2 days ago i switched from my Samsung SGH-E900 to this equally stylish looking Nokia 6500 slide. The E900 had a very shitty 2.0 camera that took equally gut-wrenching pictures during the day and at night. It had an mp3 player and a video player too but the quality wasn't up to par. The best part of this phone was that it was touch-buttons therefore effortlessly scrolling or browsing through this phone was made easy. It was also quite user-friendly except for the sms function that is far worse than Motorola's.

Making the switch from touch-buttons back to solid buttons that require actual force was difficult. Mainly because it's so easy to just move any of your fingertips and tap the button to get the desired result compared to pressing down on the button which also gives you a stiff solid feeling. I'm not complaining. With touch it took you days to get used to it and because of it's sensitivity you could sometimes cancel what you were doing.

Ok, lets talk about the 6500 slide (background story explained )

At first glance when i took my Zitron 6500 slide out of the box i was...whoa. It looks even better in reality compared to the tv and newspaper ads. It's definitely not a girls phone. It's a little big in terms of width,length and depth but in a positive manner because the big screen is fantastic. It's heavy...not sure about the weight but it's rather heavy, but something about it being heavy tells me it's reliable. Inserting the sim card was a challenge. I had no idea how to put it in so i had to consult the manual (new buyers of the phone should too).

The first things i did on the phone was testing the lovely 3.2 megapixel Karl Zeiss camera. The dual-flash, auto-focus, auto-flash and the ability to save the pictures at a whopping 2048x1536 resolution was a big plus. I tried the camera in broad daylight and at night - i could not ask for a better phone in terms of camera quality vs price.

The second thing i tested out was the mp3 player. I installed the Nokia PC Suite and began to transfer some of my favourite songs to the phone. The loudspeaker quality is brilliant and i can only imagine the headphones to be equally impressive. You can video call and what not and browse the internet using an in-built Yahoo program.

Nokia and the great theory of it being user-friendly - definitely false. I have to say that i always thought Nokia phones to be user friendly but comparing it to my old Samsung, it falls very short. When you play a song on the phone and exit the music player program to do other things, there isn't a button to directly stop the song from playing. You have to scroll all the way back (or shortcut your way back) to the music player and then press pause to stop it. There's options, pause and exit. Exit doesn't stop the song just for your information. The menu looks great at first but once you have to tediously scrolled through all sorts of redundant and wrongly categorised functions you'll start to get a little frustrated. There's a shortcut button at the side of your phone for the camera but what really confused me was that nowadays phones are normally bought for the camera and music playing capabilities. Where is the music player side button? The E900 had a mp3 and camera button at the side.

This phone is far from perfect in retrospect to the marketing they are doing for it. The worse part is that if you use your PC Suite to convert videos to .3gp or .mp4 format so that you may transfer it to your phone....it doesn't work....all i get is the audio from the video with no display. The PC Suite is by far one of the worse PC to handphone programs on the planet. To overcome this problem i downloaded MediaCell Mobile Video Convertor. Now i can convert my avi / wmv files with ease.

In conclusion, this phone looks far greater than it is although it can support up to 4 gb external memory. The camera and music player makes up for all the other irritating small quirks.

Pros - Great 3.2 megapixel camera. Brilliant sound quality. Internet capabilities. Video calls. Up to 4 gb external memory. Clear and big screen.
Cons - Not as user friendly as it makes out to be. Alot of redundant functions. Very bad PC to handphone program. Low battery life (up to 1 day and a bit if you use the camera/music player and make/receive calls). Phone interface a little too complicated.

I got this from my friends cousin who is a handphone dealer. AP price ranges from RM 900 to RM 1000. The Zitron that i have cost me RM 1400 with a 1gb memory card included.

Edit: My personal rating for this phone is a 7 out of 10.

This post has been edited by zXc.Bubbles: May 11 2008, 10:23 AM