| Nokia 7250i |
| General |
| Network | Gsm 900 / Gsm 1800 / Gsm 1900 |
| Announced | 2003, June |
| Status | Available |
| Size |
| Dimensions | 105 X 44 X 19 Mm, 73 Cc |
| Weight | 92 G |
| Display |
| Type | Cstn, 4096 Colors |
| Size | 128 X 128 Pixels, 8 Lines |
| | - Wallpapers
- Digital Clock Screensaver
- Dynamic Font Size
- Softkey |
| Ringtones |
| Type | Polyphonic (4 Channels), Monophonic |
| Amount | 21 Poly + 10 Mono + Custom |
| Customization | Download, |
| Vibration | Yes |
| | - Ascending Ringing Tones
- Personal Alert Tones
|
| Memory |
| Phonebook | 500 X 3 Numbers, Photo Call |
| Call Records | 20 Dialed, 10 Received, 10 Missed Calls |
| Card Slot | No |
| | In 4 Mb User Memory
- Phonebook
- 150 Text Messages
- 250 Calendar Notes
- 30 To-do Entries
in 3.5 Mb Memory Pool
- Mms, Max 45 Kb Each
- Custom Ringtones
- Images, 10 Preset
- Java Apps |
| Data |
| Gprs | Class 4 (3+1 Slots), 24 - 36 Kbps |
| Hscsd | Yes, 43.2 Kbps |
| Edge | No |
| 3g | No |
| Wlan | No |
| Bluetooth | No |
| Infrared Port | Yes |
| Usb | |
| Features |
| Messaging | Sms, Enhanced Mms |
| Browser | Wap 1.2.1, Xhtml |
| Clock | Yes |
| Alarm | Yes |
| Games | Triple Pop And Bounce + Java, |
| Colors | Blue, Plum, Brown, Olive, Grey, Green |
| Languages | Major European Languages |
| Camera | Cif, 352 X 288 Pixels, Night Mode |
| | - Java
- Stereo Fm Radio
- T9
- Syncml
- Calculator
- Stopwatch
- Calendar
- Image Editor
- Xpress-on Covers
- Profiles |
| Battery |
| | Standard, Li-ion 780 Mah (bld-3) |
| Stand-by | Up To 150 - 300 H |
| Talk Time | Up To 2 - 5 H |
|
Nokia - 7250iEye-to-Eye with the Nokia 7250i
Major features
Tri-band compatibility
4,096-colour LCD display @ 128 x 128 pixels
Integrated CIF digital camera, with digital zoom
Data-cable and Infra-red connectivity
FM Stereo Radio/Alarm Radio
Picture caller identification for up to 100 contacts
Hands free speaker phone
Concatenation support for SMS/EMS, MMS and E-mail
4 Chord Poly-phonic ring-tones, with monophonic ring-tone support
xHTML Browser
4mB shared memory
Sales package (should contain):
1 x Nokia 7250i handset
1 x Li-Ion battery @ 780 mAh (BLD-3)
1 x Travel charger (ACP-12)
1 x Pop-port stereo headset
1 x Nokia 7250i user manual
1 x MMS quick setup guide
Overview
Introduction
Finally, a Nokia phone with an integrated digital camera! All the Nokia fans out there have been waiting for it ever since other companies started releasing integrated camera, and now they have it.
The Nokia 7250i is an enhanced version of the Nokia 7250, with only a few new software features.
New/outstanding features
The Nokia 7250i is part of Nokia’s series 40 set of phones. New features that are not available in the 7250 is the ability to zoom in on taken photos (digital, not optical zoom), to send enhanced MMS messages and an xHTML browser for a better mobile browsing experience.
The best feature is the integrated CIF camera. It has the ability to take two types of photos, portrait and normal, along with a ‘night’ mode. The camera has a maximum resolution of 352 x 288, which is the resolution that the camera takes pictures at the normal setting.. Higher quality images in up to the size of a VGA camera image (640 x 480 pixels) can be scaled down and shown on the Nokia 7250i. These photos can them be instantly sent to friends and family via MMS or e-mail.
