Email used to be so simple. You’d have a mailbox somewhere and every now and then your mobile device would dial it up and ‘move’ down selected new messages. Then IMAP email started to come over from the corporate world and take off for consumers, bringing the concept of email staying on the server and you accessing it directly there. Nokia’s all-encompassing solution for email and had a rocky start, launching in the era of the ill-fated Nokia N97, which struggled with the disk space requirements. But Nokia Email is now mature and a decent all-purpose push email system, as we see here.

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Step 1: Initial checks

Before getting started, we need to double check a few things. One: you’ve already got a Nokia/Ovi account. Two: you’ve got a SIM card in your phone and you’re not in ‘offline’ mode. Three: you do have a valid cellular data access point (e.g. O2 Internet). You’d be surprised the number of people who ‘try out’ Nokia Email on a spare phone, with Wi-fi and no SIM and then wonder why nothing works properly. Although Nokia Email and Ovi Store work fine over wi-fi once set up, the initial sign-up process requires cellular access, so that Nokia’s servers can get information about your location and network.

Step 2: Popular email providers

Starting from a point of extreme wariness then – maybe you’ve been ‘burnt’ before with Nokia Messaging – head for the ‘Mail’ icon on your Symbian phone and tap on ‘New’ – you’ll see a page of intro text. Tap on ‘Start’. You’ll see a list of half a dozen popular email providers, each of which has had the optimum settings pre-inserted.

Step 3: Off and running immediately

Assuming that you use one of these (e.g. Gmail), tap on it and enter your email address and password (fig 3). If offered ‘Terms of service’, accept them and move on (though do see the FAQ below). Nokia Email will then go off and check access and then you’re, quite literally, up and running. No fiddly mail server addresses to look up and type in.

Step 4: Are you ‘Other’?

On the other hand, if you’re in the 2% of people who don’t use any of the above systems and your email provider wasn’t on the initial list, tap on ‘Other’, and again enter your login details. This time, however, there are extra questions to answer – whether it’s a Mail for Exchange account or POP/IMAP, what the server addresses are, what security systems are used, and so on. See your email provider’s web page for the answers to anything you’re not sure of.

Step 5: Your email inbox

Either way, Nokia Email should now be showing you emails in your inbox (fig 5), or at least showing a whirling ‘busy’ indicator and is obviously busy retrieving content for you (give it a few minutes, especially at first). You might think that you’re done at this point. Well, not quite, here’s where things start to get more interesting.

Step 6: Pre-loading email images

Tap on ‘Back’, to get to the opening Mail screen and tap on ‘Settings’. ‘Message display’ is well worth diving into (fig 6), not least because you can turn on the downloading of images, which saves you one step when reading image-enriched emails later on, assuming you’re on a fast connection, and because you can turn off the annoying warning when deleting emails.

Step 7: Saving bytes, saving time?

Tap on ‘Back’ and then again on the name of your mailbox (usually just your email address). ‘Synchronisation’ is also worth looking at – you can tweak a couple of settings should you find yourself on a slow or expensive cellular connection (perhaps when roaming in another country). ‘Retrieval frequency’ can be dialled right down, while ‘Mail download size’ can be downgraded to just mail headers, to reduce the bandwidth used up.

Step 8: The human touch

Tap on ‘Back’ again and then on ‘Account settings’. Although Nokia’s setup wizard will have filled in the main fields, to get your email up and running, it won’t have known any more about you. Set your real name in ‘My name’ – this will be supplied to people who receive your email in the message header.

Step 9: All your info, every time, in your sig!

Also really, really useful, while in this dialog, is to switch ‘Include signature’ to ‘Yes’ (fig 9) and set up some suitable ‘Signature text’ that will get appended to any email you send from your phone. At its simplest, as here, it might say ‘(sent while mobile)’, a warning to people that you might be slightly briefer than normal in your reply text. If you’ve got time, you can also put in your usual contact details, such as title, phone numbers, web address and any relevant caveats. Not having to type any of this in a mobile email ever again is quite freeing, while the recipient gets all the information they’ll need.

