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SilentPanda

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Oct 8, 2002
9,992
31
The Bamboo Forest
Well here's my review of the Nokia 3620 and all the features I've used thus far.

Usage setup: Nokia 3620, iBook G4 800 with internal bluetooth, iWireless for my provider (part of T-Mobile).

Look & Feel:
To me, it doesn't feel big as other websites describe it. Then again I've never had a miniature phone either. Height wise it's about as tall as a 12 oz soda can, thickness 1 1/2 dvd cases, and the width is about that of the top ring of a 12 oz soda can. Hey, that's all I had within arms reach to measure by. :) The phone feels plasticy, almost like a childs play toy. Weight isn't terribly much.
The keypad layout feels awkward as the columns of keys tend to flow into each other. But frankly I don't use them that much since all my numbers are put in already for the most part.
The screen takes up most of the space on the face of the phone and it's bright and visible from about all angles (until you can't actually see the screen anyhow).

Memory:
It comes with a 16 meg card. Nokia sells a 128 meg one for $99. Crucial sells one for $36 as of this writing. eBay sells them for even less.

Bluetooth:
Once I got it home I set it up. It was pretty easy. In the phones bluetooth menu you just change it from "Off" to "On". To set it up on my iBook I went into "Applications", "Utilities", "Bluetooth Setup Assistant". I told the app I had a mobile phone to set up and it found it fairly quick. Nice.
Now I wanted to get all my contacts onto my phone. I opened up iSync and added the new device to iSync. Clicking on the device I was able to tell it to sync my contacts and my calendars. One thing I didn't figure out until later was that I then had *all* of my contacts in my phone. If you're like me you have more contacts in your address book than you'll probably ever want to get ahold of. So to fix this, make a new group in Address Book, call it something like "For Phone", and populate it with the contacts you would like to have on your phone. In iSync you can tell it to only sync that group. I clicked the Sync button and away it went. The initial sync takes the longest but that's to be expected. I had about 68 contacts and probably a third of them had pictures. The pictures show up on the phone when you receive or send a call.
My contacts and calendars had no problems showing up. Adding a contact to the phone and syncing will put the contact in your address book and automatically put him/her in your "For Phone" group. Adding an event to the calendar will add them to a calendar group you specify in iSync.
The other things you can use bluetooth to do are dialing an ISP (I'll comment on that later), send pictures, sounds, and video, and of course use Salling Clicker.
Pictures can be used on the standby screen. The format of these pictures should be 176 x 140 to allow them to take up maximum screen real estate. You can upload pictures larger than that but if you're only showing them on the screen there's no sense in it since it can't truely display anything bigger than that.
Sounds can be used as your ring. I haven't fully explored this but thus far I have been able to get .wav and .mid files to play. By default .mp3 files will not play although from what I understand there are programs you can download to allow you to play them (although I don't know if you can play them for your ring).
Video is in .3GP format. I have Quicktime Pro on my machine so pretty much anything I can play in Quicktime I can reencode to .3GP and play back on my phone. The video is decent for a phone. 1 minute of video is roughly half a meg. So with a 128 meg RAM chip in your phone you could in theory store about 256 minutes of video. That's a decent amount. Unfortunately the video player only has pause, play, and stop. Therefore if you do put 2 hours of video on your phone you might want to encode it into 4 or 5 minute segments.

Camera:
The phone has a built in camera. It takes alright pictures (obviously not as good as a real digital camera) but it's good enough for "just in case". If the object is moving you'll get ghosting since it doesn't seem to take them very fast. But for taking pictures of stationary objects you should be good.

Video Camera:
The phone also takes video in H.264 format. It's crap. Don't even bother with it. It will only let you take 95 kb worth of video at a time and it has thus far come out looking like junk. It's a novelty and nothing more.

Games:
It comes with two games. The Snake game (where your body gets longer each time you eat one of the things on the board and you can't run into yourself or a wall) and also a tile game (where you shift the tiles around to recreate the one picture). The Snake game is decent enough fun but the tile game feels awkward and time consuming. Of course, you can purchase more games off the internet but I've yet to delve into that.

Extra things:
It comes with a notepad type app, a calculator, a currency convertor (although you have to populate the conversion), an audio recorder/player, a ring tone composer, and a clock. They all serve there purpose. Nothing too neat here.