Along with these new features, the 7250i has the ability to send email and MMS, listen to the radio, put important appointments into the calendar, and always be on time! You can also set the alarm to tune into the radio, and with the predictive text input included, typing and sending MMS/SMS’s is extremely easy. The long list of features for the handset include a HSCSD, a wallet over xHTML, hands-free speaker, downloadable applications and Java™ games, colour schemes, a calculator with currency converter, a stopwatch and countdown timer, and a new, visually provocative design.
4mB is the total memory pool that s provided on the 7250i, with a shared memory of 3.5mB for MMS messages, ringing tones, Java™ games and applications, and images. The rest of the memory is used for phone-book entries, SMS messages (which can also be stored on the SIM card), and Calender notes/To-Do list notes.
Physical aspects
The Nokia 7250i is boasted by Nokia as having a “new, provocative design” with smooth curves and easy lines. The key mat is also very easy to use, as the buttons are set out neatly, and spaced apart, so even those with larger thumbs can use the phone with ease. =)
Only a small amount longer than the Nokia 6610, the Nokia 7250i has the dimensions 105 x 44 x 99mm, and weighs a cool 92grams, including the battery. It is small enough to fit in your shirt or pants pocket, and in a small bag. The phone has a very new-age feel about it, and is available in several metallic colours. The sales package should contain the handset in metallic Plum, Green, Grey, or Blue. This of course can then be changed with the use of an Xpress-on™ back and front cover. Alike all Nokia’s now-a-days, the antenna is internal.
On the left side of the phone there is a volume control, alike the 6610. Opposite side is the microphone, which also acts as a speaker when previewing Midi’s via the gallery. On the 7250i, the volume cannot be changed by pressing the up/down buttons during a call, as these are now shortcuts for starting the camera and going to your contacts respectively.
The standard keypad for Nokia is used, with numbers 0 to 9, * and #, directional keys (left, up, right, down), pick-up/hang-up buttons, and two selection keys. This set out is becoming quite common among all different brands and models throughout the mobile phone range.
The most noticeable change in the keypad design is not the numbers; it’s the hang-up/pick-up section of the buttons. This section has the directional keys, and the selection keys. They are now on a slant compared to the 6610, and the left and right keys are now closer to the up directional key. The keys are however much easier to use.
Although metallic, the colour (not black) of the Xpress-on™ covers are slightly rougher than the black part of it, so it’s much easier to hold when talking, and won’t slip in your hands.
User Interface & display
Because the Nokia 7250i is a series 40 phone, it the user-interface is much the same as the Nokia 6610 and 5100, etc.
Take a closer look!
A simple press of the left selection button opens up the menu, where everything is easily displayed by scrolling through. The messages menu is firstly displayed, because it is most used. You can then access multi-media messages (MMS) or Text messages (SMS). Like other Nokia phones, if you know what number the menu is you want to go to, you can press the menu button and then the number. For example, pressing menu then 1-0-1 will quickly get you into the list of Java games available on your phone. There is also a new menu called “Connectivity” where you can enable Infra-red or check your GPRS settings. In the “Extras” option you can access your calculator and stopwatch.
The 7250i has the ability to set out all the menus in a icon form, and when you hover over an icon you will see at the top what it represents - that’s if you can’t gather it from the picture! This way of setting everything out neatly and easily is perfect for any user, intermediate to the advanced user. It’s simple, and clean, and did I mention easy to use? =)
A new feature which is only available in the 7250i is the easy-access key, which doubles as the ‘0’ key. If you hold this down you will jump straight to your WAP homepage if your settings are set properly. This is very convenient because you don’t have to go into the menu and scroll around to find ‘Services’ and then access your homepage.