Step 10: Email on your homescreen

You’re not going to want to dive into email through a menu shortcut 50 times a day though – far better is to put your mailbox right on your phone’s homescreen. Press ‘Home’ and then tap on ‘Options>Edit home screen’. Tap on a free ‘+’ slot and pick ‘Mail’ from the list of widgets. You’ll then need to tap on which mailbox you’d like shown in this slot (should you have more than one) and then you can tap on ‘Done’ and sit back and admire the result (fig 10). Congratulations, you now have push email showing on your phone homescreen – tap the widget to bring up the full app.

Step 11: Keyboard shortcuts

Finally, on keyboard-equipped devices like the Nokia E6 and E7, extra keyboard shortcuts are available for powering your way around Nokia Email. Within the email list or when reading an email, tap on ‘Options’ and you’ll see alphabetic keyboard shortcuts listed, along with what they do (fig 11). So, next time you need to ‘Reply’ to a message, for example, just hit ‘r’. Much faster!

When Nokia launched the E7 it was billed as the ultimate business smartphone. It is in many ways the logical successor to the old Communicator line, and Nokia is pushing its ability to cope with Microsoft Exchange email, create and edit documents, use Outlook calendar synchronisation and even use built in Virtual Private Networking (VPN) for secure connection to your work network.

The built in qwerty keyboard and 4 inch screen help in this respect, but the Nokia E7 also has good consumer credentials with Twitter and Facebook support, an 8 megapixel camera, HDMI out, BBC iPlayer pre-installed and plenty of gaming potential. In fact, where the old Communicator line was definitely a case of ‘business first’, the E7 is an attempt to mix both worlds.

The Nokia E7 is a slim and neat handset, and in fact you’d be hard pressed to think that it packs a qwerty keyboard inside its slimline chassis. It is heavy, though, thanks to the solid casing.

The chassis has two unpleasant surprises on offer. First, it does not have a removable backplate, so the 1200mAh battery that powers the E7 is fixed and non replaceable. Second, there is no slot for a microSD card, so you are stuck with the 16GB of built in storage. Both seem like throwback issues to us, though admittedly no Windows Phone 7 handsets cater for removable storage either.

If you are wondering how you fit a SIM into the Nokia E7 when it lacks a backplate, the answer is that there is a side slot.

The Symbian^3 operating system has come in for some stick in the past. It is Nokia’s own label touchscreen OS and it offers three home screens which you can fill with widgets and shortcuts. Each screen offers six widget areas, and any one can be populated with a single shortcut or data area (showing incoming email or diary commitments, for example) or four small links to apps.

For us ^3 feels just a bit too like older versions of Symbian, and with its apps stuck in nested menus it doesn’t make for easy navigation.

To give just one example. The E7 has two radio applications, one for FM radio, one for DAB. You might expect to find them both in the same place, but the FM app is in a folder labelled ‘Music’ and the DAB shortcut is in the ‘Applications’ folder. Nokia could get over this and the other similar problems that run throughout the system simply by getting rid of the folders system altogether.

The forthcoming Symbian Anna update should smooth away some of the UI issues, as well as add an improved browser too.

Still, the Nokia ClearBlack screen is beautifully bright, and the 640 x 360 pixels, while being a long way from the top of the range in a smartphone are sharp enough. The screen is capacitive and supports pinch to zoom. Data displays really well, and benefits from the larger size of the 4 inch screen.

The hinging mechanism is super smooth and there is a satisfying clunking noise when the keyboard is revealed and hidden away. The screen sits up at a nice 45 degree angle when the keyboard is on show, so you can easily view its contents when the Nokia E7 is on a desk.

And the keyboard itself is a pleasure to work with. The well spaced keys are comfy under the fingers, and there is even room for a small set of cursor keys on the right side of the keyboard. We’d have liked dedicated shortcut buttons for messaging, the web and so on, but as you can add these to a home screen there absence isn’t really a problem.

Multimedia fans will like the HDMI out feature and Nokia provides a converter from the mini jack on the handset to a full sized one. But multimedia fans may bemoan the fact that the camera is fixed focus. In a handset of this level of sophistication that’s an odd feature.

There’s an awful lot to like about the E7. The combination of form factor, excellent keyboard and superb screen give it true appeal for the business user. But it comes with a very high price tag, and that only services to make its weaknesses seem even greater.

