Mobile Review reviews the Nokia 6110 Navigator

Read the whole review, loads of pictures, screen shots, and three videos!

Some snippets:

The numberpad didn’t manage to appeal to me ergonomics-wise due to being a somewhat offbeat solution, whose buttons were not tailored to fast texting. At the end of the day the keypad embedded into Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N80 is still one of market’s best offerings, providing soft feedback and nice click of the keys; whereas the 6110 suffers from hardness and short travel.

Behind the shutter is a 2 Mpix CMOS-matrix lacking auto focus, yet fighting some points back with its LED flash. Generally, the camera here is no different from what we have come to expect from the company, the only difference is availability panoramic mode.

Viewing Internet pages for 4 hours straight drained all power from the battery, while non-stop music playback leads to the same result within 7 hours, for video the battery life makes up 2 hours. That said, you should expect one-two days of operation, depending on your usage mode. At activated in-car GPS-navigation, the 6110 lives for about 2,5-3 hours. It takes the battery 2 hours and 15 minutes to charge from empty to full.

The handset runs on S6 3rd edition Feature Pack 1 platform, yet boasts a number of highlights characterizing Feature Pack 2, for example support for HSDPA, Active Notes, streaming multimedia downloads, screen rotation in the second version of the browser and a new image editor found in the Gallery. Yet the manufacturer claims the 6110 to be a Feature Pack 1 powered offering. For now, we will rely on what Nokia says, but in future will definitely check back.

Regrettably, there is no A2DP profile here, meaning that there is no way to transfer stereo-sound to a wireless headset. And we are truly eager to find out the origin of the gossips about the 6110 supporting this profile. Genreally, Nokia Mobile Phones’s solutions powered by the S60 are getting this profile on the board later than Nseries-branded smartphones.

The Applications menu contains 3D Tones, allowing you to enable 3D ringing tone effects, apply various sound trajectories, and reverberation. And to the developers’ credit be it said, these settings do have influence on the sound, but on the whole it’s just another marketing move, as majority of users don’t pay too much attention to how amplified the handset sounds – they rather focus on call itself. To prove that we carried out a survey and according to the results most people don’t notice any striking difference between default sounding and 3D Tones.

The first and the foremost thing you appreciate is how the voice navigation works – in fact it does very well, allowing you to forget about ever looking at the display. As for the screen itself, the 6110 is armed with a quality display, you come to think so especially if you place the device to the left of the wheel, rather than to the right (with the original package it is not an option, but in theory it will work out). On the minus side is missing touchscreen, that we have come to expect, bearing in mind offerings by other manufacturers, but at the same time number shortcuts enable you to shift between various settings to and fro, for example go into the night mode and then back to normal. Should you take a wrong turn they device will quickly rebuild the route. So basically we don’t have even the smallest niggle with the 6110’s navigation department. “Cold start” takes about 3-4 minutes, which is a good result overall.

If I was given a choice between the E65 or the 6110 … 6110 hands down: