Love at first sight - Nokia's 7250

Nokia 7250It is no secret that I was no big fan of the Nokia 7210. The feature set was good, the look was, well, interesting, and it had a lot of things going for it. It just had the world's worst keypad ever. The buttons had a strange shape, were not lined up properly, and the direction buttons were just so poorly designed that I was constantly hitting the wrong one.

So in spite of a lot of potentially good things about the phone, I couldn't stand to use it.

Fast forward a bit to the new 7250. It has a shape similar to the 7210. It, too, has very creatively designed keys and buttons. It comes in vivid colors and user changeable covers and has all of the features that the 7210 had. It even has something new, a built-in camera.

The results of these few seemingly minor changes is astounding. The 7250 is an awesome phone.

The 7250 has all of the features that you want in a phone, for the most part. It is triband GSM, it has a color display, polyphonic ringtones, Java, and a speakerphone function, too. Sure, it is missing Bluetooth, but I pretty much have given up on Nokia and Bluetooth ever really working well together. For as much as Nokia seems bent on getting others to use their UI standard (Series 60), they sure seem unable to play by somebody elses rules (those of the Bluetooth SIG).

But outside of Bluetooth, this device has it all.

Color rules
Everything about the 7250 revolves around color, it seems. The covers are all very rich looking, with subtle textures looking like brushed metal. The color display is large and very bright, and it shows off the photos taken by the internal camera very well. In fact, I would say that the 7250's display and camera work better together than any pair I have seen on a mobile handset to date. When you take a photo with the internal camera and view it, it looks like how you saw it. Clear, bright, colorful.

The display is not made of the most modern technology, though. It is a 4096 color passive matrix display, just like the earlier color Nokias. In my mind, 4096 colors is enough for a phone. I don't think you can really appreciate more colors on such a small display. The images are not large enough to be able to appreciate subtle tone changes that higher color depths offer. I do think that a switch to an active matrix display would be worth it, though. But not really for the brighter colors or such, but to avoid display ghosting.

For the same reason that passive matrix displays were so unpopular on early color laptops, they should not be used here. Passive matrix displays show a lot of image ghosting in situations with high contrast (the calendar numbers on a white background) or fast action (the Bounce game). The ghosting in the 7250 is not as bad as the 7210, in that the calendar looks fine, but Bounce still does not look great. Any kind of scrolling game, like Bounce, demands an active matrix display. Triple Bop, on the other hand, runs and looks just fine as is.

But outside of Bounce, I think the display and phone are well paired. As I mentioned before, the images from the new internal camera really shine on the phone's display - something that is pretty rare. The image quality from the internal camera is quite decent in general, but it lacks resolution. This is not a problem for use as a wallpaper on the phone, but it is an issue if you want to use the image on your PC. The maximum resolution for a photo is only 352x288, but for such small images they still look nice on a PC. I have included a number of samples in one of the following pages after the end of the review so you can see for yourself.

Sample PhotoThe camera has 3 quality settings, Basic, Normal, High. I recommend using High at all times since the images are still very small (12K max, give or take), and the 7250 has so much free memory (5MB out of the box). That's plenty of room. There are two photo sizes, too: Standard and Portrait. Portrait shoots small images suitable for MMS messages. Perhaps the coolest thing the camera has is the Self-Timer function. This causes the phone to wait a few seconds before snapping the photo after you press the button, giving you time, presumably, to get into the photo. The problem with that scenario is that the phone is not very stable when standing on end. But I imagine that this would be useful in some situation, and it surely didn't cost anything to add the feature. So thumbs up.

Note: Yes, my 7250 reported 5MB of free memory out of the box. Loading additional logos and ringtones to the phone reduced the reported free space to 4.9MB. I am aware that this is quite a lot more than what the originally released specs stated the device had. I can not explain that, I can only tell you what the model I had reports....

Considering the lack of a need for an attachment, the negligible impact on phone size, and the relative good quality of the images, I would have to say this is my favorite camera in a phone. I'd like more resolution, sure, but I prefer image quality to resolution, so this is a winner in my book.

 

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