Price: £499 SIM-free
Web: www.nokia.com

Essential Verdict
Performance: 8/10
Design: 7/10
Features: 7/10
Value for Money: 8/10
Overall score: 7/10

Written by Sandra Vogel.

Nokia’s new Symbian^3 operating system has not impressed us greatly so far. When we reviewed the Nokia C7, for example, we liked the handset well enough, but we did have some reservations about Symbian^3.

Nokia’s challenge has been to come up with something which does not jar too much for existing Nokia users while offering enough new stuff to keep up with popular touch oriented operating systems. The solution seems to us to be a bit of a fudge, with nested menus which feel very old fashioned sitting alongside multiple home screens with a widget based ethos.

As on other Symbian^3 handsets Nokia offers three home screens on the C6-01, and you move between these with horizontal sweeps of the capacitive touch screen. Three home screens might seem rather too few, but actually you can do a lot in the space.

Each has six ‘slots’ which you can populate with shortcuts, data such as RSS feeds, Twitter or Facebook alerts, or four application shortcuts or bookmarks. Populating these slots is a bit tedious. You press and hold the screen to access all its slots, then tap to add something new by scrolling through a list and making a selection.

Changing a group of four app shortcuts or bookmarks requires quite a few screen presses. This is a long way from the press and hold system used by Android and setting up a home screen so it is ‘just so’ feels like a chore.

Still, it does all work, and the look and feel should not be alarming to existing Nokia handset fans.

The C6-01 itself is a well featured and well-built handset which sits towards the middle of the range in pricing terms. It is related to the previously reviewed C6, also known as the C6-00, by its naming convention though it lacks the sliding keyboard of the C6-00 and that older handset runs on Symbian S60 5th edition.

Both handsets share some key characteristics, and one of these is a pocket friendly size. They both have a 3.2 inch screen offering 640 x 360 pixels of viewing area. This is small for a smartphone screen, and not ideally suited to media rich activities like web browsing or viewing video.

When web browsing you can pinch to zoom, which is useful, but text reflowing support is not good, so if you zoom past a certain point you’ll find yourself having to scroll left and right to read text. Scrolling through long web pages is not always smooth, either.

Where text entry is concerned, there isn’t space for a qwerty keyboard in portrait mode, so you are left with a phone style multitap keyboard instead. In wide mode you do get qwerty, but it is a little cramped if you have larger hands. This is definitely a ‘try before you buy’ handset as the smaller than average screen size does have implications in many key areas of use.

Wi-Fi, GPS and HSDPA are all present and you can put a handy Wi-Fi scanner on one of the home screens which will tell you when networks are in the vicinity.

The camera shoots stills to 8 megapixels, pushing the C6-01 above the 5 megapixels that is the average these days, and it benefits from a dual LED flash to help out in low light conditions. There is a front camera for video calling.

The one area where the C6-01 really shines, is the area where Nokia always shines: build quality. The metal backplate is a factor in the 131g of weight, but the handset feels solid rather than hefty. There is a side mounted lock button and a camera shortcut too. Beneath the screen are Call and End buttons and a central lozenge for access to the main menu.

Price: £295 SIM-free
Web: www.nokia.com

Essential Verdict
Performance: 7/10
Design: 8/10
Features: 7/10
Value for Money: 8/10
Overall score: 7/10

Review written by Sandra Vogel. Originally published in Smartphone Essentials magazine.

The BackBeat 903+ is a set of Bluetooth headphones that make an immediate impression. They can be considered contemporary and sleek or big, bulky hearing aid wannabe’s.

The style straight out of the box is subject to opinion, but slip the earpieces over the ear and opinion changes. They sit comfortably and securely on the ear and in the ear helping to eliminate a lot of external noise.

The right earpiece boasts all the music controls, while the opposite earpiece boasts the call button. The relative controls are on the outside of the earpieces and are not the easiest to operate. They are small and not immediately instinctive. However, after using the units for a while the operations become second nature.

Getting connected, via an iPhone, was quick, simple and straightforward. Plus, a neat battery level indicator icon appears on the iPhone giving a quick visual on headphone power.

Primarily the Plantronics are a set of headphones for music playback. The default sound output is strong and there is a bass boost to give the audio an extra kick. The headphones switch seamlessly to incoming calls and the sound, while not as sharp as music playback, is perfectly acceptable for a conversation.

