Introduction, packaging
This is what no one has been expecting. It is a well-known fact that Nokia didn’t really care about touchscreen phones for a long time, all they did was to release 6708 back in mid-2006, which has been a BenQ P31 under the Finnish brand. A bit late though, but they’ve finally managed to realize that the users have a really high demand for such things, so if they won’t get one from Nokia then no matter the brand fidelity, they will buy an Apple or an HTC. Seeing their sales statistics, the great council of the elders has been assembled in Finland, the result being the touchscreen version of the Series 60 platform that was launched on Nokia 5800. This brought quite an amount of joy for fans and for those who managed to escape brand fidelity as well.
Just as usual, the Finnish guys have invested huge sums in promoting this new system, so it has been rather surprising to read on the web about a handset called 6208 Classic and the touch-controlled Series 40 platform on which it is based. Did they really do it and launch it so silently? Well, it looks like they did, as the handset we got for testing from MGSM is right here on my desk, and it’s already available in stores as well.
I would not like to tell you the punch line already, so all I would like to note that things are not always what they seem to be. This time I told you a big deal of truth, but one should have some reservations about it when having a look at the really large box of 6802 Classic, which is primarily decorated with logograms (Chinese marks). We can immediately see that this handset hasn’t been made for the European market, but of course you could never know – this wouldn’t be the first Nokia which came to the Old Continent only after a short trip in Asia. Sticking to the facts I’d say that the large piece of cardboard had only a charger, a headset, an extremely short (~10 cm long) data cable and a 1 GB microSD card inside, although there probably would have been enough room even for the guy who has assembled it somewhere on the far side of China. Environment friendliness: zero.
Hirdetés
Exterior
We can see on the exterior of 6208 that this hasn’t been designed for us. Although the materials used and the assembly quality are much better than the “real” Chinese phones, but the design, or better said, the scale of the elements makes us think of these handsets, as there is a large display on top and shiny buttons on the bottom. It even resembles 3230 a bit, but basically its quality is about three times better: our Chinese-looking Classic has quite a lot of metal in it. The back panel is completely made of it, but the plastic parts on the front and the sides are also very high-quality ones. We can feel this on the weight of the 109.8 x 49.3 x 13.3-14.7 mm large handset, as it weighs a bit over 120 grams.
On top of the front panel there is the speaker and the inevitable Nokia logo. These are on a somewhat shiny, black area, which surrounds the 2.4” QVGA display and includes the main controls as well – softkeys, call handling keys, d-pad. I can say only positive things about the display, the colors are beautiful, image quality is perfect even in bright sunlight and it’s not pixelated at all. The keys I’ve mentioned have a proper size and this is true for the silver numerical keys as well. This black part has a metallic stripe running around it, which has the numerical keys on its bottom end – the design is unique, but it looks really elegant, mostly because it’s clean and well-organized.
It’s quite hard to describe the back side. Here is a grey, metallic back panel, which is slightly brushed, and it looks awesome on its own. Then there is a large camera accompanied by a large engraved label (3.2 mega pixel autofocus) and a dual-LED flash, which is also perfect. And then there we have a pen made of metal, which destroys all this high-quality feeling, mostly when we take it off the back, just as you can see it on the picture – in order to do this you have to push it upwards a bit.
The top of the handset is the realm of connectors, here we can find the 3.5 mm headset jack and the charger’s connector, they have the power button as their neighbour. As the microphone is on the numerical keypad (between keys 6 and 9), the bottom part is now empty, just like the left side, so this means that there are lots of things crammed on to the right side. Here we can see the microUSB connector, the volume control keys, the camera’s shoot key and the microSD slot (protected by a cover), which has no problem dealing with high capacity (SDHC) cards.
Menu system, software, touch control
I won’t be teasing you any longer, I reveal the great secret: no matter the touchscreen, 6208 Classic cannot be controlled with taps, the pen can be used only for text entry. This information is probably even more shocking than the news that you won the lottery; as for me I’ve been thinking for days what’s the meaning of all this, but I just can’t figure it out. I think the only possible reason is that Chinese marks are easier to write by hand than type, but as soon as I see how complex they are I have to realize that this theory is not quite correct.
So there is a normal S40 interface running on our gadget, which is a positive thing anyway, as it’s a fast, easy to use, mature platform. There is no lack of features; we have everything from active standby to dynamic SMS memory and extra software on 6208 Classic. I would not like to go very much into the details, but let’s see the software side in short.
In the organizer we can see an alarm clock that works even when the handset is turned off, then there is a nice calendar, a to-do list, a notepad, a scientific calculator, a timer, a stopwatch and the inevitable English-Chinese dictionary. In the Applications we can find three games (Golf Tour, Snake III, Sudoku) and lots of non-gaming apps (converter, flickr, typing demo, settings wizard, Opera Mini, QQ, Share on Ovi and world clock). The internal memory is 23 MB large, 10 of which is free by default, as these pre-installed apps take up quite a lot of space. Since we have a 1 GB card we shouldn’t have any problem with that, fortunately applications can use that storage space as well, and this includes even the sound recorder in the multimedia menu.
The only strange thing occurs during typing, as there is a special icon in text entry fields, which shows us that we can use the touchscreen. We just have to tap the field and the text entry window pops up, which works only in handwriting recognition mode. It won’t deal with continuous writing, if we write a whole word it will digitalize only the first letter, if she can deal with it. Probably Nokia has seen as well that the efficiency of the software is pretty far from the magical one hundred percent, so after writing down the letter we are offered lots of alternatives, so we can tell that we didn’t want to type an i, but an exclamation mark/a small l/semicolon. I again have to ask: what is this good for? They could have just used a virtual QWERTY keyboard, that would make things easier and faster. It works like this:
I would like to note that we can of course use the keypad for typing as well, I’ve managed to type about five times faster with it. It’s really shocking why does one have to put a touchscreen foil on the handset for just this feature, it’s a waste.
