The Nokia 3250 is one radical looking phone. The most unique feature of the 3250 is its innovative swiveling keypad, which rotates 90 degrees to transform the handset into camera mode, and 180 degrees to transform it into a music player - revealing the four dedicated music buttons. Sporting a 2.0 megapixel camera, the Nokia 3250 is a triband (900/1800/1900MHz) phone with support for EDGE networks. It comes with a 512MB microSD card in the box, and a remote control with in-ear canal earphones.
Physical Aspects
The Nokia 3250 is quite an unattractive phone. It is thick, and its design just seems uninspired; it makes me feel like I am holding a brick in my hands. The entire phone is made out of plastic, and some parts felt cheap. However, our review unit did not present any creaks or squeaks, and the swiveling mechanism was solidly made. What I did not like about the 3250 was the amount of glossy surfaces used. The entire back of the phone was glossy, which made it impossible to keep clean, and photographing it was extremely difficult.
The front of the Nokia 3250 looks just like the 3230. The keypad layout and design are very similar. Just below the display, you will find the navigation joystick. The joystick is flanked on the left by the left selection key, call key, and menu key and to the right are the right selection key, end key, clear key, and edit key. Like the 3230, these keys are all squeezed into one cramped space, making them rigid and uncomfortable to use, especially the bead sized clear and edit buttons. The joystick felt stiff and my thumb felt sore after a few minutes of use.
To the right of the phone, you will find the familiar Pop-port connector alongside the charging port. This awkward position of the Pop-port made placing the phone in your pocket almost impossible with a headset attached unless you placed it horizontally. To the left of the handset, you will find the 2 megapixel camera located on the side of the swiveling keypad. The top houses the power button and the bottom contains the loudspeaker. There is nothing on the back except for the four dedicated music buttons - previous track, play/pause, stop, and next track. These buttons will only work when in music mode or camera mode, where the previous track key also doubles as the zoom out button, the next track key as the zoom in button, and the play/pause key as the camera shutter button. The play/pause key is clad in chrome.
Swiveling the keypad to camera mode will reveal the location of the microSD memory card slot. The microSD card slot was so well hidden I could not find it without consulting the manual. It is located just below the call key, in between the display and keypad portions of the 3250. As you can see from the photos I have taken, the size of the microSD card also made it a difficult task to swap cards at that absurd location.
The white backlit keypad is adequately large and comfortable to use. Unlike the 3230, the 3250's keypad does not wobble and gives good feedback. I have no complaints about the keypad.
Measuring 103.8mm x 50mm x 19.8mm (4.09" x 1.97" x 0.78") and weighing 115g (4.06oz), the Nokia 3250 isn't exactly a heavy phone, but its dimensions and design make it look like a brick. I would have preferred a more streamlined design with sleeker lines. Nevertheless, it is still quite an innovative idea by Nokia to include the music control buttons on a phone without a slider design like the one found on the N91.
Multimedia
The main display on the 3250 is the same old 176x208 pixel resolution screen capable of displaying up to 262k colors. The new fonts found in the new Symbian OS need a higher resolution screen to really shine, they look blocky on the 3250. The screen is sharp and is readable under harsh sunlight though.
Twisting the keypad 90 degrees activates the camera mode. The camera on the 3250 does not have an auto focus mechanism. The Nokia 3250 can capture images in three different resolutions - 1600x1200, 1152x864, and 640x480. The 4x digital zoom is pretty worthless, as the 3250 does not crop images when zooming. The end result is blurred and noisy images.
The menu system in the 3250's camera function looks dated and not as user friendly as the ones found on recent S60 phones. Unlike the intuitive and user-friendly menus found on the recently reviewed N71, accessing any option has to be done by first clicking on the left soft key. The white balance options cover most of the situations that you could expect to encounter - Automatic, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, and Fluorescent. The Automatic white balance option worked very well, delivering spot-on color all the time. However, there is no macro mode in the 3250, and this makes it impossible to snap close-up pictures.
The Nokia 3250 records videos in two resolutions - 176x144 and 128x96 pixel resolution stored in 3GP format. Users can record in two different lengths - short and maximum. Unfortunately, the maximum length is only an hour's worth of recording. This is disappointing, since 512MB of external memory could have easily stored more than an hour's worth of video. A mute function allows you to turn off the microphone when recording a clip. Users can also toy with white balance (Automatic, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, and Fluorescent, as with still shots) and color tone (Normal, Sepia, Black & White, and Negative).
Overall, the pictures taken with the 3250 were of decent quality. Some outdoor shots were actually pretty good, provided that there was enough lighting. Indoor shots suffered in terms of sharpness, and there were quite high levels of noise when pictures were taken indoors with artificial lighting. If you are lucky, some of the pictures might be good enough for print.
