Problem phone?. Review on Nokia 3250

i was gifted my new nokia 3250 in june2006 and was on top of the world ...No doubt coz its a smart phone and looks beautiful. The lower portion of the phone can be twisted - clockwise to make it a music player and anticlockwise to make it a camera.

I would like to divide my review in two parts- one about the phone and other about the problems i'm facing now ...

Nokia 3250

The display screen is quite big and bright ....In fact, the clarity is really good and makes a good first impression. It has all the features of a standard phone alongwith bluetooth, MMS etc.

The main attraction of this phone seems to be the music player (phone also has a radio) which is really good with enhanced music features such as equilizer , reverb , bass boot. It has a storage capacity of upto 750 songs(as they claim). Tracks can be downloaded from the PC onto the phone. Supported file formats are eAAC+, AAC+, M4A, MPEG-4 ACC LC, LTP, MP3 and many more(if you know what it means, I don't , guess it means mostly all kinds of formats are supported and all kinds of songs can be played).

Our own ringing tones can be created from the approx. 40 MIDI tones pre-loaded in the phone.

Also, it has something called visual radio which I haven't had the privelege to use yet.

To sum up, the voice quality of FM and music player is quite good and loud too.

Now, the camera, its a 2 megapixel camera with 4X digital zoom and video capture. The camera is okay which means if not very good is not bad too. Just that the holding angle of the camera (which the phone becomes when twisted) is not very comfortable ...you just have to get used to holding it in a specific position. One thing different here is that taking your own photos while you are holding the camera is easy with such a camera (i mean if you happen to be the self-obssessed kinds ).

The camera has 8MB internal memory but comes with a free 512MB microSD card which expands the memory upto 1GB. I wasn't very happy with the battery which used to get depleted rather soon ( for a phone whose standby time is claimed to be 10 days). I mean not with too much use , I had to charge it every other day.

Problem?

So, overall, I was happy with my phone and in fact was still in the process of discovering more about all of its features (as they are in fact quite many ) when suddenly one day (after 15 days of use to be precise) it got switched off. Without anybody switching it off I mean. So, on noticing it switched off I switched it on ...but it would hang up ..Moreover , there was no network ...couldn't make or receive calls and it would then auto switch off.

Though disheartened , the vey next day (was a sunday)i took it to the nokia service centre(Lajpat nagar, delhi) and after about a hour and a half of waiting leaped up to show the phone when my no. was called . Turns out the people sitting there were no engg. and couldn't tell what was wrong and adviced me to deposit it and gave me a jobsheet. I was asked to come after 3-4days and only after calling up the nos. on the jobsheet. Okay , fine . So, called them up after 4 days and was quite rudely informed that their server was down. Was asked ( ordered?) to call after 2days .

So, called after two days and was (again) quite rudely informed that the server was down and everything was closed and was told nothing about the status of the phone. I (obviously very tense) went again to their centre on sunday only to find that the server was down but the centre was very much open. The man at the reception told me that my phone was sent to the head office and would take more time( I mean they could've even have told me this over phone but they chose not to).

Anyway, as they asked me I called them up again after 4 days , to find out the problem couldn't be solved and they would be replacing the handset. It would take another week or so .

So far so good ( in fact not too good for me ....going without a phone isn't that easy in today's world).

Anyway , so here I was waiting for the replacement but got no call from them whatsoever .

In another development , the numbers they had given were not even being answered now . Its not really that easy to run to their centre everyday. I called up the nokia customer care no. where they apogised for the delay but asked me collect the phone on 21st ( I had deposited the ph. on 2nd).

So, reached the centre in anticipation, only to find the centre was no longer there! It had been shifted to Green Park (i mean they couldv'e told me this over the phone but chose not to!).

Anyway, since I had taken leave from work for this imp . work , and since I wanted it anyway, I went to Green Park only to be informed that my replaced handset had not reached them and would probably take 4 days! Their reason for not picking up their phone ? U guessed it ..coz the centre was shifted . Then , does it really matter that the nos. given are actually cell phone nos. not landline???????

Friends, I am still sitting here without my nokia 3250 and hope probably next week I wil be reunited with it but think I am asking for too much . I know I have bored you enough with my long story , but am amazed at the callus atttitudes of nokia customer care .

I don't know whether the problem was with just my handset or their 3250 models are not really durable in the long run but would advice you to think twice before buying any nokia phones coz if you do have a problem with the phone( as I saw the customer care centre so many people were having), you will have no one to turn to . You will have to learn to manage without a cell phone as I am learning for the past one month.