Mobile Phones

The Nokia 8800, Sirocco Edition, is a sublimely beautiful phone. It’s sleek, smooth, sexy and probably a bit sleazy too.

This is definitely a going out phone — you’ll slip the SIM card from your business mobile into it on a Saturday night before you go out to quaff champagne cocktails. It should be placed strategically on the bar, not on the office desk.

The Nokia 8800 is a handset that only tries to be a phone; not a camera, or a PDA — and it does so with some style.

The lavish use of polished ebony metal gives the phone a reassuring heaviness at 134 grams. It also gives it an indestructible feeling. The slider mechanism opens and closes so fast you need to make sure you don’t catch your cheek in it.

The screen’s protective coating is tempered with sapphire glass that actually protects the surface from scratches, and the phone’s contours means it sits in your hand like a smooth black pebble. Annoyingly though, fingerprints do tend to stick to the phone’s metal body. However Nokia has provided a nifty leather case and dust cloth as part of their luxury offering. Frivolous perhaps, but this reviewer found himself using it to maintain the Sirocco’s eye-catching shininess.

Source and more info: electricnews

Nokia tries a lot of variety with its handset design, and in some cases pushes at the outer edges of what we might think of as a mobile phone. The company also, though, works with the more traditional approach, and the N73 is in many ways a welcome breath of candybar fresh air in an arena awash with twisty clam shell N93-a-likes.

At 116g and 110×49x19mm the N73 can’t give some of the more superslim handsets currently around a run for their money, but it does feel tidy in the hand and pocket, and, importantly, shaves precious millimeters and grammes off the dimensions of its forebearer, the popular N70.

The star attraction of the N73 has to be its main camera. A front facing lens caters for video calling, but it is the main camera that grabs the attention.

Carl Zeiss optics are becoming something of a standard for higher end N range handsets, and in this case we have 3.2 megapixel image capture with an autofocus mode, flash, and a mechanical shutter which really does help you get clearer pictures.

Outdoor shots are particularly good, tending to the clear, crisp side of things which means you wouldn’t be embarrassed to show them to friends and relatives or keep them on file. We weren’t over the moon about the indoor test shots we took, but then no handset delivers as well as a digital camera indoors.

Nokia has thought quite hard about ease of use with the camera and for the most part has come up with the goods. The lens is protected by a large sliding cover. Pull it back and the camera software is activated. Now flip the handset into wide mode and use the mini joystick under the screen to make settings for the flash, self timer, exposure compensation, macro and other scene mode selection, white balance, ISO setting and suchlike. You just scroll down a column of icons click, scroll some more, click, and you are there.

Source and more info: 3g