The 3250 was designed to be a music phone, though unfortunately the music player application included is the standard one found on all the latest 3rd Edition S60 phones. Transferring your music files can be done via the Pop-port connector, which has USB 2.0 support. The 3250 will first ask you to select one of three modes - Media Player, PC Suite, or Data Transfer. PC Suite mode will allow you to synchronize your contacts and information along with your music files via Nokia's PC Suite application found on the CD in the sales package. Data Transfer lets you access the external memory card, allowing you to just click and drag the music files you want. Media Player mode is where the 3250 works seamlessly with Windows Media Player (WMP). After installing a driver found on the CD, the 3250 will be recognized as a music device by WMP, and you will be able to synchronize your music files easily between phone and PC.
The 3250 worked well with WMP. Automatic playlists can be created via WMP, and there is a Shuffle feature where WMP will randomly select the songs to fill up the 512MB of space. This works somewhat like the iPod Shuffle and is a great way to randomly select songs if you have a library that is much larger than the size of your memory card. One problem with WMP is that by default your MP3 files will be converted into WMA format before being transferred over. Although conversion takes place on the fly and does not affect your original files, this conversion consumes a lot of time even when you have only 512MB worth of music. The option to change this behavior is a little buried, and may be missed by some users.
There are three automatic track lists on the 3250 - most played tracks, recent tracks, and recent additions. Any additional automatic track lists will have to be set via WMP and synchronized over. There is the usual repeat and shuffle modes, and the music menu allows you to browse through your library by song names, artists, albums, genres, and composers. If you want to run other tasks while playing music, just swivel the keypad back to its original position and you will be brought to the standby screen. Please note that the music buttons will not work when swiveled this way, only the numerical keypad functions are active.
Sound quality was fair with the included remote control and in-ear canal earphones. The 3250 was weak in the bass department but overall it was acceptable. When I used my Sennheiser PX100s to listen with the 3250, it still lacked clarity but bass improved tremendously. A five band equalizer can be tweaked to improve sound reproduction. Overall, the 3250 sounded decent.
The 3250 also comes with the Nokia FM Visual Radio player, which takes advantage of a GPRS/EDGE data connection to pull down information from participating radio stations around the world, providing the 3250 user with visual and textual information on the artist and song that is playing over the FM radio. Currently, none of the stations in my area support this service, so I am not able to report on this.
User Interface
The Nokia 3250 was one of the first few handsets released to run on the latest 3rd Edition of the S60 user interface. The UI speed is markedly improved over previous S60 phones like the N70. I have always complained about the sluggishness of the S60 user interface, but with the 3rd Edition, things just seem much faster, although I would be lying if I said there was no lag at all.
Pressing the dedicated menu button on the right side of the phone brings up a 3x4 icon grid main menu. The icons are smaller than in previous S60 editions, and because of the lower resolution screen, they look pixilated and blocky. This time, the *, 0, and # keys are also linked to the fourth row of icons, resulting in the keypad being linked to the top 12 icons in the main menu. The keys even work when you have scrolled further down in the menu. Icons and folders can be arranged as you please, though you still cannot create a subfolder in a folder.
In standby mode, the 3250 includes the Active Standby feature, which is a line of application shortcuts as well as a list of upcoming calendar appointments displayed on the standby screen. The 3rd Edition S60 adds an extra icon to the list, so now you get to customize six application shortcuts to your liking instead of just five. You use the joystick to navigate through the six application shortcuts and upcoming appointments. Clicking on a calendar appointment will bring you to the Calendar application, showing you the full details of your appointment. If music is playing in the background, you will be able to see the song title just below the Calendar appointments section on the Active Standby screen. Highlighting this section of the Active Standby and clicking on the joystick will bring you to the music player application.
If you do not like this new Active Standby feature, you can always turn it off in the Settings menu. With it turned off, you can press on the five different directions of the D-Pad to launch different applications. The directional shortcuts can be customized to your liking, as can the left and right selection keys.
Phone Functionality
The 3250 worked as expected during calls, delivering excellent voice quality, and I did not experience any dropped calls or poor reception. The volume of the earpiece was adequate - not deafening and not too soft. I primarily use the GSM 1800MHz band, but when tested, the 3250 also performed well in the 900MHz band. I have no complaints here.
Like all previous S60 phones, the 3250 has a nice profile system. There are a number of default profiles available, and you can create your own if you wish. However, support for timed profiles is still missing, but otherwise the profile management is quite good. You can link each profile to one or more groups of contacts, so that the ringer is disabled if the caller is not a member of the appropriate group. The 3250 also has an Offline profile, enabling you to use the 3250 in areas where wireless phone use is prohibited, e.g. in an airplane. Another cool feature of this Offline profile is that you can even use the 3250 without a SIM card. This will allow access to the 3250's multimedia functions anywhere and anytime.
