Nokia 3120 classic review: Mid-range fighter

Customization

There are as many as four different view modes available for the main menu of Nokia 3120 classic: a grid of icons with or without captions, a list of items, and tabs. While each of them has its pros and cons, our personal choice remains the typical grid view of 3 x 3 icons with legends. If you prefer more icons to appear on screen, you can go for the grid view without labels, as it displays a 4 x 3 icon grid.

The four different main menu view modes

The background color of the entire menu, as well as the wallpaper, can also be easily modified by changing the active theme. There are four themes preinstalled on the Nokia 3120 classic but downloading new ones is only a matter of seconds.

The other three preinstalled themes

A spacious phonebook

The phonebook of Nokia 3120 classic stores up to 2000 contacts and that sounds good enough. Each contact can be assigned a variety of fields but the phone numbers are limited to 5. First names are separated from last names eliminating problems, which may occur with synchronization. Ringtones can be assigned to each contact.

Naturally, you can also assign personal pictures or videos that will run on an incoming call. Bear in mind that the caller image is different for incoming and outgoing calls. It fills the screen when you are on the receiving end of a call, and appears much smaller when you are calling one of your contacts.

The Nokia 3120 classic phonebook is searched by gradual typing

There are three available view modes for your contact list: List-of-Names, Name-and-Number and Name-and-Picture. It can display the SIM card contacts, the phone memory contacts or both at the same time. Contacts can be ordered by either first or last name.

Some of the available fields when editing a contact

The phonebook font size can also be modified, should this be necessary, and it's an option that will surely be widely appreciated. And lastly, the well-known grouping is also present. This means that contacts can also be organized in groups and these can subsequently be used as call filters.

Another application to mention here is the voice dial: no pre-recording of voice labels is necessary. There is also a Voice aid application.

The Call Log in Nokia 3120 classic hasn't undergone any significant changes either compared to other S40 devices. It can display Dialed, Received and Missed calls separately, as well as all of them together. Every submenu can hold up to 20 call records with their date, time and duration.

Messaging duly covered

No major changes are to note in the messaging menu either. Not that it needs any, as it's organized very well and capabilities are extensive. Nokia 3120 is capable of handling all the common message types including SMS, MMS and email.

Texts and MMS use one and the same editor and all you need to do to turn a regular SMS into MMS is insert some kind of multimedia content. As soon as you activate the editor, it displays a field for entering the number of the recipient, which you can fill by simple typing, select it from the phonebook, from the caller groups, or from the list with the most recent addressees in the call register. There is even the very handy option to select a favorite message contact in case you have frequent correspondence with one and the same person.

Typing a message is a nice experience with the classic

Everything in the editor is intuitive and organized in a practical time-saving manner. Once you have inserted the relevant number, a single click will shift to the message body where you can start typing. The T9 dictionary and the handy delivery reports go without saying.

Message length is limited to 1000 characters with both the count of typed characters and the number of parts the message will break down into displayed on the screen. All messages use the shared memory, regardless of their type.

A photo, a contact card, or an event from the calendar can be sent via MMS. MMS size limit for both send and receive is 300 KB. A handy feature is that the phone will automatically scale down pictures for sending via MMS.

The email client is doing pretty well to meet most user needs in this aspect. It works with POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4 protocols and supports multiple email accounts.

The native email client is more than good

When a message is to be sent, it finds the email address of the corresponding recipient in the phonebook. Sent attachments are not limited in size. Either message headers only or entire messages can be downloaded by default, depending on your choice.