Expensive Toys. Review on Nokia 8250

NOKIA is the best-known Cellphone manufacturer. No two opinions here. In fact, Finland itself is perhaps best known for NOKIA, like Brazil is for Football! My experience with the NOKIA 8250 however has been a little disappointing...

At a price of Rs. 13,000/- you expect something more than just a famous brand name: you expect features, you expect ruggedness, you expect value for money. Sadly, all three are missing from the 8250. In comparison with my SONY J6, for which I paid a little more than half this price. The SONY J6 has now been given to the better half...

I miss the polyphonic ring tunes of the J6: in comparison, the 8250's ring tunes sound like the crowing of a diseased crow...

I miss the high-quality display of the J6 as well as the many more lines of display. The 8250's display is just 4 lines, and the quality is only passably ok.

I miss the J6's Jog Dial, which let me surf the menus with ease. More importantly, it let me choose the right word far more easily, while SMSing.

I miss the External Speaker of the J6: although the J6's speaker was not something to write home about, it was adequate, as long as the environs was quiet.

I miss the J6's ability to save incoming SMSs automatically - the 8250 just does not let you save incoming SMSs automatically, you need to explicitly save them! I also miss the J6's ability to quote from sent SMSs, while replying.

Battery life is poor in both cases - just 2 days of medium usage. My earlier SONY CMD CD10 gave me a solid 3 days - sometimes even 4 days! Reception is pretty sharp with both the J6 as well as the 8250. Looks-wise, there is again nothing to suggest why the 8250 is priced nearly double the J6 - except that the 8250 has an internal antenna.

I do not miss the J6's WAP feature, as I never got to use it much. However, the 8250 is just not enabled for WAP!

I dislike the thin plastic casing of the 8250. While the casing can be changed using XPress-on covers (they come in 4 different colours), it is also expensive, with each XPress-on cover costing Rs. 350/-! More importantly, the covers get easily scratched: just taking the 8250 out and putting it back into my belt-carrying case put scratches on it within a week!

The only 'improvement' I see in the 8250 over the J6 is that I can communicate with my Notebook, using the 8250's Infra-red port.

Correct me if I am wrong, please, but I think the high cost of the NOKIA is because it is assembled somewhere in labour-expensive Europe, while the SONY is probably assembled in cheap-labour economies like Taiwan, China, etc...