Hey what’s up guys? Jon Rettinger from Techno Buffalo here with a review for you of the Nokia Serge for AT&T Wireless, this suckers going to run you 79.99 after a 50-dollar mail on rebate and of course on the two-year contract. This is running Symbian S60 which surprisingly or not surprisingly, depending on where you’re located, is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and this was my first four-ray in to it. So I was very excited to use it and give you my opinions on it. First off, one thing I have to mention about this phone is the hardware design is bizarre. You guys saw it during the un-boxing where I put a link in the sidebar to the un-boxing then this is just a very strange design with this big lip. It’s got a nice accelerometer that slides out to reveal a really big keyboard when you turn it but it’s just a very strange design. It’s a relatively thin phone but I’ve just never seen anything like this, it’s nothing that I ever want to show off to my friends but it is very functional.
Speaking of functional, let’s talk about the Symbian S60 Operating System. For those of you guys outside the US I’m sure you’re familiar with it and you’ve used it, for those of you inside the US you probably haven’t had that much experience of it. And I will say that it’s very, very functional. It’s very useable, it’s intuitive, it was easy to learn, I was able to give it to other people you had never used it before and they are able to pick it up very quickly. So certainly kudos to the Symbian Foundation for pointing gathers very intuitive operating system. Now this is not the touch screen version that was just released for the N97, this is sort of the old school, none touch screen using the D-pad to click around and navigate. It does come with a full HTML Flash capable browser so you do flash content right on your phone. You can play You Tube videos right from the browser and all kinds of other cool flash stuff and it does work very well. It displays the website natively like it went on a computer. A low the zoom controls and navigations, we’re not so good. I would have liked sort of an easier zoom but I can overlook that to have Flash capabilities something I wish devices like the iPhone, would have.
So moving right along to the Symbian OS, I will say one thing that I do like about this as well is that it displays your calendar items right below the main row of icons. If you’re like, you forget things very easily and having to either set reminders in your calendar or go through open your calendar on a once, twice or three time to day basis to see when your meetings are, can be of a little bit annoying. Often times you might forget to do so. On device like the Serge, every time you turn on your phone you see a list of what your calendar items are for that day or week or however you set it. That’s something I really like.
I like that the Blackberry, the old school Blackberry of course had it, something I wish my current device the iPhone hasn’t so definitely give the S60 credit for that. So moving along to sort of what it looks like, it’s definitely a, well old school looking user interface; doesn’t look as elegant as some of the modern user interfaces so again like the iPhone, like Android even like the N97 that they sort of refresh the OS. It just looks antiquated, looks like a phone you could have picked up five, six years ago. It would have set wirelesses look on a little bit old even then but you know if you like Symbian and you like the operating system it’s going to be very familiar to you. However if you’re in the US and you’ve not used this before you definitely going to want to play around it a little bit to make sure that you like the way the operating system works. It’s got a GPS in it; it’s got a Micro SD card slot. It’s got all the goodies that you’d expect from a smart phone minus Wi-Fi so something to keep in mind when you go to your purchase.
So this is a phone and it’s going to make good phone calls and I will say that the radio in this is very, very, very strong. I got a much better 3G signal, 19-width; several of devices that I’ve lined up including the iPhone, Samsung, Apex and the HTC Touch Pro all lined up together. This had the strongest 3G signal and they were sitting right next to each other, so definitely a plus to Nokia for that. Call, calling it was fantastic I can hear people nice and clearly with no white noise. So if you want to use this as a phone you’re going to have any problems and the speaker phone was quite loud.
So on a rating scale on a one to five scale where you rank this? We’ll its going to be. I’m asking myself questions here, it’s going to be hard to rank this and standing alone on itself without looking at the comparisons of bugger phones that are available for the carrier. It’s a nice phone; it does a lot of things well. However I don’t think I can get pass to this atrocious design for a phone. It is really tragically ugly. It does have a nice feel in the hands but every time I look at it wonder what the designer for thinking, the engineers were thinking. So for 79 bucks it’s not a steel of a phone, it’s not a free phone, it’s not one of those 20-dollar phones that AT&T has. I give it a three; the operating system is certainly functional. It looks old, it doesn’t have sort of the fun and the flare that you get with some of the newer devices that are coming but it is useable. So if you’re first stepping in to the smart phone world and you’re looking for a calendar and a way to send text messages you know then this is going to be a decent way to go. If you’re looking for something more advanced and certainly something with the touch screen this is not going to be for you.
So guys hope you enjoyed my well relatively lengthy review of the Nokia Serge. For exclusive contents, be sure to follow me on Twitter, twitter.com/jon4lakers. And if you want to learn about Techno Buffalo definitely check out technobuffalo.com or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/technobuffalo. I’ll see you guys in the next video. Bah bye.
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