Battery life was fair. The phone lasted about 3 days before having to be recharged. This was with roughly 30 minutes of calls each day and quite a lot of SMS messaging, taking pictures, and GPRS usage. The 3250 lasted for 9 hours and 56 minutes when playing music with the wireless radio turned on but without making any calls and with the screen backlight turned off. Basically, I left the phone playing music in Shuffle mode and with the volume at 50%. Although this is almost impossible in real world situations, at least Nokia's claim of the 3250 achieving up to 10 hours of music play is true.
The 3250, like most recent S60 phones, supports speaker independent voice recognition technology, so there is no longer a need to pre-record voice tags. Just say the name of your contact and it will be recognized. The same applies to voice commands (choosing a profile, connecting to the voice mailbox, activating Bluetooth, opening Voice Recorder, or launching any other application). It worked pretty well with English names, however I had the same old problem of the phone failing to recognize most Asian names.
Connectivity
The Nokia 3250 supports GPRS and EDGE networks where available. It has Bluetooth v1.2 but no Infrared port. Setting up for GPRS was easy, as you just have to choose from a list of service providers, and everything will be set up accordingly.
The Bluetooth system in the 3250 is version 1.2 and it works well. It supports the PC Suite, Headset and Hands Free, OBEX access, and Dial-Up Networking profiles. I encountered no problems at all during the three weeks that I used the 3250.
USB data connectivity also allowed the 3250 to be used as a modem with your laptop or PC. Transferring music files via the USB data cable had average speeds, and I was able to achieve much faster speeds when using a card reader. However, you will not be able to create automatic track list with this method of transfer.
Messaging
The 3250's email client supports both POP and IMAP protocols. Creating a new message is simple, as is attaching a file of just about any type. You can define multiple email accounts, and the 3250 features automatic retrieval of messages. You can schedule it to retrieve email automatically on any day of the week, at any time. T9 can be used when typing out emails, SMS, and MMS. Text input was fast and there was no noticeable lag.
The SMS system works flawlessly. Instead of clicking on the recipient's name field to access your contact list, you can easily multi-tap the letters of the intended recipient's name. The 3250 will then pop up a list of all the names beginning with those letters, and you can just select the right one. Confirmation receipts pop up briefly on the display before being stored in a separate folder. New words can be added to the dictionary, and the system was fast enough to catch up with my typing. If you type in a word that isn't already in the dictionary, it will be saved automatically. The bad news is if you accidentally misspell a word, you have no way of removing or correcting it.
Applications
The 3250 comes with Nokia's new web browser. Websites are rendered the way they were meant to be, so what you usually see on your desktop will appear just the same way on this fantastic new browser. A transparent window called the Mini map helps you tell where you are on the page when moving the pointer around. When pressing back, you will be shown thumbnails of all the previous pages found in the cache. This helps you to visually select the page you want to go back to. An odd thing about the 3250 is that Nokia has included both the old web browser along with this next generation web browser. It was quite confusing at first since the icons for both browsers were almost identical.
The fully featured calendar application is much like the ones found in earlier S60 devices. New appointments of several different types can be created. Start and end times and dates can be set, where appropriate, and alarms can be configured to remind you before the appointment takes place. The calendar can be viewed in either month or week view, and when a particular date is highlighted by navigating with the joystick, the appointments contained therein will be listed at the top of the screen in a small popup box.
Apart from that, you will find things such as a clock with an alarm, Nokia's LifeBlog, and a dictionary. Quickoffice applications commonly seen in previous S60 phones are absent in the 3250. This is understandable, as the 3250 was designed as a music phone and not for business users. Our review unit came with only one game, a 3D version of Snake that was pretty fun to play with, since it now includes quests and hexagonal maps instead of the old boring squares.
Conclusion
The Nokia 3250 isn't really a breakthrough device. Unlike the N91, which works and sounds as good as a dedicated music player, the 3250 feels like a sloppy piece of work. If Nokia had put more effort into designing a better music player application instead of just sticking with the usual S60 player, the 3250 might have been a more complete music phone. Instead, Nokia decided to slap a radical twister design with music buttons onto an existing S60 phone and label it a music phone. Yes, it might sound unfair since the 3250 is priced at half of that of the N91, but the 3250 was designed to be a music phone, not merely a music playing S60 device. Every other S60 device can handle MP3s with ease, so what is so special about the 3250?
If you are on the look out for a music phone with dedicated music buttons running on Symbian, the Nokia 3250 receives a Recommended rating from me. However, if you do not need the Symbian OS, the Sony Ericsson W810i might just be a more attractive option with a sleeker and sexier design along with a much better camera.
