The Nokia 6310i is designed for professionals who want to be connected to anything, anywhere. It has tri-band GSM, at 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz, which is fantastic if you travel to places which use a different GSM technology, and useless if you don't.
The phone does not support MMS or have a colour screen. Everything else you can reasonably expect in a mobile phone is included. At 103 g and 129 mm long, this phone isn't the smallest around but it's no brick, either. It actually looks quite good.
The 12 key keypad is laid out normally, with the buttons made of a shiny plastic that sometimes caused our thumbs to slip. Improvements could be made with the more common rubber 'sticky' surface. Then there's the two soft keys, the up and down keys and the answer/reject keys. Volume is controlled by two buttons on the side, and the power button is on the top of the phone, near the IR port.
From a connectivity viewpoint, it would be hard to beat the 6310i. As well as WAP and GPRS, the phone supports HSCSD, or High Speed Circuit Switched Data. This is designed to connect to a laptop or PDA via Bluetooth or Infra Red (which the phone also has, of course) and is supports data transfer speeds up to 42.3 kbps.
WAP is also used for the Wallet, which allows you to store credit card and loyalty card details and use them to pay at a WAP enabled store. We'd advise going for the upper end of the four to ten character long password, because in addition to credit card details you can also store your address, as shipping information, and possibly your work address if you want the bill sent to them.
You can also store personal notes in your wallet, though why they need to be in this password-protected section of the phone we're not sure.
As with most phones these days the 6310i comes with its own PC software, which consists of synchronisation functions, a graphics creator and a composer.
The composer is the best we've ever seen for a mobile. It comes up with a stave, and you can drag various notes there with the mouse or use the keyboard to key in tunes. This is far easier than trying to guess the correct buttons on the phone to press, and if we weren't such IT geeks we could probably have done something remarkable with it. As it was we were greatly impressed with the tune we created, but no one recognised it.
The 6310i also supports downloading java applications. The applications already included on the phone include a converter for temperature, currency and measurements, and a world clock.
Extra games can be downloaded via WAP and are filed in the games/more games menu. The one that's included is Racket, which is basically table tennis. The "normal" games included are Space Impact, Bumper and Snake II, which you can play against an opponent using the IR port.
The phone scores highly on basic functionality. We found call clarity to be excellent, and the voice dial/command function also worked well. The 6310i has speed dialling, and the ability to make conference calls.
The Messages menu is one of the most comprehensive we've seen, with the Archive and My Folders sections that make keeping and sorting SMS messages a lot easier. In addition you can listen to Voice Messages and send e-mail, via GPRS. The Message Settings can be changed to allow you send your messages as text, fax, e-mail or paging, and to send messages via GPRS, among other things.
We were really impressed with the battery life of this phone, with it lasting well over a week of normal usage, just over nine days without recharging.
All in all, this is one of the best value phones we've seen in quite a while. If you're into the latest gadgets you'll go for a higher-end phone, possibly incorporating a camera, and if you just want to talk and SMS the 3510 will do you fine. If you want strong connectivity without fancy gadgets, for AU$699 this could be the phone you're looking for.
Nokia 6310i
Company: Nokia
Price: AU$699
Distributor: Nokia
Phone: 1300 366 733
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