Nokia 6500 Classic Review
In a nutshell: The 6500 Classic is Nokia’s thinnest phone so far, and is a stunningly beautiful phone too, with its polished metal casing. It’s an easy to use phone that does just what most people want from a phone - make calls, take pictures and play music. Supplied with 1 Gbyte of memory and a stereo headset, it’s already equipped to go. The one thing missing from this 3G phone is video calling.
Now here’s a tasty-looking phone. Nokia have finally joined the ultra-thin revolution with the 6500 Classic phone. This is the slimmest Nokia phone released in the UK and, incredibly it’s a 3G phone too! And doesn’t it look nice, with its sleek aluminium casing (”individually polished”, according to the Nokia blurb) and available in Black and Bronze. Let’s pause a moment to enjoy the looks.
OK, having drooled enough, let’s look at the exterior of the phone in more detail. There’s absolutely nothing to complain about here. Whereas Sony Ericsson seem intent on destroying nice phones with unergonomic keypads, Nokia have learned their lesson from making “cool” keypads and have provided the 6500 Classic with a very functional keypad and navigation key. The combination of an ergonomic design, a plain Series 40 interface (no Smartphone junk here!) make this an extremely easy and pleasurable phone to use. Power it up, and the next thing to enjoy is the large and ultra high-resolution LCD display boasting the latest 16 million colour display technology. It’s a display that you can easily customise with a choice of themes (wallpapers, sounds, screensavers, and backgrounds).
The featurelist of the 6500 Classic matches what you’d expect from a mid-range 3G phone in 2007: a 2 megapixel camera (no autofocus - so don’t throw away your digital camera!), a competent music player (although support for Bluetooth stereo headsets is missing), a video camera and good connectivity via USB and Bluetooth. There’s nothing to get very excited about here, but it ticks all the boxes that most people will care about. One obvious thing that’s missing, considering that this is a 3G phone, is video calling. There’s no front-facing camera, so video calling is out, I’m afraid. However, the sales package does include a Nokia Stereo Headset HS-82 and a microUSB Connectivity Cable CA-101, so we can’t fault Nokia for their generosity there.
One of the unusual features of the 6500 Classic is that it has a fixed memory of 1 Gbyte, of which around 920 Mbytes is available to the user. Now this has its good points and bad points. The bad point is that there’s no slot for increasing the memory beyond 1 Gbyte. But on the other hand, 920 Mbytes is enough to store 200-300 songs, which is certainly enough for most users, and it means that the memory is all easily accessible in one place, without any hassle of copying data from internal memory to memory card. Given the kind of phone that the 6500 Classic is (i.e. mid-range) we think that this is a perfectly good solution.
Other thing to point out is that battery life is less than average, which isn’t surprising for an ultraslim 3G handset. It’ll probably need charging every other day.
We do like the 6500 Classic. It’s a very beautiful phone and lovely to use. It isn’t all-singing and all-dancing, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At Mobile Phones UK, we like our phones to look nice and to work reliably, and the 6500 Classic does that. If it had included video calling we might have rustled up another star and awarded it 5 out of 5.
Features of the Nokia 6500 Classic include:
- 2 megapixel digital camera
- Video camera (176 x 144 pixel resolution, MPEG4 format)
- Display: 16 million colours, 240 x 320 pixels (2 inches)
- Music player (AAC, eAAC+, and MP3 formats)
- Integrated handsfree speaker
- Ringtones: MP3, MP4, eAAC+, AAC, WMA & Video ringtones / 64-voice polyphonic (MIDI) ringtones
- Voice recorder
- Voice controls
- Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email with attachments (POP3, IMAP4 & SMTP protocols)
- AMS (audio messaging service) for sending voice clips over-the-air
- Java games
- Themes: wallpapers, sounds, screensavers, and backgrounds
- Calendar, To-do list, Notes, Alarm clock, Stopwatch, Countdown timer, Calculator
- xHTML web browser
- Memory: 1 Gbyte (not expandable)
- Connectivity: Bluetooth, micro USB 2.0
- WAP 2.0, GPRS, EPGRS, 3G (max download 128 kbits; upload 356 kbits)
- Quadband (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) plus dual band 3G (WCDMA 850/2100)
- Size: 110 x 45 x 9.5 mm
- Weight: 94g
- Talktime: 3.5 hours
- Battery standby: 9 days