When I received my phone and it wouldn't work at all, I put it down to a battery fault and waited impatiently for the replacement. When I had problems with this phone also I thought maybe there happened to be a bad batch, but someone else had the same phone and also had a lot of problems with it. Therefore, I must conclude that either we both had phones from a bad batch, or it's just a bad phone.
It all started out so promisingly, of course. Having looked through several makes and models, I decided on the Nokia 6500 slide mobile phone (you can get a "solid" model but I prefer the slide phone design). It looked nice, I was used to the Nokia phones, and it had a good camera. I'm not particularly fussy when it comes to phones so I expected that to be more than enough to keep me happy. If it actually worked properly, it probably would have.
The GoodWell, I do like the aesthetic design of the phone. There are a couple of different colour choices; I went for the black, and the combination of a minimalist design and sleek, rounded edges makes it look good. It's about the normal size for a phone these days, and while I couldn't say it's as light as a feather, it's not heavy enough to cause any annoyance. The slide mechanism works smoothly and has never snagged.
The range of options is decent, if you've ever owned a Nokia it'll be pretty much second nature to you. The handy stopwatch and countdown features are still there, though sadly no calculator.
The best thing about the phone is definitely the camera - it's a Carl Zeiss 3.2 megapixel Tessar camera and the software for the camera has a decent range of options and features, including video mode (640x480 resolution). The resulting photos are very good quality, with the colour saturation being a lot more life-like than previous mobile phone cameras I've used.
The display is quite large due to the phone's design, which is quite nice really as it gives you a larger but still crystal clear image.
The Bad Ugh... where do I start?
Firstly the keys aren't particularly responsive - you quite frequently need to press the key twice or even three times to get it to register. The operating system is also a bit buggy (even after updating it via firmware) and it crashes every so often.
While the music player software being ported over from the
Nokia Music Xpress 5300 is generally a good thing, this too is rather buggy - frequently it skips a track for no apparent reason, usually when you've just started the music player. It also seems to feel the need to regularly recheck the entire music library on the phone - even when you're not switched the phone off between uses and there has been no activity in terms or uploading to or downloading from the phones' memory.
It's a Nokia so the battery is - you guessed it - not particularly brilliant. At first it barely seemed to last out a day with minimal use before conking out, though this has improved slightly. It gives very little warning that the battery is dying (though to be fair it does flag up the issue, if you happen to notice it - blink and it's gone), and unlike
any other phone I've ever used, does not keep any reserve power when it automatically turns itself off. So, once it's off... that's it, until you have a chance to charge it up again. Hope you don't have any emergencies...
By far the worst problem however is the reception. The reception regularly disappears (even in areas where other phones on the same network have at least some coverage), and to make things worse, it seems to have a glitch that means once it's lost reception, it can't get it back even in a high signal area without turning it off and on again. Again, I've never had this problem with other phones, even if their reception abilities were dubious.
Someone else told me that the Bluetooth was also inconsistent, though I can't verify this as I haven't really used that function much.
Summing UpWell you probably don't actually need me to sum up, do you? From my experience this phone looks nice but works badly. You might get lucky and end up with one that works fine - the other reviewer on Epinions certainly doesn't seem to have had the problems I've encountered - but I wouldn't bank on it. If you're unsure try to find someone you know who's had experience using the phone - that might prove whether my difficulties with the 6500 phone are typical or unusual.
Incidentally the memory on this phone is tiny -6Mb - I got a 4Gb memory card for mine, they're very cheap nowadays.
See also:
What You Should Know About Nokia Mobile Phones