Salling Cliker:
Although Salling Clicker did not come with the phone nor does it currently say it works with this specific model, it does. It's a wonderful program and I registered it within 10 minutes of using it. It allows you to control most anything on your computer (within reason... don't try to play Halflife via your phone!). iTunes, Powerpoint/Keynote, VLC, Quicktime, Mail checking, etc. You can check out more from their site (http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/index.html). I would suggest giving it a shot and seeing if you like it.

Internet dialing:
Providing you have some ISP you can dial into, you can set your Mac up to do this via bluetooth via the phone. It's incredibly slow and I wouldn't recommend doing much more than checking a POP/IMAP account but it does work. There is more info on getting that to work . The modem script I ended up getting to work was the GSM scripts for the Nokia phones, more specifically, the Nokia GSM Analouge 9.6 RB.

Overall:
Well that's pretty much all I have to say about it. I like it. There's probably better things out there for whatever reason but this was pretty much my only option. That or the N-Gage and yeah. :) Overall I'm happy with it but then again my last phones neatest feature was... the alarm clock I think. I can also supposedly check my e-mail and read webpages using the phone but I have yet to try that.
I'm mainly posting this here as a general review for the curious. If you look up this review and have questions please PM me and I'll answer you and possibly update this post. If you need help getting something set up on the phone you can ask and I'll tell you what I know. Most things that work on the Nokia 3650 will work on this phone too. This is also sometimes referred to as a Nokia Series 60 phones I believe. I'm still trying to figure things out. This is all just very new to me.

Done.
 

MikeLaRiviere

macrumors regular
May 25, 2004
188
0
Thanks for the review. Cell phones certainly have come a long way in recent years. Something I'd ask that you try: rather than dialing in to your ISP, try connecting via your cellular provider's GPRS network. From what I've read, GPRS is supposedly faster (but by no means fast) than dialup. If you look at this extremely helpful user's webpage, you can see that the GPRS connection is, for some reason, four times the speed of the dialup connection. If you're able to try it out, let us know. I'll be receiving a bluetooth phone, the Sony Ericsson t610, in the next few days, so I'll let you know how GPRS speeds are.

Mike LaRiviere
 

srchurch

macrumors newbie
Jul 17, 2004
14
0
SilentPanda said:
Games:
It comes with two games. The Snake game (where your body gets longer each time you eat one of the things on the board and you can't run into yourself or a wall) and also a tile game (where you shift the tiles around to recreate the one picture). The Snake game is decent enough fun but the tile game feels awkward and time consuming. Of course, you can purchase more games off the internet but I've yet to delve into that.
Done.

I have a simalar model 3650 for about a year.
You can get Bounce for Series 60 phones for free off the Nokia website. This is a great game and is much better than the two they give you. Just make sure when you install new apps, to install onto the memory card and save that very precious internal memory. You need the internal memory for general RAM when running some apps. Enjoy!
 

ibookin'

macrumors 65816
Jul 7, 2002
1,164
0
Los Angeles, CA
I use GPRS over Bluetooth with T-Mobile and my T616 (cousin of the T610, runs on GSM 850/1800/1900 instead of GSM 900/1800/1900), and I also have a data card (Merlin G100), and I have to say that the data card is a much better experience.

Though I have yet to try the phone with a USB cable (don't have one for this phone), I have found that using the phone with Bluetooth, it disconnects after about 10 minutes of use. Supremely annoying.

It might have something to do with the service, since using my Bluetooth Verizon phone produces better results, but probably not since the same T-Mobile service is so much better with the Merlin card.

For anyone looking to use cell networks for internet access more than occasionally, definitely invest in a data card.
 

jsw

Moderator emeritus
Mar 16, 2004
22,910
44
Andover, MA
Excellent review, SilentPanda!

I've got the 3650, which is essentially the same phone, and I think it's great. I use Bluetooth to go online with my PB, and, while the connections often get dropped every 10 minutes or so, my speeds average ~20kbps, and, with my T-Mobile tzones pro service, I pay nothing extra for the connection. I'd be bummed if I paid more, but that $10/month for unlimited SMS, MMS, etc. which just so happens to include GPRS is fine for when I need it.

Nothing on the phone is brilliantly executed, but it's a phenomenal package deal. I got mine free last year when Amazon was offering a $150 rebate on top of T-Mobile's $150 rebate, and, for free, it can't be beat. I much prefer the standard keypad layout of your 3620, though, SilentPanda.
 
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