Data communication, phone calls
We don’t have many data communication protocols to choose from. 6208 Classic has a tri-band GSM module (900/1800/1900 MHz), there is no 3G support, so we can only use GPRS or EDGE. WiFi is of course missing as well, so we have to do with the 2.0 Bluetooth that supports stereo sound as well. It’s important to note that the standard microUSB connector supports the USB 2.0 protocol, so we can copy our songs quickly on the phone.
I haven’t been completely satisfied by the handset’s sound quality. There are no serious problems, but it doesn’t have the quality of an average Nokia: it’s not loud enough and it has some hissing, although this won’t affect usability. There are no features regarding phone calls, we can store 2,000 contacts in the phonebook, there are quite a lot of extra fields. Messaging is flawless, the storage space is dynamic, we have an e-mail client, which supports IMAP servers with authentication and attachments as well.
We browsing could be even good, thanks to the large display, but due to the slow data transfer it will be no big deal. We can use two applications: the good old Opera Mini or the default browser. The first one is quite fast in comparison with the possibilities – and half the world uses it – but Nokia’s genuine software isn’t bad either, it has quite an effective page breaking and it even supports JavaScript.
Multimedia
The camera has a resolution of 3.2 megapixels, it has autofocus and two LED flashes. The highest available resolution for photos is 2048 x 1536 pixels, while videos can be recorded at 640 x 480 pixels. The camera’s software is the well-known one from other Series 40 handsets, it’s easy to use, but it doesn’t have much settings. We can tamper with basic stuff like white balance, JPEG compression, etc., but let’s just forget sensitivity or light metering.
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Image quality is average, this camera is perfect for archiving interesting and memorable moments, but we can see that this is not a camera phone. At 100% zoom we can see that noise level is quite high even in a sunny weather, the software trying to (unsuccessfully) compensate this with a powerful noise filter. The photos won’t be rich in details, the colors are quite pale as well – but I’m very satisfied with video recording, the only problem being that the picture becomes very pixelated when recording fast motion. Here’s a short test video (3GP format, ~2.5 MB).
There are no problems with the music player either. It can run in the background, it can filter tracks by ID3 tags, it displays album covers, has an equalizer, it can seek and it’s fast. The FM radio is similarly good, I had no problems with it.
The HS-48 headset that comes with the phone is a medium quality one. When turning on the handsfree I had some mixed feelings, as thanks to the metal case there is barely any distortion and it’s loud enough, but practically we will hear only the medium frequency range. We are still waiting for the Nokia that has a sound quality at least close to the one of 6290.
Battery, summary
Battery capacity is only 860 mAh, so we shouldn’t be surprised that 6208 won’t take it for more than two days with a charge.
What could I say as a summary? I have some bad feelings about criticizing the handset, as it’s basically a very high-quality, reliable phone, which could be a great successor for 6300, as they are similarly well assembled and it’s at least as much reliable. On the other hand they drove me mad with this touchscreen stupidity, which could be a positive thing, but unfortunately there is no sign that this will be used in the future – for example in a game with touch support.
The saddest thing is that the presence of the semi-touchscreen can be felt on the price of the handset, as it currently costs about 230 euros. If it would have half the price then I wouldn’t care at all about the pen on the back, but this way things are not that simple. Not mentioning the fact that in a proper successor for 6300 we would like to see 3G and HSDPA as well, and 6208 Classic doesn’t have such things. Knowing these I really can’t give an award – I’d rather go for a 6300i instead, that costs 65 euros less, has WiFi and a cradle as well.
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
Nokia 6208 Classic has been provided by MGSM.hu. The handset can be purchased at:
1024 Budapest, Lövőház u. 12.
On-line at www.mgsm.hu.
Specifications
| Nokia 6208 Classic | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM | |
| Size | 109.8 x 49.3 x 13.3-14.7 millimeters | |
| Weight | 120 grams | |
| Available colors | Titanium silver | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2.4” | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | ~16 million | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 2,000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | dynamic / dynamic | |
| Internal memory | 23 MB, 10 MB free by default (+ 1 GB card in package) | |
| Memory expandability | microSD (SDHC-compatible) | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | yes (class 32) / yes (class 32) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | no / no | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | no / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | no | |
| USB | 2.0 (microUSB) | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | yes / no | |
| GPS receiver | no | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | yes | |
| Vibra function | yes | |
| Built-in handsfree | yes | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | yes / yes | |
| Sound recorder | yes | |
| Alarm clock | yes, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | yes | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Series 40 | |
| WAP / HTML browser | yes / yes | |
| E-mail client | yes (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | yes, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 3 | |
| Currency converter | yes | |
| Extra software | Flickr, Opera Mini, QQ, Share on Ovi | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 3.2 megapixels, autofocus | |
| Secondary camera | no | |
| Video recording | max. 640 x 480 pixels | |
| Music player | yes, can run in background | |
| Equalizer | yes | |
| FM radio | yes, with RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | BL-4S (860 mAh) | |
| Standby time | 300 hours | |
| Talk time | 3 1/2 hours | |
| Other | ||
| Touchscreen for text entry only | ||
