''Snooping on the Keypad''. Review on Nokia 3650

Hey friends as I had promised I will be updating my review as soon as I get familiar with the phone here is what I find;

I was pretty excited when I first heard about the Nokia 3650. I already had a 7650, which I liked, well I paid around US$630 (US$540 + US$90 freight) and bought one 3650 yesterday and im very keen on sharing my review with you all. First of all let me give you a quick specification of the phone; Weight: 130g, Size: 130mm x 57mm x 26mm, Triband 4096 color display MMS send and receive Digital Camera Video capture 4 MB internal memory with a memory card slot for expansion. Bluetooth, GPRS, HSCSD, Infrared port Java support New keypad design - a retro-rotary type layout It isn't the lightest phone on the market it isn't even close to being the smallest, either. But it is passable when you consider the size of the screen and the other goodies This phone is a bit of a compromise. Kinda like a PDA, but not really. But it does offer a lot of bonuses.

The contact management system in the 3650 is pretty good. Not only can you have multiple numbers per contact, but you can have multiple addresses, email addresses, URLs, note, etc. There is even a field for the person's birthday, one for a full-sized photo, and one for a thumbnail photo that is seen when browsing the contact list. Voice tags can be added to a contact for use with the 3650's voice dialing feature. In general, the contact system in the 3650 is as good as most PDAs.

One of the most hyped advantages of the 3650 over traditional phones is its built in digital camera. The camera can take VGA resolution photos. The camera enables you to capture simple images of moderate quality.

One further way that the 3650 differs from the 7650 is that it is not limited to still images. The 3650 allows you to take short video clips, too. While not really useful at all for practical purposes, it is still kinda fun. There is no sound but they look decent enough to be interesting. The videos can be saved to either the internal memory in the phone or to the optional memory card. Another thing that really surprised me was that the video clips made on the 3650 could not be played on my PC.

The new rotary style button layout used by the phone is sure to turn off a lot of people - at least initially. I thought it looked like a good idea when I first saw it, but I have to admit that I am not adjusting to it as quickly as I thought I would. To me it makes sense, in theory, that the numbers and associated letters for the keys are in order from left to right. In practice, though, I have to fight 10 some years of habit to make use of this improvement. That is proving to be harder than I thought. I am sure that in time I would get used to it and appreciate it, but it doesn't come quickly enough. I predict that most people will not like this keypad design and that we will not see it on any future Nokia devices

So in the end, the 3650 is a decent phone. I just prefer the 7650 still, for design reasons. I'm willing to give up the video clips and take on 20 extra grams for the slider design. The only problem is that if you live in North America, you need GSM 1900 support. If that is the case, then you have probably never seen a 7650, and none of your friends have probably ever seen anything like the 3650 before - and that will make it a fun phone to own.