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Review of Nokia 7250 - Triband GSM w/camera
An anonymous reader writes "The new Nokia 7250 is out. Small, very cool looking phone that even has a built-in camera. 3 page review with 6 pages of photos, including a photo gallery of images taken by the 7250 itself - with some human help, of course."
The Slashdot Effect has already rendered this website inaccessible. Below is page one of the review:
It 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.
The 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.
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.
I've established a complete mirror of the images referenced by Mobile Burn. Perhaps "The Mysterious Future" was intended to enable the creation of mirrors by subscribers.
Do you like German cars?
...be set to stun mode?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
It doesn't look all that great to me when compared with the SE P800...
The server has already pretty-much melted down, but it's another Nokia phone - all of the cells that I've had in the last few years have been GSM Nokias - they perform pretty decently, are easy to navigate around, but there's nothing ever really revolutionary...
I think my next phone will be the P800 - once the price drops a bit...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
The colour balance of the camera of 7250 is not good, too much red tinge in the pics. Overall I don0t like quality of photos taken by the internal camera. I like photography and atleast for me, small size of the lens is not an excuse for bad picture quality. Infact a I happened to use a prototype phone made by samsung as a friend of mine was working on that product, and the image quality was really good, 1024x768. In fact the picture quality of even Sony Ericsson P800 is much better than 7250. But I do like the fact that the reception of 7250 is better than T68i because that sucks sometimes.
What's under yellowstone?
Shame, last time I checked Nokia still insisted on producing their phone synchronisation software for windows.
Anyone know of an open alternative? I guess it would need a depth of knowledge about the phone hardware which would be hard without Nokia support...
Hmmm...
The way the camera is situated on the back of the phone makes it very easy to surreptitiously take photos. You would merely appear to be dialing a number on your phone.
I'll bet this phone will become the next journalist's, spy's, and uber-geek's must-have toy. I can also envision many socially compromising situations when these covertly taken photos are eventually discovered, especially since the amalgamation of technologies encourages for these photos to be spread on the net.
"What??? I didn't know you were taking my picture! I thought you were just calling someone! Did I give you permission to take my picture and publish it? Get out of my bed, NOW!!"
For me, there is only one feature on a phone that really counts: the keys.
The best keypad I've used was on the Nokia 8310/8210 handsets: tough, precise, no wobble, consistent springiness, rectangular keytops.
The Sony Ericsson T65i has a really unpleasant set of wobbly keys, with inconsistently stiff springs. Similarly the latest Nokia handsets all have horrid keys.
Scroogle
Remember just two days ago when we were discussing the negative social effects of cellphones? Yet when something with all these flashy features comes out, everyone is *drool* *drool* *drool* :-)
This is undoubtedly a cool phone, and adds a bit of flair to Nokia's now-tired cellphone design (we've had to put with it for about 6 years here in Europe) but relating this to our previous discussion, are these features actually any use to business users?
I'm undecided. Stereo sound is pretty useless, color screens are pretty useless, FM radio is useless, and multiple color schemes? Please. Business users don't need that crap.
It seems like this phone has been decided to be the 'latest trendy thing' rather than something a nerd could have any real use for.
Having a tiny digital camera on hand is a great idea, to take pictures of number plates, crooks, and what not.. but it's not good enough res to be used professionally.
Tri-band is useful for the international traveller.. but where's the 3G? 3G is going live in the UK as we speak, and it's a waste of money buying a phone that can't deal with it.
Yup, this is just a phone for the socialites.
(P.S. Did you realise there's a $10,000 Nokia cellphone made in gold with encrusted diamonds.. not bullshitting, seen a number of stories about celebrities buying them. Anyone know what they're called?)
mogorific carpentry experiments
But outside of Bluetooth, this device has it all.
;) I am actually gonna be putting a wireless carphone rig in my car (at the same time as getting the Becker TrafficPro, new amps and new speakers), so any phone I get to replace my slow-interface T68m MUST have Bluetooth.
When will Nokia get on the ball? Bluetooth is too fun for stuff like phonelist/addressbook syncing, remote-controlling your Mac (cheap slideshow clcker, iTunes controller), doing GPRS dialup, wireless headset, wireless carphone, etc.
Now that I'm one of a handful of techies who just landed a job in NYC (thank you, thank you
And yes, I would LOVE LOVE LOVE a PDA with a thin HDD that had bluetooth, gps, gsm, a mic and camera, et al. Even if you could only use the phone functionality with a bluetooth headset. Maybe it could come with a stereo wireless headset with noise cancellation, bluetooth enabled so you could listen to music and it would pause when you place/receive a call...
There's more info:7 250-en. shtml
. mantere.sjr.fi/7250/
http://www.mobile-review.com/review/nokia-
Pics taken with it:
http://tude.tripod.com/temp.html
http://www
Why mention this Nokia versus the others you mentioned? Glad to assist you in understanding.
First, the Samsung S105. It's a Samsung. Decent phone, but nowhere near the following that Nokia has. Nokia has a better UI, a better reputation for quality and several other minor advantages. This essentially could be answered by saying, "For the same reason a new Compaq notebook doesn't get mentioned on Slashdot whereas the Apples do."
The t68i was mentioned very recently here on Slashdot, in fact it was its replacement (and several sister models) that were featured in the story, so your objection here makes little sense.
The T720i? It doesn't "have a cam", it has an attachable camera. Yuck. Secondly, this phone has also been mentioned on Slashdot, in fact in an article far more apropos for Slashdot's (claimed) theme: An article on developing applications for the T720.
What exactly was your objection again?