Phone Arena reviews the Nokia 6300

Nice little video to start you off:

And now the review:

The small leather case is elegant and adorned with graphic details, known from previous Nokia phones. It cannot be hung onto anything but simply contains the 6300 in order to safeguard the unit from scratching. At the beginning, the leather was rather tight and after inserting the phone in, it was quite difficult to pull it out.

[I didn't even know this thing came with a case!]

Though the 12 numeric keys are comparatively small and cramped to each other, they are very soft at pressing and have again very good tactile response. Despite the necessity to look while writing, because it is difficult to tell them apart at touch, writing on this keyboard is a pleasure.

The only regrettable impression about the phone is left by the sound volume control rocker, located on the right. It is very hard to feel, and displeasing and difficult to press. It is almost impossible to use it during conversation, when the phone is next to your head.

In our view, one of the principal shortcomings of Nokia 6300 is being solely a three-band GSM/EDGE 2G phone, which means it cannot operate properly on all continents. Nokia announced two modifications, one for America with 850 / 1800 / 1900 MHz and one for Europe at 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz support.

The built-in browser caused our utmost disappointment – it is only WAP, not HTML, and to use it for visualizing Internet pages in our opinion is nearly useless. It is rather obsolete and a pity that a QVGA resolution phone does not dispose of a real browser.

[I have emailed the author of the review a link to the Opera press release stating Opera Mini would be on all 6300's. He told me his unit had no such browser.]

The phone’s camera is a 2 megapixel one without a flash or automatic focus. It takes the very satisfactory 3 seconds to start, but taking pictures is itself quite slow: 8 seconds to record one at maximum resolution and after that you need almost as much (15 seconds in all) to be able to start over photographing.

Plenty of pictures in their gallery. Nice solid review overall. If I could own one S40 phone then this would definitely be it.

I learned something else about S40 today. Look at the calculator they get compared to us S60 users:

Jealousy is in the air.