Now here’s a tasty-looking phone. Nokia have finally joined the ultra-thin revolution with the 6500 Classic phone. Incredibly it’s a 3G phone! And doesn’t it look nice, with its sleek aluminium casing (“individually polished”, according to the Nokia blurb) and available in Black and Bronze. Let’s pause a moment to enjoy the looks.

OK, having drooled enough, let’s look at the exterior of the phone in more detail. There’s absolutely nothing to complain about here. Whereas Sony Ericsson seem intent on destroying nice phones with unergonomic keypads, Nokia have learned their lesson from making “cool” keypads and have provided the 6500 Classic with a small but functional keypad and navigation key. The combination of an ergonomic design, a plain Series 40 interface (no Smartphone junk here!) make this an easy phone to use. Power it up, and the next thing to enjoy is the large and ultra high-resolution LCD display boasting the latest 16 million colour display technology. It’s a display that you can easily customise with a choice of themes (wallpapers, sounds, screensavers, and backgrounds).

The featurelist of the 6500 Classic… matches what you’d expect from a mid-range 3G phone in 2007: a 2 megapixel camera (no autofocus – so don’t throw away your digital camera!), a competent music player (although support for Bluetooth stereo headsets is missing), a video camera and good connectivity via USB and Bluetooth. There’s nothing to get very excited about here, but it ticks all the boxes that most people will care about. One obvious thing that’s missing, considering that this is a 3G phone, is video calling. There’s no front-facing camera, so video calling is out, I’m afraid. However, the sales package does include a Nokia Stereo Headset HS-82 and a microUSB Connectivity Cable CA-101, so we can’t fault Nokia for their generosity there.

One of the unusual features of the 6500 Classic is that it has a fixed memory of 1 Gbyte, of which around 920 Mbytes is available to the user. Now this has its good points and bad points. The bad point is that there’s no slot for increasing the memory beyond 1 Gbyte. But on the other hand, 920 Mbytes is enough to store 200-300 songs, which is certainly enough for most users, and it means that the memory is all easily accessible in one place, without any hassle of copying data from internal memory to memory card. Given the kind of phone that the 6500 Classic is (i.e. mid-range) we think that this is a perfectly good solution. Other thing to point out is that battery life is poor, which isn’t surprising for an ultraslim 3G handset. It’ll probably need charging every other day.

Nokia 6500 Classic Specification:

Network system
UMTS / GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900

Size
109.8 x 45 x 9.5 mm, 47 cc

Weight
94 g

Display
- TFT, 16M colors
- 240 x 320 pixels, 2 inches

Battery type Standard battery, Li-Ion 830 mAh (BL-6P)
Stand-by up to 300 h
Talk time up to 5 h 30 min

Ringtones
Polyphonic (64 channels), MP3

Option
Number in phone Yes
Call records 20 dialed, 20 received, 20 missed calls

Memory
- No Card Slot
- 1 GB internal user memory

GPRS Class 32, 53.6 kbps
Messaging SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Infrared port No
Games Yes + downloadable
Color Black, Bronze

Features
- Camera 2 MP, 1600×1200 pixels, video(QCIF), flash
- Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP
- 3G 384 kbps
- WAP 2.0/xHTML
- Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML (Opera mini)
- EDGE Class 32, 296 / 177.6 kbits
- Seamless case of anodized aluminum
- Java MIDP 2.0
- MP3/AAC/AAC+ player
- T9
- Calendar
- Calculator
- Built-in handsfree
- Voice memo

Technoreviews score this Nokia 6500 Classic scale from 0-10 is 7.2