Nokia 6110 Navigator  

The phone
The 6110 Navigator is a decent phone. You could even say that it is a fairly attractive slider device. However, you can see the spring between both halves of the phone if you peek in between both halves of the phone when the keypad is revealed.

The black and silver device is very nice, especially the slide cover for the camera lens on the back of the phone. The charger port is on the top of the device, which is a bit confusing since most Nokia phones have the charger port on the bottom. Furthermore, it was not always easy to tell at a glance which side of the phone is the ”„up”¦ side.

The pry-open type of battery cover is a bit difficult to understand. You will need to press the button on the bottom of the phone, after which the back cover pops out a little and you have to use your fingernails to pry the entire cover off. The battery is very difficult to remove as there are no apparent grip points to pull it out and reveal the SIM card.

Software
The Nokia 6110 Navigator is a Symbian device, running version 9.2 of the Symbian OS with the series-60 user interface. This particular model should be using the 3rd edition of Feature Pack 1.

The phone comes with a 500MB microSD card to supplement the 40MBs inside the phone. This is more than enough storage for most applications, considering that you can move out data easily with the USB data cable provided inside the package.

Perhaps the key selling point of the phone, which is the GPS receiver, is the only reason that sets this phone apart from an entire extended family of rather similar Symbian devices. I found the GPS to be fairly accurate and sensitive, picking up signals from inside a building where most other GPS devices do not. Even the N95 is not this sensitive.

However, the Asia Maps application forces you to connect to GPRS to activate the application before it will work, so I wasn”¦t too happy with that. It would have been better to have everything preloaded into the phone, given the numerous reports of unscrupulous charges from unnecessary connections or transactions with third-party application providers in Malaysia.

The QuickOffice suite is pretty much the same as from before and the Quickword, Quicksheet and Quickpoint applications found inside this phone are the Symbian counterparts of the Microsoft applications for the desktop PC.

Again, we have a little problem with the music playback where AVI files are detected but not recognised, and will not play. MP4s are detected, but many of the clips only played audio and did not playback video.

When the video plays in music clips, it was jerky and paused frequently, indicating that the processor or the memory configuration is not up to the job.

Connectivity
Again, we have another quad-band device from Nokia. The connectivity starts with GSM 850/900/1800/1900, and also works with 3G UMTS and includes support for the HSDPA protocol. EDGE and GPRS are also provided for if your carrier does not have 3G.

Bluetooth is supported, but Infrared is not. There isn”¦t any WLAN support either. Apart from that, the built-in GPS receiver has maps that you can use right away. These maps are specific to your country, so make sure that you get the right map from the dealer when you buy the phone.

Camera
The camera is a 2-megapixel model, with a manual cover that can be slid to one side. When you slide the cover to one side, the camera kicks in immediately and is ready for shooting. That camera has an autofocus mechanism, which adjusts just fine in the few test pictures that I snapped.

The turnover time between pictures is fairly fast, but you must press the back button which then sends you from image preview back to camera viewfinder before you can snap the next photo. The camera buttons here do not light up, but I was pretty happy with the settings for night mode, colour and multishot.

There are a lot of other adjustable settings for the camera, including a panorama mode which allows you to shoot a series of photos side-by-side and then digitally paste them together to get a wider, panoramic image.

Video is recorded at 15 fps, and stored as MPEG-4 or H.263 at 320 x 240 pixels. The camera zoom goes up to 4x, and there are three different delay times for the self-timer mechanism.

Games
There are two games in the phone. The first one is Marble, which I have not seen in an earlier Nokia. It requires the user to fire marbles at other marbles that are moving around the screen. The objective here is to match colours for the marbles you fire versus the marbles that are already on the screen. The second game is the classic Nokia Snake, albeit in the 3D version this time around.

GPS
The GPS in this phone works much more intuitively than in the N95. whereas one had to scrabble around to find the proper applications in the N95, the inclusion of the shortcut GPS button here makes it so much easier.

Just one touch of the GPS button and the device automatically shows a map and your rough location on it. That is precisely what a user wants, not having to shuffle between multiple menus just to get to the map like on certain competing devices.

The maps depend on what you get when you buy the phone, but once you have the GPS receiver, which in this case is also the phone, then you can download, tweak and play with GPS settings as much as you like.

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