Nokia 6280 Review

Overall Rating

Good quality camera
Stunning screen quality
Nice size
Good battery life
Sliding mechanism is smooth (when it's new anyway)
Easy to repair when it breaks, or maybe that's just me getting used to it

Camera lacks functions and the flash is useless
Poorly built
Unreliable
Lack of compatibility with old Nokia chargers

They don't make 'em like they used to. It's a cliche phrase, but one which I keep hearing about Nokia's new phones and now it's one I'm finding myself telling people.

The 6280 is the latest in a long line of Nokia phones I have owned, and after the over-complicated 6680 which was prone to slow running and crashing I decided I wanted a break from the world of smartphones. Now, after six months, I'm thinking of cutting my losses and going back to the 6680.

Out of the box it's a lovely phone. The screen resolution is fantastic, and will make the most of a good quality image uploaded from your PC (or even the included backgrounds) as a wallpaper. It's also stylish, with a simple silver, black and chrome colour scheme and smooth sliding mechanism and is bundled with a PC cable, software and headphones for the built in radio. Neat.

The first issue I found with this phone is that it uses Nokia's new smaller charger jacks, so the multitude of old adapters I have left around work, home and the car are now useless. This wasn't difficult to solve, Nokia sell converters which downsize the jack, but given how cheap these are it would have been nice to get a couple thrown in for convenience sake.

The 6280's biggest selling point is its neat 2 megapixel camera which uses the entire screen as a viewfinder and has its own shutter release button. This means it's like a point and shoot digital camera to use, and is more natural for taking pictures. But don't be fooled by megapixels. Like the Sony Ericsson K750i, depth of field and image clarity are still way behind my 5 year old 2mp digital camera. However, if you're after a camera good enough to take printable snapshots and decent videos it's more than up to the job.

However, it's got its fair share of flaws. Where the camera falls down most is night photography. The 6280's camera includes a flash and has night mode for longer exposure times, but it's incapable of taking decent pictures in the dark. The flash isn't isolated properly which means light leaks into night pictures from the right hand side leaving you with a glowing fog on your pictures. In really dark conditions the flash also makes people's faces blue.

Night mode, like all other Nokias with this feature, is similarly useless unless you've got a really steady hand or want to take arty blurry pictures. Any dark pictures taken with the 6280 will also suffer from noise (dots all over the picture) which are very obvious once you load them onto a computer.

Aside from the flash, the camera also has a useless digital zoom function. You won't realise until you load them onto a computer, but rather than zooming in and taking a full size picture, this simply crops part of the frame. At full zoom it'll give you an image just about big enough to be a thumbnail. Not impressive, and certainly nowhere near printable.

Once you've taken your picture, inserting it into a multimedia message couldn't be simpler. Well, actually, it really could. If you take images at 640x480 it'll tell you they're too big and demand that you crop them first, unlike the 6680 and even the 6600 I had before which both resized them automatically.

Camera niggles aside this is a straightforward phone to use. The menu system is intuitive and loads quickly, it's considerably faster than my Orange branded 6680. I was lucky enough to get an unbranded one though, so I couldn't comment on what the Orange Homescreen does to this.

My biggest problem with this phone is that, despite how it feels when new, it's really badly put together and very fragile. Six months into ownership, and it's falling apart. I treat all my phones the same, and while none have withstood this abuse as well as my Nokia 3210, I've never had one which breaks so easily. The silver plastic trim on the side broke when I dropped it on laminate wood floor from waist height. The screen cracked when I dropped it on concrete. Wear and tear has knackered the sliding mechanism, which means now when I drop it it either slides the wrong way or comes apart completely. But with practice I can now put the sliding front back on in less than a minute. Go me.

The software has similar fragilities. Locking the keypad occasionally turns the phone off, sometimes it decides it won't connect to the Orange network for a few hours even though it's in coverage and once it did a spectacular purple and green light show while I was writing a text message then rebooted itself. During the summer it decided it couldn't be bothered switching between 2G and 3G automatically, the option vanished from the menu, so now I have to tell it which I want. I didn't buy a Smartphone, but I didn't want a stupid one either and the 6280 is a few cards short of a full deck sometimes.

So, overall it's a good looking, easy to use phone with a great camera, but it's fragile, tempramental and badly designed. It's not an awful phone, but it's not up to the quality I'd expect from a Nokia handset. Unfortunately I have another 18 months before I can upgrade, and I can't imagine it will last its full term. If it does expire and the alternative is an Orange branded replacement I'll go back to my 6680.