Hi-Mobile.net sent us in one of the most down-to-earth, powerful and yet no frills, smartphone Nokia ever released, the 6120 Classic. Read on for our review of the SymbianOS S60 v3.1-based smartphone.The 6120 Classic is a quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G phone. The 6120 model supports the 850 (mostly suitable for use with AT&T in USA) and 2100 Mhz 3G bands, while the 6121 model supports 1900 and 2100 Mhz. It uses a 2″ QVGA screen, a microSD slot, 35 MBs of free storage, 64MBs of RAM, 369 Mhz ARM11 CPU, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP/AVRCP support, a 2.5mm audio jack, miniUSB, 2 MP camera with flash, QVGA video-call camera, a Li-Ion 890 mAh battery and an FM stereo radio. On the box we found the phone and its battery, a charger, a user manual, USB data cable, a CD-ROM and a Nokia stereo headset. There was no microSD card included in the package.
The 6120 is an incredibly small phone, considering its “smartphone” heritage. It might very well be the smallest Symbian phone ever. It weighs just 89 gr and it fits perfectly on the palm, or in tight jeans. For those who like their phones to be “just a small phone” and yet they do want some extra features sometimes, this might be the product for them. The only “extra” buttons on the side are the volume buttons and camera. For people with large fingers it might take a bit of time to get used to the thumb-press required to get things done, rather than using your fingernails to do so. I am usually using my finger nails to push buttons, but his phone won’t register finger-pressings on the two softbuttons. You have to press with the whole thumb.
In our tests, the 6120 performed admirably. It had excellent reception, superb voice quality, and it was FAST. This little smartphone surpasses in speed many Symbian phones and even the much respected N95. Where the phone really shines though is battery life. I received the phone 2 weeks ago and yet I had to wait to publish my article because the battery was… refusing to deplete! It averaged about 5 hours of talktime (via plain GSM, 3G was off), and 11 days of standby.
Using the front video-call camera
The 6120 has a bright, beautiful screen, albeit just 2″, which doesn’t make it very suitable for media viewing (even if the phone has h.264 support). We inserted a 2 GB microSD card and it worked very well. We never ran out of RAM, even when browsing large pages, like Slashdot’s. Bluetooth maxed out at around 100 KB/sec, while A2DP worked perfectly with two of our headphone pairs. The miniUSB 2.0 cable allowed us to mount the microSD card directly to our desktop, although you will need to use the charging port and its proprietary cable to charge the phone.
The camera is “ok” for outdoor shots, but pretty bad indoors. It has a pretty powerful flash though, and it can record MP4 QVGA video (sample). The front camera can also snap pictures in QVGA format, plus QCIF 3GP video (sample 1, sample 2). The feature I loved most about this phone though is the “video editor” included. You can place multiple videos and images in sequence in order to “direct” a larger video, right from your phone. The final work is saved as .3GP. It would be perfect if Nokia adds support for “trimming” video clips in the timeline and maybe add 2-3 filter plugins (e.g. color balance).
Regarding applications, there is not much we must say, as it comes with all the usual S60 apps in it: Calendar, Calculator, PTT for Europe, J2ME 2.0 (Opera Mini runs crazy fast), GPS apps, Quickoffice viewer, Adobe PDF, Converter, Music player, Real and Flash player, IM, MSN support and more. Overall, this phone has been themed as an “Internet” phone, as it has some extra apps in it that are nothing but links to web sites.
One thing that I really did not like though was the fact that it came with SIP/VoIP configuration and server-registering support in the Settings, but no way to dial via it. Sure, 3G calls have latency problems compared to WiFi ones, but still, it would have been a nice feature.
Overall though, this is one of the best, smallest, to-the-point smartphones ever released. And for less than $290, it’s a steal.
Pros:
* Battery life
* BT 2.0 w/ A2DP support
* Dual-band 3G, quad-band GSM
* Video editor
Cons:
* No WiFi
* Half-implemented VoIP SIP
Rating: 9/10
Nice pics!!! O_o
Nice review!
This is OT, but I have to ask, since Eugenia seems an expert on phones
:
What do you think of the SE K610i?
Last week, I saw it for sale with a SIM card that had 3,129 minutes for free, for a bit less than $200.
I did some research on it, and it has most features I use, a good web browser (Netfront 3.3, is it actually any good?) and higher Java performance than the 6120, according to JBenchmark (except for the 3D, 6120 is a bit higher here), which is good since I like playing some games on my phone every now and then
I’m asking this, because the last phone I bought had lots of problems even though I researched it.
And how do you think the K610i compares to the 6120?
Does the difference in functionality between them justify the price?
Thanks.
Edited 2007-09-05 00:10 UTC
I don’t see anywhere the K610. I see the W610 and Z610, but I can’t find anything about the K one.
Edit: I found it. So, it’s not as powerful as the Nokia one. It has a lower-res screen, and it’s not a smartphone.
Edited 2007-09-05 01:14
I’m not terribly familiar with Symbian phones: does the phone’s Calendar application sync events/tasks/etc with Outlook ’07, and if so, what sort of desktop sync software is used?
Yes. You install the Nokia Suite and then it goes through it.
I’ve only had basic Nokia bricks. Is there any Linux support for syncing Symbian phones?
I have recently got Nokia E50 (with Symbian S60v3) and after some fiddling I’ve got it to sync with Evolution via Bluetooth thanks to this howto (for Ubuntu) http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=260676
Thanks.
Why not use Mail4Exchange ? It’s available in the Software Catalog on the phone for free.
