Nokia 6270 review: A bulky slider

Don't wanna miss a thing?

The Nokia 6270 has a separate Organizer menu which includes applications to help you stay on schedule. The Alarm clock allows for only one alarm to be set but it can be repeated on given days of the week. Nokia 6270 will wake you up with a standard peep sound, with any sound saved in the phone, or with radio signal, if the earphones are plugged in. The snooze time of the alarm is also configurable.

The calendar application has benefited significantly from the large display and its higher resolution. The monthly view includes details like the weeks and the week days, while the Weekly view includes details like the days and the hourly schedule for those days. The week begins according to the wish of the user - in Saturday, Sunday or Monday.

The calendar offers 5 types of events: meeting, call, birth date, memo, 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, which unnecessarily complicates things. The reminder in Nokia 6270 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). The phone offers synchronization of notes and calendar events with both a PC and a remote server.

Organizer menu • setting an alarm • Calendar: monthly view

The To-Do list is simple enough. 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).

Nokia 6270 offers a voice recorder and as in Nokia 6280, the voice record duration depends on the available free memory only. It's up to your will whether the recordings will be stored into the internal memory or onto the memory card. Nokia 6270 uses the .amr format and a one-minute recording uses approximately 100 KB of the memory. Here the Nokia engineers could have designed the side button on the left side of the phone to start the voice record instead the Push-to-talk function or at least it should have been made user configurable.

The menu also has a countdown timer and a stopwatch. The Java applications include a unit & currency 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.

One of the things we missed is an application for viewing MS Office and Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

Playing in 3D

Nokia 6270 supports Java 2.0. The phone features 2 pre-installed games: Golf Tour and Snake III. Both feature interesting graphics, but disappoint when it comes to amusement.

Golf Tour & Snake III games

The Golf game is as realistic as possible on such a small display and the limited control options. There are several available types of gameplay so you shouldn't get bored easily. The Snake game is a nicely elaborated 3D variant of the legendary Snake game. But this time the controls are rather complicated and you can hardly get the apple you are after since the snake doesn't turn in the right moment you want it to turn.

Final words…

At the very beginning we were pretty reserved towards Nokia 6270. During the tests, however, it turned out that it offers abundant user-configurable options to make your life easier. The menu is organized logically; functions are detailed, offering high control comfort and brilliant work efficiency.

When making an informed buying decision though, competition does matter - if you make your research you will find that there are a lot of other phones that offer equal functionality with a far better design.

The Nokia's greatest drawbacks - the size and weight, the lack of playlists support for the music player, the low camera picture quality and the hefty price would surely make a lot of people turn their backs to it.