A new feature in the 7250i is the right selection key, which is now customizable. It is pre-set to go straight to your ‘Contacts’ menu, but can be changed to several different things such as the ‘Radio,’ ‘Multimedia Inbox,’ ‘Inbox,’ ‘Create MMS,’ and many more. It can also be changed to activate your General profile, or you’re Silent profile. This can be very useful if you are at school or work and need to quickly change your profile at the press of a button.
When the phone is not in a menu and the ‘desktop’ is visible, you can use the directional keys to jump to different options. The left key starts a new SMS message and the right key goes to today in the calendar where you can write in an appointment or reminder. The up key starts the camera in normal mode, and the down key goes to your first contact. These cannot be changed, but why would you want to, they’re a great help!
The calendar included on the 7250i is a really great idea. You can enter birthdays, reminders, meetings, and memos. These can all be attached to alarms, so you’ll never be late or have to send a belated birthday card again!
The backlight on the 7250i is quite strong, so using it in low-light is not a problem. Capable to show up to 8 lines, reading an SMS in a dark place is no problem whatsoever. When it is brighter, you can’t notice the back-light and can simply read straight off the screen without a hassle. The backlight does not turn on until the keypad is unlocked, and has a cool fade-out effect when the light turns off.
Making and receiving calls
What can you expect from a Nokia phone than perfect audio quality? You do get what you expect, with clear, crisp audio. The microphone is also very good, with not one complaint about not being able to hear me or muffled voices/background noise.
The phone is not small enough to slip out of your hand while holding it to your ear, but also isn’t bulky so you’ll look like you’re speaking into a brick. You can also use your shoulder to hold up the phone when two hands are needed elsewhere.
To make calls you simply press the number in the phone book and press the green dial button, or go to a person in your phone book and press the green button once again. When you open your contacts list you can start typing in a person’s name, and all the names in your phone book with that letter combination will then show up so you can easily select them. For example if you have “Darren” and “David” in your phone book, typing in “Da” will show up “David” and “Darren” in alphabetical order. Predictive text is not supported in the phone book.
To pick up a caller, simply press the green button again! If you have set a picture for a caller in your phone book, which the Nokia 7250i supports 100 of; the photo of the caller will display so you can quickly and easily identify your caller. You can only add a picture to a contact if it is on the phone memory and you have taken the photo in portrait form.
There are two ways to communicate to your caller. You can use the normal hold-up-to-ear method, or a new feature is using the Nokia 7250i’s internal speakerphone. When in a call, press the right selection button “Loudspeaker” and the audio will now be routed via the speakerphone instead of the earphone. The audio will also be louder so you can hear better without holding the handset up to your ear.
The 4-chord MIDI polyphonic ring-tones are played through the speaker phone, and are very loud and clear. You can easily transfer tones from your PC or laptop via an infra-red port, or Nokia’s DKU-5 data-cable. Only MIDI form is supported on the mobile phone, but let me assure you, your phone will be personalised to the max with a cool ring-tone - you’ll be the envy of all your mates!
Messaging
The 7250i allows you to send normal SMS messages with concatenation support, MMS messages, and EMS - the ability to add sound clips to your MMS messages.
Also supported is e-mail, which is very handy. You can type your emails while you’re out and about, and your mobile phone will send the message and it will be from @yourserviceprovider.com.au. This is quite good considering not everyone has a MMS/e-mail supported phone yet, so you can instead send them an email in an instant. Photos and sounds can also be attached to the email. Up to 1000 characters are supported for both MMS and e-mail.
The T9 predictive text input is supported for SMS and MMS writing. You can easily and quickly type your messages on the go and send them in a flash. For those who don’t know predictive text input is just like the name says. Instead of pressing a key x number of times to get a letter you want, you can simply press the number that represents that letter and the phone will make a word out of the possible letters. Writing messages has never been so easy =)
Alike with all other Nokia phones, words that aren’t recognised can be manually inputted into the custom dictionary and then when typed later they will show up.
