Despite the "ring of fire" keypad, the Nokia 3650 has some fantastic--and relatively unique--features. This is definitely worth a perusal for those looking at the high-end mobile market.
The Nokia 3650 is one of those mobiles that appears to be different just for the sake of being different--in this case by having its number keys aligned in a circle. Despite this, there are some nifty things the 3650 has that may make it worth the purchase--things such as a video camera.
Apart from having the keypad in a circle--which achieves its aim of being eye-catching but couples it with being annoying--the layout of the keys on the 3650 is pretty useful. There are the normal answer call and reject call keys, two softkeys and a clear key. These are joined by a dedicated menu key and a 'text' key, which is used to bring up options when entering text. There is also a five-way dial, used to navigate around the menu.
The screen of the 3650 is quite impressive, with 4,096 colours and 176 x 208 pixels. We're not sure why, but the 3650 screen seemed to be clearer and brighter than the P800, even though they have the same colour range.
The big drawcard of the 3650 has got to be the video camera embedded in the phone. While there are a lot of mobile phones on the market with an inbuilt digital camera these days, an inbuilt digital video camera is still enough of a rarity to attract attention. The video quality is not good enough to send into Tropfest, being basically a bunch of mobile phone-camera images strung together, but it's still pretty cool. It can record up to 15 seconds of footage, but unfortunately you don't get sound.
The phone comes with a number of cheesy video clips and animated images included, covering almost every occasion you can think of. There is also the capability to capture a still image from a video, which is a neat feature.
The video camera doubles as a normal digital camera with three modes--standard, night and portrait. The standard mode takes pictures of 160x120 pixels, the night mode the same but using a longer exposure for dimmer conditions. This is useful because the 3650 shares a common trait with most mobile phone-cameras in that it doesn't have a flash. The portrait mode takes pictures at 80x90 pixels, which can be included in the contact book.
The phone has about 3 Mb of storage for images, which equates to 55 standard images at low quality, or 15 standard images using the highest quality. The high quality images are captured at 640x480 pixels.
From a messaging viewpoint the 3650 has all the right features--SMS, MMS and e-mail--but the wheel arrangement of the keypad made entering text quite a struggle.
Images can be transferred to your computer via MMS and e-mail, if you wish, and the phone also comes with Infrared and Bluetooth capabilities. Each picture has to be transferred across individually: We think it would be a lot better if you could select all the pictures you wanted to transfer and do it in one hit.
We found the calendar on the 3650 to be very useful and easy to use, as well as looking good. The phone includes a Real One Player, for music and videos, and an applications folder to download Java applications to.
The 'extras' folder includes the usual suspects: calculator, currency/metric converter, alarm clock and so on. The phone has a 'recorder' function allowing the recording of soundclips, telephone calls and voice memos. The sound quality is good enough to understand what is being said, but not great.
One feature that should be highlighted is the composer, which allows you to create your own ringtones. When this feature first came out our complaint was that the program was so difficult to use that in order to create anything close to a musical ringtone you needed to be a mutant hybrid of Mozart and Linus Torvalds. The 'composer' programs have improved over the past year, and that of the 3650 is probably the easiest one to use we've come across. You can highlight notes to change them--without having to delete them and re-enter something different--and the program has features allowing you to delete notes from the middle of the piece while leaving notes afterwards intact, and even to copy sections of the music if you plan to reuse them.
Additionally, rather than the harsh tones resonating of silicon that normally come out of these programs, the 3650 plays the tunes with a gentle sound resembling a woodwind instrument.
There are two games included with the Nokia 3650 and the phone has the ability to download further Java-based games. The first game is 'Snake Ex', a enhanced form of Nokia's standard Snake game with added powerups and constantly changing mazes.
The other game is 'Mix Pix', which gives you pictures divided into squares that have been jumbled up, and you have to rearrange them to get the proper picture either by sliding squares into a gap or swapping tiles. By far the big drawcard of this game was the ability to create new games using your own pictures. It isn't any more challenging, but there's something ego gratifying about slowly piecing a picture of yourself back together. It gives you the impression you may be able to put the shattered pieces of your life together into a meaningful whole. Did we say that out loud?
All up, we found the Nokia 3650 to be a good phone with a number of useful and reasonably unique features. If you're not put off by the keypad and want a high quality screen with a video camera on a GSM phone, this mobile is definitely for you.
Nokia 3650
Company: Nokia
Price: AU$999
Distributor: Nokia
Phone: 1300 366 733
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