Web: www.plantronics.com
Price: £69.99
Rating: 8/10

Inevitably, most households are going to have more than one device that needs a battery boost. And, it is almost inevitable that devices are going to need to different connectors.

This presents a host of standard issue connectors which will get either lost or be unavailable when most needed. The Varta Home Station resolves the issue and provides a neat and tidy recharging solution for the home.

The Home Station is a multi-functional unit with a collection of adaptors, USB port and an in-built battery charger. The unit is decked in a clean white casing with a neat footprint and support for up to 3 adaptors.

The package includes eight adaptors offering compatibility with Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Nokia, Sony PSP, Micro USB, mini USB and an Apple connector for iPod, iPhone and iPad. In addition there is a standard USB port for recharging any supported devices.

Plus, there is the in-built battery charger which offers room for a couple of AA and AAA batteries. To make sure that the additional adaptors stay close a four component, attachable storage unit is included.

The Varta has most bases covered but one gripe we have is the lack of options on the adaptors. Four never got to be used while more than one Apple connector would have been great.

Web: www.varta-consumer.co.uk
Price: £49.99
Rating: 8/10

The Symbian^3 operating system is Nokia’s answer to Android and the iPhone. It is intended to be more finger friendly than the earlier touch enabled version of S60, and yet to remain familiar to existing users of Nokia’s handsets.

Before we get to the OS itself, let’s take a look at the general specifications of the Nokia C7 which are hard to fault. The camera shoots at 8 megapixels with 720p video recording. Wi-Fi runs to 802.11 b, g and n. T

here is a massive 8GB of built in storage, GPS and Bluetooth 3.0 which, if you are sharing data with another Bluetooth 3.0 devices, delivers increased range and speed. There is even a front camera for video calling.

There is a side button for using the camera, as well as a lock switch that prevents accidental tapping of the touch screen when the handset is in a pocket.

The build is generally good. The mostly plastic body has a metal backplate, and there is a side button for the camera. The chassis is slim, and the phone is very comfy to hold. It is easy for all but the smallest hands to reach right across the screen. One gripe, though, is that you have to remove the battery to get to the microSD card slot.

The screen measures 3.5 inches and delivers 640 x 360 pixels. It is capacitive and not quite as responsive to taps and sweeps as we’d like. This was most pronounced when we were typing.

The user interface of ^3 retains a very familiar design, but, as we’ve already noted, also adds new elements. So, there are three home screens, each capable of housing six widgets. The widgets are uniform in size, so that whether the screen is in wide screen or tall screen format they sit happily in the space available.

Their contents can be quite flexible, with one widget able to carry four app shortcuts. But actually swapping shortcuts in can require a lot of screen tapping – much more than the simple tap and hold system used on Android.

We aren’t sure why Nokia has retained its nested menu system, either. People simply don’t want to delve into folders to find the apps they want. They are much more used to scrolling through a single, complete listing.

While we are grumbling, let’s also look at the voice control system. A good idea in theory it is somewhat fiddly to use. You tap a side button to get it going, then say something. But you need to understand how the system works to get the most from it.

To run an application you need to say ‘application manager’ then tap the screen to get the app you want. On the other hand you can say ‘what time is it?’ and the phone will tell you, in an American computerised drawl.

Social networking is covered by an integrated Twitter and Facebook app that lets you see and send messages, and by some very nifty home screen widgets which can show both Facebook and Twitter update summaries.

Text entry is hampered in tall mode by the presence of a virtual T9 keypad, though the screen is probably too narrow to accommodate a usable qwerty keyboard. You get full qwerty in wide mode, and the Swype system is on offer.

Web browsing is a reasonably positive experience although Flash Lite 4.0 doesn’t render some video for example that at the BBC news web site. There is a YouTube client and the BBC iPlayer too.

The Nokia C7 has a fair few niggles, some of which unfortunately relate to Symbian^3 which doesn’t bode well for the future of Nokia’s touchscreened OS. But there is an awful lot of goodness here too, and the C7 is without doubt a sleek piece of hardware.

Price: £285
Web: www.nokia.com

Essential Verdict
Performance: 8/10
Design: 8/10
Features: 9/10
Value for Money: 8/10
Overall score: 8/10

Written by Sandra Vogel. Originally published in Smartphone Essentials magazine.

