Nokia 6131 review: Highly addictive

Time organizer and office applications: long live large displays

Alarm clock is repeated. Alarm days as well as the repeated alarm interval are user-configurable. Nokia 6131 will wake you up with a standard peep sound, with any sound from the phone memory, or with radio signal, provided earphones are plugged in.

Setting up the alarm clock

The calendar application has benefited significantly from the display enlargement and its higher resolution. Its month and day views can now be viewed simultaneously, including details like month, week, week days... The week view has similar characteristics: in the top part of the display you will see bars with individual days and times, while in the bottom area is located the correspondent day view.

  
Month view of the calendar • week view • day view • event detail

The calendar offers 5 types of events: meeting, call, birth date, note, and reminder. The last one, the reminder, is used for fast inserting something that has to be reminded of soon. In other mobiles you often need to use the "meeting" option as a reminder one, which unnecessarily complicates things. Reminder in Nokia 6131 includes the following details: subject, place, starting date and time, end date and time, reminder date and time, reminder type, repetition (never, daily, weekly, every two weeks, monthly, and annually). Note alias synchronization is missing, which is a pity as it may create difficulties with meetings already planned in Outlook. Meeting place is downloaded into the phone during synchronization.

Modifying events

Task list is simple. Here you can only add a subject, a priority, a term, and a reminder type. Accomplished tasks can be marked off. List items can be ordered in alphabetic order or by deadline. Tasks are very easy to transfer into the calendar.

Text notes are quite handy, because they get synchronized with PC, which allows for longer texts to be downloaded into the phone. Font size is not configurable. Yet, in my opinion it is the text notes where three font size options would have been really helpful (just like in the SMS application). I have the same mark regarding font size in the task list.

Nokia 6131 is equipped with a voice recorder, which makes records with a 5-minute maximum duration. This limit is quite surprising as in Nokia 6280 voice record duration depended on the available free memory only. Whether data will be stored into the internal memory or onto the memory card is up to your will. Nokia 6131 uses AMR format, a one-minute record occupies approximately 100 KB of memory. Here Nokia engineers could have designed the upper button on the left side of the phone to start the voice record. Instead it has been assigned to the Push to talk function.

The menu also has a countdown option, a stopwatch for lap and meantime measuring. In the java applications there is a unit & rate converter, a world time clock, and a calculator. The latter is quite detailed, offering not only standard mathematic operations, but also work with powers, square roots, reciprocals, functions, the number pi, and memory functions. Yet, the calculator ignores common operator priority. The last application worth mentioning is the so called Sensor, which serves for communication through Bluetooth.

 
Unit converter • World time • Smart and at the same time stupid calculator

Simple music application and multimedia functions

Even though music files can be directly played either from the memory, or from the memory card (respective folder is selected in the music player application), it is more convenient to transfer music into the phone using Nokia Audio Manager, which is a part of PC Suite. Here you can create playlists and transfer music straight into the mobile device through a USB cable. However, if you possess larger music library, of more than thousand songs, for example, work with Nokia Audio Manager will probably turn into a never-ending suffering.

The MP3 or AAC(+) player integrated in Nokia 6131 is rather simple. All options are controlled through the use of three keys: start/stop, fast forward and next track. If you minimize the player, the name of the currently running track appears on the active stand-by display. From here you can also move straight to the next song and even fast forward. Repeating and shuffle options are available too. When music is played with the device closed, the name of the current song and the artist appear on the external display.

 
Music player • detailed playlist

The earphones delivered with the Nokia 6131 are a standard pair of plugs of average quality, which go into the Pop-port. I recommend music fans to get themselves an adapter in order to be able to plug in their own set of earphones. I myself tested Nokia 6131 with a pair of Sennheiser HD212 Pro and I remained quite satisfied. The phone is also equipped with an equalizer to help balance sound properties.

Earphones delivered with Nokia 6131

The earphones have a microphone, a key for call accept/skip a song, and a couple of smaller volume control keys.

Note: in case that you decide to get yourself an earphone adapter, you may run into a problem with Nokia Music Pack as this comes together with a memory card of the MMC type, while Nokia 6131 uses microSD. That is why you may need to buy an adapter separately.

Video in Nokia 6131 is played within an application called Media Player, which also supports streaming. I tried to convert a movie into MPEG4.3GP format and it worked out well. Nokia 6131 played it across the entire display, with the legends Back and Pause being the only disturbing visible elements. The Media Player is not capable of fast forwarding videos.

Your multimedia data is not limited to the internal 10 MB memory. It can be extended with the help of microSD memory cards, which can be hot-swapped meaning that you can change them without turning off the device. Just remove the rear cover.

First remove the rear cover, and then insert the memory card

 
Memory manager

If you get bored with the music player, switch on the FM radio. Here you can save up to 20 broadcasting stations. In general, however, it does not offer any special functions, not to mention RDS.

Radio