I finally graduated…. Review on Nokia 6101

… to a colour mobile. And it is not only a colour mobile. It is feature packed. I got it as a gift from my mom earlier this week and felt that this is too big a gift for me. But I couldn’t refuse. I had actually wanted to upgrade from the dull and old Sony Ericsson T105 and had a few cell phone models in mind but mom surprised me with this one. And well I must say that I am a bit surprised but a happy man with this phone. So here goes my review about the Nokia 6101.

The small and sleek phone weighs just about 97g, maybe on the higher side although nothing that would look bulky in your hands. It has two display screens with the outer screen having a resolution of 96 x 65 pixels and 4096 colours. Likewise, the inner screen is of 128 x 160 pixels and 65536 colours.

Open the flap and you are presented with a sleek keypad with a 4-way navi-key at the top. The functions of the navi-keys are predefined although they can be changed as per your preference. I found it very convenient to put the inbox and the radio on two of the 4 navi-keys.

Most of the features are new to me and it took me a lot of time to get a hang of them and honestly speaking, I am still exploring the features of the phone. It won’t be before a few weeks before I finally get my hand set on this new phone. Having said that, I can also say for sure that the menu-system of this phone is fairly easy to handle.

I love the radio. Well honestly this is the feature that I liked the best because I can play it whenever I am on the move. You can save as many as 20 FM radio stations on the phone and play it using a headset or the built-in loudspeaker.

You can use mp3 tracks as well as MIDI/polyphonic tones as your preferred ring tones. But what disappointed me was that this phone has a considerably lesser number of ring tones when compared to other Nokia handsets. It has just 17 ring tones while some other models have up to 30 ring tones. Plus, I found that the ring tones of this phone are not as melodious compared to those of Nokia 3120, 6610 and 6600.

The main menu can be designed as a list or as a grid. In other words, the menu can be displayed as a list of option or as icons on the screen. You can also change the font size of the text messages that you receive from extra small to medium and large. It has a message counter too that counts both incoming and outgoing messages. The downside here is that it counts the delivery notifications too, thus the count of the received messages may seem to be much more than what you actually receive.

The cell phone comes with an integrated VGA camera of 640 x 280 resolution with a dedicated button for the camera. The phone display can be used as the viewfinder and the outer display can be used for a self-portrait. I tried taking some pictures but since I don’t have its data cable yet, I could not see how the photos look like on a computer screen. The phone has a built-in image print application courtesy Kodak Photo Service.

It also has a sound recorder that records sounds of up to 5 minutes. You can record your speech or a phone conversation as well. All the images captured and sounds recorded are stored the media gallery where specific folders are already created for each one of them.

Sending and receiving messages is pretty easy and it supports both text as well as multimedia messages although the messages cannot be more than 100KB in size. It supports most popular Email protocols and standards and has support for most Asian and European languages. In fact, the first time I turned it on, the phone displayed its menu in Hindi!

It has a 3.5MB internal memory which can be used to store contacts, text messages, calendar notes, audio and video clips and photos. The phone comes with a built-in 500 number phone book that is expandable to store extra information about each contact stored.

It doesn’t come with any preloaded applications except games like Solitaire, Golf Tour and Canal Control. I found that the phone slows down considerably when playing games with the sounds turned on. So I guess it is better to turn off the sounds whenever you want to play games on the handset. The cell phone has support for Java applications and you can download and install them if you have GPRS access.

Last, but not the least, connectivity is good. Infrared is one feature that I found very useful obviously, because I didn’t have this feature in my old handset. Connect it to a data-cable and you can synchronize your calendar and manage the picture and multimedia gallery. Where this phone lacks is that it doesn’t have support for Bluetooth devices. That would have been a big bonus for people who have a large use of Bluetooth devices.

The Verdict

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Overall, this is an absolutely superb phone. I would recommend this phone if you have the money to spend on it. I don’t really know its actual price but I am told that it is in the range of about 11000 bucks. Considering that phones in the same range like Nokia 6600 cost about 23000 last year, I bet this is a good buy. But still, I would give it 4 out of 5 owing to the points I highlighted above.

© Cheers,

Anuj

UPDATED 20 Dec 2005

I forgot to add above that this handset supports Push to Talk. but I really don't know much about this service as I have not subscribed to it.

After weeks of dilly-dallying, I finally bought it's data cable (CA - 42). A First look at the pics I had clicked from this phone suggests that the camera is very good, much better than other 1.3MP cameraphones. The memory capacity is a big issue as its 3.5MB memory is shared between applications and contacts, which leaves just about 1.3MBs for the camera and downloads. And finally, it doesn't have any scope for expandable memory.