A limited amount of SMS/EMS/MMS is supported on the phone, anywhere up to the 3.5mB shared memory. This is quite a bit, so you won’t be running out of memory for important SMS’s and MMS’s any time soon.
Connectivity
Alike most Nokia mobile phones on the market today, infra-red and data-cable connectivity is supported. The 7250i follows suit, with an infra-red port on the left side of the on/off button, and an optional Pop-Port data-cable available separately.
The Nokia Data Suit is not supplied in the 7250i’s sales package, but you can download the newest version from the Nokia official website (http://www.nokia.com). This will always make sure you have the most updated version of the software. When you have installed the Data Suit, you can use the modem in the phone to access the internet on the go, put Java games/applications on your phone, along with images and polyphonic ring-tones.
Infra-red is the cheapest and easiest way to connect your phone to your PC. You may experience drop outs though, so the original Nokia DKU-5 data-cable is probably the most effective way to connect and personalize your phone.
Build quality
I found absolutely no major build problems in the Nokia 7250i.
The battery sits smoothly and effectively in its shaft, and the sim-card is easily put in and sits in its spot without moving about. When the battery is on top of it you will have no problems with “Insert Sim Card” messages.
The Xpress-On™ covers fit on nicely and without excessive force, the only problem I had was removing the back cover. It’s a bit tricky to push down the tab, and then push off the bottom of it. After that everything else clicks off, and then clicks back on again. I had no problems with the keypad except for the buttons. They are quite hard, and excessive typing may leave fingers sore - but it’s not common =) The buttons are reactive and I never had any problems with buttons not responding when pressed.
Battery life
Battery life on the 7250i was everything I expected. I managed to get a little bit more than the estimated 5 hours talk time, and more than 10 days standby time. This was on the Standard 780 mAh Li-ion battery in the sales package.
Major features...
Tri-band compatibility
Most new phones available on the market today are what we call tri-band. This means they can operate on 900/1800/1900 MHz radio frequency, which also means the phone can be used in basically anywhere in the world. Different parts of the world use different radio frequencies, and when a phone is able to change to the different frequencies it will work wherever a 900/1800/1900 MHz frequency is used. You will never have a problem using your mobile in another country again!
4,096-colour LCD display @ 128 x 128 pixels
The Nokia 7250i has a large 128 x 128 pixels LCD display, with 4,096 colours. This means images and the menus can be displayed in rich colour, which is very easy on the eyes. The screen is also not glary, so using under bright sunlight is not a problem. The backlight is also very bright, as reviewed earlier.
Integrated CIF digital camera (With digital zoom)
An integrated CIF digital camera is located on the back of the phone behind the LCD display. This digital camera can take still photos at a resolution of 352 x 288 pixels, and then re-size them to view on the 128 x 128 LCD display of the 7250i. Pictures taken with the CIF camera are in .jpg format. More in-depth information is available in the “Camera performance and quality” section of this review.
Data-cable and Infra-red connectivity
The 7250i has support for Pop-Port data-cables, available from Nokia (DKU-5), and infra-red. This means that you can easily connect your 7250i to your PC or laptop, and copy images, Java games/applications, and polyphonic ring-tones to your phone. The 7250i can also be used as a wireless modem over GPRS for your PC/Laptop when you’re out and about and don’t have access to a land line.
FM Stereo Radio/Alarm Radio
By plugging in the supplied radio-headset into the Pop-Port at the bottom of the 7250i you can access the stereo FM radio. The headset acts as an aerial for the FM radio, which can also be set as your alarm! Instead of the average ‘beep-beep’ you can wake up to the radio instead.
