Another phone for me to destroy

Author's Rating:

Pros: Cheap; basic; solid Bluetooth connection

Cons: Terrible user interface; not loud enough; worthless camera

The Bottom Line: 
It's a basic cell phone with a rotten camera. No more, no less.

Author's Review
I don't get along well with cell phones. I hate them quite a bit, in fact, and wouldn't carry one if my wife and my employer didn't insist on it. A few years ago, I got stuck with a dastardly piece of garbage known as the Nokia 6010.

That Nokia lasted me over three years but the phone just didn't stand up that well to punishment. A few weeks ago, the battery died when I was in the middle of a conversation, so I took the rational action of throwing it against a wall. Three times, in fact. I kicked it a couple of times, too, and stomped it at least once. Oh, the phone still worked OK but I couldn't see what was on the LCD screen as it was cracked quite a bit.

Now don't get all critical. I once tossed a $400 phone out of my car window while driving down the interstate at about 80 miles-per-hour because I was sick of the conversation I was having. The Nokia got off easy.

With my phone smashed, I figured my office wouldn't stick me with a new one. Unfortunately, AT&T allows you to get a new phone every three years so I was sent to the cell phone store. The fellow there offered me an array of choices, ranging from putrid little devices with keyboards to phones that can hold a lot of MP3s. I told him to give me the absolute cheapest phones available for free because I'd probably destroy the new one, anyway, and didn't want to spend much to replace it.

He showed up with the Nokia 2600. In short, it's really only got three features worth mentioning and one of them is absolutely worthless. This phone comes with a camera that takes grainy, terrible phones in a resolution that would have been impressive in about 1995 (640 x 480 pixels). You can shoot video in that same rotten resolution, too. Don't go nuts, though -- you've only got 10 MB of storage in this thing.

One feature that does work well is Bluetooth connectivity. In other words, you can connect one of those Bluetooth headsets if you want to look like a self-important jerk. I prefer to use the Bluetooth connectivity to cut up MP3 files and load my own ring tones into the phone. In fact, the Bluetooth connection is the only thing I use to connect this phone to my computer. There appears to be a mini USB port, but the thing is so small and odd-shaped that I haven't bothered to find a cord for it. A Bluetooth dongle costs about $4, so grab one of those to connect your computer to the phone and you'll be fine.

Another feature that works well enough is the loudspeaker which allows for hands free conversations. I wish the speaker was a little louder as it can get drowned out by road noise. Still, it's a convenient feature that I have used while driving and it's implemented adequately.

The address list in the phone is adequate in that I can store up to 200 phone numbers. That's more than enough for me so no complaints there.

One of the things that I like about the phone is that it's small enough to fit in a pocket. Of course, I've got a few key scratches on mine but that doesn't bother me as I have little regard for cell phones and a scratched one works as well as a pristine one. There is a drawback to the small surface area -- the "vibrate" function is rather hit and miss because there's just not a lot of phone to shake and the loudspeaker is rather small, meaning it can be difficult to hear in crowded areas. So, you've really got to turn the volume up all the way to hear the phone ring.

And you've got to turn it up all the way to hear conversations, too, unless you're in an absolutely quite room. Road noise and general racket simply overwhelm the small speaker in the phone so I've had my volume cranked to the max since the day I got the phone. The speaker does to cut in and out a bit, but I can't tell if that's just a design flaw, if AT&T is just a terrible carrier or if the phone struggles with signal strentgth when moving from tower to tower.

The lack of a full keyboard makes texting an awful chore on this phone, of course, but that's fine with me as I I hate text messages and tend to ignore them. You can browse the Internet with this phone but I haven't tried that due to the awful keyboard interface.

Now, one thing I absolutely hate about this phone is that it does come with some demo versions of some nifty games (Pac-Man, for example), but you've got to pay money to get the full versions. That stinks. The lack of a standard USB port for charging is a drag, too. The short battery life bugs me as you only get 3.5 hours of talk time out of this thing. My old Nokia achieved around 4 hours of talk time, so it seems odd that the newer phone won't achieve even that -- not exactly what I'd call progress.

Another thing that bugs me is that I've seen a number of articles referring to this Nokia as a good "starter phone." What the hell is a starter phone, exactly? Such statements make me believe that these phones will get more irritating and include more worthless features as we go. The only thing really terrible about this particular phone is the worthless camera. All I need is a phone that will let me call people when I'm out and about and anything beyond that is just annoying.

Well, the user interface if fairly awful, too. It doesn't bother me too much as I generally just use the phone to call people with and don't care about the features (or lack thereof) that I have to reach through the interface. However, the operating system is slow and lags like crazy, meaning it's a bit cumbersome to do simple tasks like turning on my Bluetooth connection, transferring ring tones once I've uploaded them to my computer and etc.

All in all, this is a basic phone that will do just fine until I find a reason to destroy it. It'll be cheap to replace when that day comes, too.