile's MyFaves service...More at Amazon Marketplace
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