Picture caller identification for up to 100 contacts
A very cool feature found in the Nokia 7250i is the ability to attach a photo to your contacts entry in the phone book. When you take a picture in portrait mode, you can then attach it to a contact, and when they next call their picture will be displayed under their name for easy identification. If you have several people with the same name in your phone book as I do, you can easily and quickly find out which Peter is calling, and avoid any tricky situations! =)
Hands free speaker phone
This feature is very handy when you don’t or can’t put the phone to your ear. You can route the audio to the inbuilt speaker phone, which automatically makes it louder so you can hear it and speak freely, and the person will still hear you.
Concatenation support for SMS/EMS, MMS and E-mail
SMS, EMS, MMS, and e-mail is supported on the Nokia 7250i. EMS, also known as Enhanced Messaging Service gives the user the ability to add sound, graphics and animations to your normal MMS messages. The MMS messages that is supported in the 7250i has the ability to attach a picture that you have taken with the internal camera or downloaded from another source, to a 1000 character text message, then send it to a compatible handset or to an email address. Concatenation support for SMS is supported, so you can send up to 3 messages in one go, and then the phone will split them, and the reviving phone will then organise them again so they are one continuous long message. You can have up to 459 characters in a concatenated SMS.
4 Chord Poly-phonic ring-tones, with monophonic ring-tone support
4 chord poly-phonic ring-tones are supported on the 7250i, so you can download them from a WAP site, or upload them onto your phone via data-cable or infrared, then replay them as a ring-tone, message alert tone, or as an alarm tone. Also included is mono-phonic support, so if you want to you can take a step back in time to the older phones, and play mono-phonic tones!
xHTML Browser
An internal xHTML browser over a WAP 1.2.1 stack is a feature in the 7250i which allows a better mobile browsing experience with images, sounds and text. Also supported is a Wallet over xHTML.
4mB shared memory
A whole 4mB shared memory is available on the Nokia 7250i. There is a 3.5mB memory available for MMS messages (max 45kB per message), Images, Ringing tones, and Java applications/games. This amount of memory is enough for any user, and running out of memory isn’t something that will happen easily!
Problems/Issues?
Firmware background turn-off
I only managed to find a few issues with the Nokia 7250i in my thorough search. The most critical issue is with the firmware. This is the software that runs the mobile phone. When you have an image in your gallery and you try to set it as a background, the phone will turn itself off, and the background won’t be set. You will have to go via the settings/display menu to set a background.
This problem has been resolved in newer firmware versions, so if you are getting this problem contact your nearest Nokia Care Centre and enquire about a firmware upgrade regarding the background problem.
Slow Response to key presses
I encountered this problem on both my Nokia 6610 and Nokia 7250i.
When you press a button, the phone has a very short delay before it responds to what you pressed. Obviously Nokia had other priorities than this, such as the cool camera and enhancements!
Radio antenna on headset
I wouldn’t call this a problem, more an issue. The issue is that the internal antenna of the phone does not act as an aerial for the radio. This means you have to have the headset plugged in before you can listen to the radio, because it acts as an aerial. When you set the alarm for the radio to come in, you have to have the headset plugged in.
Audio volume
Another minor issue is that the audio on the phone could be a tad louder. This may be me going deaf, but a little adjustment by Nokia may be worth while! =)
In Summary
The Nokia 7250i is available now from your service provider, but you can buy it outright for around $700-$900. But, the question is, are you ready for the feature packed Nokia 7250i?
Well, if you’re after an integrated camera, MMS/EMS support, xHTML browser, GPRS, infra-red, Polyphonic ring-tones, hands-free speaker phone, an FM stereo radio and PIM applications, and more, yes MORE - the 7250i is for you! If you have a Nokia 7250 and are looking for an upgrade, the 7250i is also a great and inexpensive upgrade.
The phone is small, sleek, and doesn’t way a lot, so it’s not bulky. It has heaps of features, and is suitable for a man or woman.
It’s simple to use, easy to operate, and cheap to run. I all in all recommend this phone to anyone looking for a Nokia camera phone, and I’m sure you would recommend it as well if you used it! =) |
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