Nokia 6500 slide review: Slide over slim

Phonebook leaves pleasurable impression

The phonebook on Nokia 6500 slide offers space for up to 2000 contacts, as well as various configuration options. 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. The picture displayed is different for incoming and outgoing calls, as it fills the screen when you are on the receiving end of a call, and appears much smaller when you are calling any of your contacts.

The phonebook looks are familiar to everyone who has ever used a Series 40 phone

There are three available view modes for your contacts list: List-of-Names, Name-and-Number and Name-and-Picture. It can display the SIM card contacts, the in-phone contacts or both at the same time. The phonebook font size can also be enlarged, should the user find that necessary, and it's an option that will surely be widely appreciated.

Searching is done by gradual typing of the name of the corresponding contact. And that's not all: contacts can also be organized in groups and these can subsequently be used as call filters.

Another application worth our compliments is voice dial; no pre-recording of voice labels is necessary. There is also a training application that helps for better results when using voice commands and/or dialing.

The Call Log in Nokia 6500 slide won't surprise anyone who has ever held a Series 40 device in their hands. 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.

The Call log holds 20 records in each sub menu - dialed, received and missed calls • It also keeps track of your total call duration and data transfers, as well as messages and sync sessions

Messaging is great with this keypad

The message menu has not undergone any modifications either. It is organized almost perfectly. Besides standard text messages, Nokia 6500 slide is capable of receiving and sending multimedia messages, sound, flash messages, and emails.

The messaging submenu • a dialog window for creating a new message

SMS and MMS use one and the same editor and all you need to do in order to turn a regular SMS into an MMS is insert a picture or any other multimedia content.

As soon as you activate the editor, it displays a field for entering the number of the recipient, which you can insert through standard 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. Everything in the editor is intuitive and is organized in a practical time-saving manner.

It goes without saying that the phone also offers a rich T9 dictionary.

"...Another application worth our compliments is voice dial; no pre-recording of voice labels is necessary. There is also a training application that helps for better results when using voice commands and/or dialing..."

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Message length is limited to 1000 characters with both the count of typed characters and the number of parts the message will be divided into constantly visible. 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.

Composing SMS or MMS starts in the same window

Flash messages are simple text messages that are instantly displayed upon receipt but are not automatically saved. The good news is that the Flash message will be immediately displayed also on non-Nokia phones; in our case we successfully tested the service with a Qtek 8600.

Creating and previewing a Flash message

Now, the audio message is technically also a MMS but obviously it is more important to people at Nokia and they have created a separate editor for it. The software editor can either record the message as you go or use a previously recorded sound clip. Unfortunately, adding text to it is impossible.

We doubt it the audio message editor will be put to frequent use, especially with no option to add text to it

The email client is luckily no longer a built-in Java application but the fully functional email client instead, that we have come to know from most Nokia smartphones. That makes it much faster and generally better than the one used in Nokia 6300 for example. It works with POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4 protocols and supports multiple email boxes.

The email client and some of the available menu options

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. Both message headers only and entire messages can be downloaded, depending on your choice.

Under messaging the Yahoo!Go feature is also available, a third-party service provided by Yahoo! Inc. The convenient service is optimized for small-screen browsing on handsets and gives access to yahoo mail, calendar, and weather, along with stocks, news, blogs, mobile search, etc.

Yahoo! Go in the messaging department with some of the available services