Nokia 3250 review: Rubik's phone

Music matters the most

New Nokia 3250 is born to play music. Yet, not everything is as bright as the phone's pink covers. First, not even once did I manage to use the control buttons situated on the rotary segment of the phone. I have no other choice but to assume that this problem is caused by the firmware of the tested model. Let's hope that its final version will work seamlessly. Let me now plug the enclosed earphones into the handset.

 
Enclosed earphones HS-20 with a standard jack

They are equipped with a standard 3.5 mm jack connector and feature a double cable of ideal length. Use the sliding cursor to fix the point where the two cables are to meet. The construction of the plug-in earphones is identical to the one we spoke so positively about in the review on Sony Ericsson W800. They come with several extensions, which go deep into one's ears and fill the ear canal completely. There are rubber extensions of three different sizes enclosed in the phone's delivery pack. Unfortunately, Nokia 3250's earphones are rather second-rate. The bass elements are poor, while the middle frequencies are sharp. If you can, substitute them with earphones of your own.

 
Plug-ins with sound tunnel • extensions of various size

I used my Koss Porta Pro. Nevertheless, sound remained lame. That made me remember the joy I experienced this summer listening to music with Sony Ericsson W800. Nokia 3250 scores worse. It does not play the way a high-class music phone should play. Sound gets slightly improved if the space extension function is activated. This function works similarly to SRS WOW in Windows Media Player in PC, or to an equalizer equipped with several pre-settings and an option for creation of a brand new preset.

Player's interface

Sound reflection is available in 3 different modes: street, small, medium-size and big room, or a big hall. It makes little sense though as the phone creates far greater echo in a small room than in a big room or a large hall. Strange, indeed.

The music player manages the following formats: eAAC+, AAC+, M4A, MPEG-4 ACC LC, LTP, MP3, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, MIDI, RealAudio Voice, RealAudio7, RealAudio8, RealAudio10, and WMA. It is able to play files randomly as well as repeat one or all of them. Once minimized, the name of the played album and its files appear in stand-by mode. Creating one's own playlists is possible, of course. ID3 tags are supported. The player orders files by artist's and album's name, as well as by genres and composers.

    
Images in the music library and setup options

The application itself features very interesting design. Font is quite small, even though it could have easily been bigger. Next to the Pop-Port the adapter has a "curve" that looks upwards, due to which it can be comfortably carried in one's pocket. At the end of the adapter there is a controller with a built-in microphone, which can also serve as a handsfree set. It is equipped with a hardware lock against random press and features all standard functions: forward, skip, pause and stop.

The adapter has several control buttons, a key lock, a microphone and a rotary clip

Where should I put the music?

I refer to the MP3 files. Nokia 3250 works with standard Mass Storage and thus appears as a new drive once connected to a PC. The phone provides direct access to the memory card structure. I was wondering where to save music files without using PC Suite. In fact, it is all the same. No matter which folder you locate the files in they can always be played only as common sound records. The use of the built-in music player was not possible.

USB connector

After I installed the data transfer application and the entire PC Suite delivered with the handset I would keep trying to make music files behave as real music file, but not as their poor relatives from the previous paragraph. My efforts were useless. The player would not recognize them. I was forced to play them in the way described above. I am going to keep looking for an answer to this problem though. If I do not find one, I will have no choice but credit this error to the provisional firmware of the tested piece.

Application for downloading music files into the phone

Let me now show you piquancy. Try to guess where in the phone the memory card slot - microSD (TransFlash), the tiniest memory card in the world - is hidden. When we obtained Nokia 3250 pack and took out the handset, our entire team put heads together plenty of times looking for the memory card, but we would not manage to find it. Eventually, embarrassed, we had to open phone's manual. The thumb-nail memory card is located under a rubber cap on the bottom side of the static part of the device. To get to it you have to first rotate the bottom part of Nokia 3250. Would you have found it here without the help of the manual? The phone comes along with an enclosed 128 MB card. At the same time the market offers microSD of up to 512 MB. Together with the card you will get an adapter for standard-size SD memory card.

 
Would you ever search for it here?

 
MicroSD is truly miniature • comparison to RS-MMC • enclosed adapter for SD size