Just a quick informal review of the Nokia 3250 which I just received recently.

If you’re looking for a more in depth review, then goggle around, or perhaps check out this link.

Yes, this is one of the first of several Nokia phones that has Flash Lite 1.1 pre-installed.

Pre-installed, the magical word that makes Flash Lite developers (well at least those in the US & EMEA regions) giddy.

Of course, Sony Ericsson beat them to the punch (or at least in EMEA region)!

But at first impressions, Nokia’s Flash Lite implementation seems to perform pretty darn well.

I ran Richard’s capabilities .swf and the results are posted on capabilities matrix. You won’t find anything particularly stunning (10-11 fps) … however it’s reassuring that Nokia has what appears to be a decent pre-installed player. The version # reported back seems to be: 5,4,104,4 (u10 runs 5,3,x,x … hmmm, changes?? Probably just tweaks).

The Nokia 3250 is basically a Nokia 3230 with a “Twist” featured bottom (you twist the phone to get to different modes). It also has some refinements, like the 2 MP camera.

It’s also got tri-band GSM/EDGE 900/1800/1900, a 2 MP camera, 10 MB internal memory, dedicated music keys, FM radio, Bluetooth, 10-hours of audio playback, 3.5-milimeter (standard) headphone jack, microSD card memory up to 1 gig, and has a larger set of display colors (292,144 versus 65,536 for the 3230). The display itself is very crisp. Comparable to the u10.

It runs the Symbian 9.x OS (s60 v3), so you’ll find an upgraded browser, as well as Nokia sensor and LifeBlog, other Nokia apps preinstalled. One other quick feature that used to annoy me, was not being able to overwrite files in the inbox. Seems this is not the case in the upgraded OS, hooray!

Click here if you are looking for a complete feature list.

The “twist” factor of the design is neat, but more of a marketing gimick than anything. You can tell by the packaging that they are targeting to crush the other .mp3 phone players out there (Motolora). Twisting the bottom base of the phone gets you to one of three modes: cell/communicator, music, and camera.

I do like the overall form factor of the device. A nice profile, smaller than my 6620, and black in color no less. This will be the second time I’ve had a black Nokia phone. Back in Black? Yes.

The UI is probably the thing I like most about the device itself. It’s easy to navigate, and more responsive (I think) than previous versions of the OS. A while back, Anthony Hand (Nokia), was telling me a lot of the UI is vector based (but not Flash Lite of course).

The next best feature has got to be the sound on this unit. I don’t know how they managed it, but sound quality is excellent for an external speaker. Using the headphones, the sound is great of course too. Also, the sound recorder performs quite well compared to previous Nokia’s I have had.

This phone to me seems like a competitor to the Sony Ericsson W810i (”phone walkmans”) and other similar models.

Overall, this is a nice unit to replace my legacy Nokia 6620, digital camera, and perhaps even my ipod shuffle (we’ll see).

Is it a good phone? Yes, I think so. Is it a killer phone? No … but then again, maybe my mind is clouded by the NTT docomo phone I’ve been playing with.

Anyways, you can read all about it on Nokia’s site.

If anyone is interested in a video of the device, just drop me a comment below, and I’ll try to put something together for this post.

Oh yeah … not sure if it supports Flash Lite 2.0 yet … but perhaps. It’s a zippy little device, and certainly the OS is up to par. Probably just a matter of an upgrade down the road.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Flash, Mobile, flashlite, nokia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.