I recently got a new phone, a Nokia 3650. Overall, it’s a nice phone with some very fun features.
The circular keypad was a little strange at first, but after using it a while I think it’s actually better for keying in text. I’m guessing it’s because the numbers/letters are next to each other, so it’s easier to keep track of what key you need to hit next compared to the usual 3 row keypad.
It’s a little big, and since it’s so light I don’t really understand why it’s so big. Seems like Nokia could have either made it thinner or shorter and still kept the same keypad and screen. On the other hand, I’ve dropped it a couple of times without trouble, possibly because it’s light and bounces well.
The camera takes nice photos for a tiny thing on the back of a phone. It takes 640×480 photos in “standard” mode. I first raised the quality setting, but later lowered it to “basic.” The purpose of phone photography isn’t quality, it’s taking lots of spontaneous shots and sending some of them out. At “basic” quality the file sizes are usually about 20K, and they send out very quickly.
I just email out photos, either to friends and family, or to Fotolog.net. I haven’t figured out a better way to get photos from the phone to the web than emailing them to Fotolog. The uploader would be nice, but it only goes to Ofoto. Nokia has a sort of description of what an upload server needs to do, so I expect there’ll be some other options available soon.
I got a USB Bluetooth adapter to connect the phone and my laptop, an iBook. Initially I had trouble with Apple’s 10.2.8 Software Update, but going back to 10.2.6 seems to have solved things. I waited a while before trying the new 10.2.8 update but it seems to work now. iSync works fine for synchronizing the calendar and address book. Getting photos off the phone is a little slow since it can only be done one at a time. Putting files on the phone is similarily slow, and there’s a funny dialog that makes me think the transfer will fail, but it works anyway.
T-Mobile’s inter-web-net thing, t-zones, is pretty lame. The times I’ve tried to use it for anything have been complete failures. For instance, Mandi and I were out shopping and she realized we had a bag of change we wanted to take to a Coinstar, which are apparently located in Food Lion supermarkets. So, I tried to use t-zones yellow pages to find a nearby Food Lion. After about 10 minutes and repeated connection failures, I finally got a list. Calling 411 would have taken a couple of minutes at most.
Fortunately, t-zones does have a redeeming quality, or the $10/month would be a complete waste. It lets me send and receive unlimited email from the phone. Like anything else, they say “unlimited” but buried in the terms of service somewhere there’s probably a limit of some sort. Using email is easy; the only complication is the shaky nature of the t-zones connection. To send a message I do something like this: navigate to the messages application and the POP account I’ve set up there, connect to it, wait a little while, say ‘okay’ when it says it failed to send my message, go to the outbox and tell it to send my message, and hopefully it sends. Sometimes it fails, so I just send again. Sometimes it seems to help to disconnect, reconnect, and try again. Complications aside, its quite fun to take a photo then email it from a park bench or while rolling along in the car.
