Most of you will surely have seen the advert for the Nokia 6500 Classic recently, where hundreds of commuters, seduced by its looks converge on a lost + found office at a station, to claim it as their own.
This commercial clearly highlights the main selling point of the 6500 Classic – looks. This is mainly down to the anodized aluminium casing which envelopes the whole of the body making the way the back-cover fits around the body absolutely seamless. Considering the size of the phone (it’s only 9.5mm thick) it’s quite astonishing the amount of features that have been incorporated. The main attractions are a 16M colour QVGA display, micro USB port, 3G data transfer support (w/o video call camera) and 1GB of in-built memory.
The construction of the 6500 Classic does feel very solid, but if you compare it to the 6300 on which it’s based on, the 6500 is slightly heavier. This does come as something of a surprise considering the difference in size between the two, but on hindsight this is almost certainly to do with the anodized aluminium casing used on the majority of the 6500 Classic’s body.
The silver trim that runs between each of the alphanumeric keys horizontally does add to the overall look of the 6500 Classic, but “helps” in limiting the usability of the keypad. This is due in part to each of the alphanumeric keys being entirely flat; meaning that texting without the occasional glance at the keypad is a little tricky. On the positive side, the D-pad and soft keys are very comfortable and do go some way into making up for the issues with the keypad.
One drawback is the lack of an option to expand the memory beyond the 1GB internal due to the lack of an SD slot. The lack of ability to make video calls is unlikely to be a problem for most people (myself included) though, as generally the best use of 3G technology is for data transfer, but a limit of 1GB memory will inevitably hold many users back. The back cover is worthy of a little criticism too, due to the immense difficulty I had in removing it. This problem is due to the sleekness of the casing and obviously isn’t meant to be removed that often, but is still something of an issue nonetheless.
With Nokia’s well-known qualifications in user-friendliness, I expected the 6500 Classic to take over from the 6300, but the problems with the keypad and inability to expand the memory do let it down a little. For a less money, you can get the Nokia 6300 which has similar capabilities (excluding 3G data speeds) but isn’t quite as visually appealing as the 6500 Classic.
Like a lot of others, the looks of this phone did blow me away, but once I’d had chance to use the handset properly, I discovered that it’s a very capable mid-range phone with some good points, but is let down by some design flaws and inflexible memory capacity.
If you’re looking for a visually appealing handset with standard features and you’re not a heavy memory user, the 6500 Classic is an ideal choice, but my recommendation would be to try one out in-store, as it won’t be for everyone.
The Nokia 6500 Classic is available on a variety of mobile phone offers on all networks
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