The Nokia 3250 smartphone is an excellent music player phone. It features a unique twisting design that’s intended to make the music player functions of the device easy to access. The phone starts off with a conventional keypad below the screen. Twist it once and the music player controls become accessible. Twist it again and it’s a 2 megapixel camera. Gimmicky perhaps, but it works well enough and is fun too!

Let’s look at the music potential of the 3250 first. The phone is supplied with 128 Mbytes of memory and this is expandable up to 1 Gbyte - not as much as an iPod, but enough for a few hundred songs. There’s also an FM radio with Visual Radio functionality (find out what song is playing, who sings it, and other artist information). Sound quality is very high, with audio features such as an equalizer, stereo widening, reverb and bass boost included. Stereo headphones are supplied with the phone, and there’s a 3.5mm jack for you to plug in your own high quality headphones if you prefer. The twisting lower part of the phone might be gimmicky, but it does allow you easy control of your music and playlists. The Nokia Audio Manager CD supplied lets you rip songs from a CD and transfer them to the phone in MP3 format. USB mass storage functionality makes it easy to transfer songs between your phone and a PC.

The camera is high quality, with 2 megapixels with a digital zoom, but no flash unfortunately. The video camera is excellent too, and can record up to 1 hour of video. A video editor is included in the applications. The display is a high quality active matrix screen with 262k colours and a high resolution - not as good as the screens on the Nokia N80 or N90, but as good as other smartphones such as the N70 or N91.

Weight and battery life are typical for a smartphone. It’s certainly not a lightweight phone, but it weighs less than a phone plus an iPod! Many smartphones suffer from reliability problems and can be slow accessing menus - we are pleased to report that the 3250 seems to be mainly free of these problems.

Overall this is an excellent combined phone & music player, with plenty of extra features too. A good alternative to the Walkman phones from Sony Ericsson, and a highly recommended phone.

Features of the Nokia 3250 include:
Smartphone (Series 60 Symbian operating system)
2 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom
Video camera (176 x 144 pixels, 15 frames per second, up to 1 hour recording)
Display: TFT, 262,144 colours, 176 x 208 pixels
Music player (MP3, eAAC+, AAC+, RealAudio formats)
Visual Radio
Ringtones: 64-voice polyphonic / MP3 ringtones
Ringtone composer
Voice Features: Enhanced voice dialing, Voice commands, Voice recording, Integrated handsfree speaker
Messaging: SMS, MMS, email (SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 protocols)
Applications: File manager, Organiser, Games, Downloadable Symbian and Java applications
Caller ID with image
Memory: 10 Mbytes plus microSD card (expandable to 1 Gbyte)
Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB 2.0
WAP 2.0, GPRS class 10, EDGE class 10 - download up to 236,8 kbit/s
Advanced web browser
Vibration alert
Triband
Size: 104 x 50 x 20 mm
Weight: 130g
Talktime: 3 hours
Battery standby: 245 hours
Music playback: 10 hours

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