Nokia 6500 classic review: Slim inside out

Organizer: time-proven performance

The organizer brings no novelties either, and, frankly, it needs none. Month, week, and day views are available for the calendar. The week can start on Monday, Sunday, or Saturday. There are five types of events: reminder, meeting, call, birthday and memo. Further, each type of event has its own specific fields like start and end time, type of alert with various advance intervals, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly repetition.

Different calendar views • Some of the calendar settings • Each of the available events has its own unique options and settings

There is also a handy to-do manager that enables you to categorize tasks in three priority levels. Tasks can be alerted of, as well as marked off once accomplished. They are easily synced with the calendar application. Text notes are available as well; their length limit is 3000 characters. The alarm clock is repeatable; it can be set to go off on any weekday and works even when the phone is switched off. You can also customize the snooze time if you wish.

The other organizing functions available include a voice recorder with a 60-minute length limit, stopwatch, countdown timer and a calculator. They are all easily operable and decently looking. This time however, the calculator is not as elaborate as in Nokia 6300 for example. It offers fewer mathematical functions but at least the essentials are still there for the user.

Other organizer features include voice recorder, stopwatch, countdown timer and a calculator

Applications

Nokia 6500 classic comes with a relatively small number of preinstalled applications outside the organizer. The sensor application has been dropped and so has been the size converter. Luckily, the regular unit converter remains and is consistently useful. It offers all kinds of converting options and, if provided with enough information about the rates, offers currency conversion too.

The unit converter is doing the usual great job

The other included application is the world clock, which allows checking the time in any time zone at the cost of only a few clicks. And finally, the applications that complete the content on Nokia 6500 classic are the Yahoo search and the Download application. While the first greatly facilitates the access to the popular search engine, the latter connects you directly to Nokia's download center, where you can find a lot of downloadable content for you phone.

The World clock application lets you check out time all over the world • Yahoo search engine and Nokia download center can easily be accessed with the built-in applications

Let the games begin

Gaming lovers will probably appreciate the preinstalled content, as it includes five games. The first one we don't come across too often in the mobile phones we review - the Backgammon II game is the Java interpretation of the popular board game.

The fans of the classic board game will be glad to find Backgammon II preinstalled on Nokia 6500 classic.

Snake is essential to Nokia phones, so the presence of Snake III in Nokia 6500 classic is no surprise at all.

Snake: the game to tell a Nokia phone

The High roller casino is a game that will meet the appreciation of gambling lovers, as it includes some of the most popular gambling games, such as Texas Hold'em Poker and Blackjack.

High Roller casino will be appreciated by gambling fans

The final two games in line are the sport simulation Golf Tour and the Java version of the popular Japanese game Sudoku. All the games have decent graphics and are comparatively easy to play. Leaving the tiny keys aside, that is.

The last two games are Sudoku and Golf Tour

When looks come first

The question at the end of our Nokia 6500 classic review is whether a seductive look can secure a lenient verdict. It is a truly great looking handset. Well, except for the not so rare moments when it ends up covered with fingerprints. Functionality however is not that much of a leap forward to justify the asking price. If you find the Nokia 6500 classic so hard to resist you might end up buying it. But in all other cases the reasonable decision will be to look elsewhere. For the same price you will buy two Nokia 6300 phones and even save some money for extra memory. Maybe this will change with time and prices will eventually level out. At this stage however, there seem to be very few arguments in favor of purchasing the Nokia 6500 classic. At least one of them though, seems to be a strong enough motivation: looks. And who says all buys should be reasonable? Anyway, the Nokia 6500 classic is on offer and it's your money.