The specs & features are impressive and the price is very attractive.
I have an HTC Wizard (Cingular/AT&T 8125) and even though it has a larger screen & does WIFI, it doesn’t have 3G. This Nokia 6120 smartphone may have a smaller screen and no WIFI, but DOES have 3G capability.
The price, 3G capability & other features would seem to put it as a good contender, IMO.
I have to say that the pics in the review looked pretty darn clear & nice.
Though the review may be considered Off-Topic, it’s nice to see some variety regarding other aspects of technology, including little gadgets.
> The price, 3G capability & other features would seem to put it as a good contender, IMO.
I think it’s one of the best current Nokia sellers.
>Though the review may be considered Off-Topic
It ain’t.
OSAlert is a generic tech site, not just OS news. It’s written in the mission statement.
Phones run on/rely on OSes too!
I waited for this phone to appear for months, I really wanted to buy it for myself as a birthday present.
But in the last few weeks quite a few people are complaining about it, the keys on the keyboard get loose somehow, the battery cover get loose, the phone heats up when you talk for a while, quite a few of the phones have died in the first few weeks for no reason, and it has a high SAR value for a modern phone.
So now I don’t really know it it is such a good phone, I think I’ll just wait a while longer to see what happens.
Cheers
Mine still works… Also, the build quality is better than N95’s in my opinion.
Ok would you mind if were to annoy you with an email in a couple of weeks to ask if you still like it then
I will likely not be using it in two weeks time. After I finish my reviews I don’t usually re-use these phones, I just package them back and put them in my lab’s closet. So, your best bet would be to ask the users at my-symbian.com
I can not comment about the US versions, but the european version does HSDPA, so it is a very nice phone to use for data as well…
About Symbian, how “hacker-friendly” is Symbian? I’ve been looking for a phone that I can write my own software for easily, and being held back by the software as little as possible (ie: not iPhone).
To run your own homebrew software you have to get certified or your phone will refuse to run them. There’s also Python for S60, see http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/index.html
You don’t need certification unless your program wants to mess with system files.
Not true, or at best a half-truth.
To see the rest, go to
http://developer.sonyericsson.com/site/global/gotomarket/certificat…
or the corresponding Nokia / SymbianSigned sites.
Get. An. iPhone.
The hacking-unfriendliness of the iPhone is completely overrated. If you actually intend to do *any* kind of hacking, you’ll have to get your hands dirty anyway.
The Symbian development tools suck. No half-words. Carbide is just ridiculous. CodeWarrior will set you back a considerable amount of cash. Visual Studio plus Symbian SDK is OK, almost decent, but still not decent. But that’s on a IDE level. API-level, you’ve got to be kidding me by not going iPhone. Look at what the guys already accomplished by using AJAX. Look at what the guys already accomplished by not using AJAX and going straight to the jailbreak/UIKit process.
Not to mention how Nokia always ships a couple of revisions behind SymbianOS, and only recently SymbianOS began supporting memory paging (which, I suspect, is the reason why Eugenia didn’t run out of RAM when browsing sites that usually put the S60 browser to shame). And Nokia *never*, ever, released a new OS to use on an “older” phone. I, a Nokia E70 owner, am stuck with a broken 3.0 firmware, and that’s because I forced my phone to report being of a different region that it actually is. And yes, I’m putting up with the crazied keyboard layout, because the 2.0 firmware is unbearable.
Consider that Apple isn’t focusing on an entire line of phones; only the iPhone (and I hope that this won’t change in today’s announcement; but we’ll know what happens in the next 3h). Whatever Apple does, I won’t change my stance: programming using the Cocoa APIs is incomparable to S60/UIQ/Symbian in general. The Symbian Signed stuff sucks to untold extremes. Homebrew has been extremely limited by it, and lo and behold, it hasn’t prevented any kind of cracking at all — not even limited it! –, because almost every vendor is locked to the same lowest common denominator of plain “self-signed dev certificates”. Which defeats the whole purpose.
Symbian’s trusted levels are all about media DRM, which completely failed to materialise. There’s the occasional rambling on Nokia music stores, but has anyone ever cared about it at all?
And we already have Apple committed to releasing real software improvements in a timely fashion. They even changed their usual accounting process to deal with this. Apple-blessed native software development is only a matter of time now, as the demand is clearly there and Apple hasn’t risen from the ashes by not listening to their customers and developers. They even softened their position regarding un-supporting Carbon64 after a number of developers expressed their concerns.
IMH, but first-hand opinion, your safest bet is anything but Symbian-related stuff. Go Windows Mobile if you will, but not Symbian. And I strongly suggest you to go iPhone, money permitting.
I have been using this phone for more than a month. Very impressive. The camera is a bit below average, but everything else is nearly perfect. Slim, fast, HSDPA is real fast, voice quality is top-notch, screen is beautiful, and it is stable, no hangs/reboots/whatever.
The only problem is that when I play H264/AAC movies on it at higher frame rates (25fps), it skips. At 20 or 15 fps, it is OK. Somebody on the net says this is because the phone, unlike N73, does not do hardware AAC decoding. I don’t know if this is real.
T-Mobile does not have (and probably won’t have) UMTS on 1900. Their UMTS is going to be on 1700
at&t UMTS operates on 1900 and 850
I like the fact that it’s fast and small and has some handy features, but come on! When is Nokia going to hire a decent designer. Almost all their phones look like crap. Samsung, LG and Motorola wipe the floor with them when it comes to design.
Some freeware for this phone http://symbiancorner.blogspot.com
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