Nokia has, for some time, had phones with a dual home screen system, and the E5 is the latest in the line.

The idea is simple. You can configure a look for the home screen complete with wallpaper and a set of shortcuts, and then configure a second look. You switch between the two using an on-screen shortcut. So, when you leave the office after a day’s work it is a simple matter to flick into a different handset mode more suitable for play time.

It actually works quite well, thanks to the range of shortcuts available, but it isn’t a patch on the uber flexibility of the Scenes mode that is built into HTC’s Android toting devices.

The Nokia E5 is a single home screened, non touch supporting handset, while those Android devices have multiple home screens – and in HTC’s version multiple Scenes rather than just two, so there’s much more flexibility. If you really want to play with different looks for different occasions, then, HTC’s Android handsets might be the way to go.

The work/leisure dual personality of this handset is emphasised by the fact that it supports both Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes Traveller. For personal use you get up to ten email accounts and Ovi Mail.

The Nokia E5 sports a miniature qwerty keyboard for typing SMS, email messages or any other text. It has a separate key for the ‘@’ symbol which comes in handy for several activities such as entering email addresses by hand or sending Twitter messages.

The keyboard is small, but the keys are domed which helps make them relatively easy to locate. There is a shortcut for turning Bluetooth on and off on the keyboard, one for muting the handset,  and if you hold the space bar down the LED camera flash turns on doubling up as a torch.

The large D-pad above the keyboard is comfortable to use as are the softmenu buttons and Call and End keys. Two raised buttons give access to Home and Messaging, and if you hold the messaging key down you are taken straight into SMS creation, while holding the home key down calls up the ability to switch between open apps.

The general specifications are impressive with HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and a 5 megapixel camera with flash all present and correct. There is a super little Wi-Fi sniffer that you can put on the home screen that will tell you when networks are in range. We’ve seen it before from Nokia and always find it very handy.

The camera does a good job though we found photos were fairly dull rather than bright and vibrant.

Social networking integration is present though only partially realised. With contacts in the handset you can add Facebook data to them such as photos, but you can’t start with a blank contacts book and fill it with your Facebook contacts.

Where the Nokia E5 inevitably falls down is its screen. Measuring just 2.36 inches across diagonal corners and delivering 320 x 240 pixels it is fine if you are making calls, creating SMS messages or looking at your diary.

But activities like looking at maps, viewing video or using the web really do suffer in such a small, low resolution space. Where the web is concerned the absence of Flash support is a bind.

Overall, the Nokia E5 is a robust little smartphone. A well made chassis with metal backplate for added strength, good keyboard, plenty of on board software and that dual home screen mode are all plus points. But the screen is too small and low resolution for serious multimedia activity, and that’s the central disappointment.

Web: www.nokia.com
Price: £259 SIM-free

Essential Verdict
Performance: 8/10
Design: 7/10
Features: 8/10
Value for Money: 7/10
Overall score: 7/10

Written by Sandra Vogel. Originally published in Smartphone Essentials magazine.

Nokia has a mixed record when it comes to producing touch screen Symbian smartphones. There have been some good designs, and good hardware specs, but all the way they have struggled to overcome the limitations of the S60 5th UI that they sported.

The N8 sees the debut of Symbian^3, the latest version of the OS that promises a more refined user experience, and also packs in some of the most impressive hardware specs seen to date. Nokia has some catching up to do at the high-end of the smartphone world – is the N8 device that will see them do it?

Turning on the N8 does not immediately suggest a revolution has taken place. Symbian^3 looks for the most part just like S60 did. It’s a deliberate move so as not to alienate the massive number of existing Symbian users, but while they will feel immediately at home, those who never took to the platform will find themselves having to look harder for changes that will win them over.

In many cases those changes have merely rectified the problems that should not have existed in the first place, such as the curious arrangement in S60 where some menu items needed to be tapped once, and others twice. In S^3 everything is now very much a single tap affair. It’s not only more logical, but makes the entire UI feel more responsive, and this has a positive knock-on effect throughout almost every area of the phone.

Elsewhere there’s a new multi-tasking screen as well, which enables you to switch quickly between running apps – of which the N8 can support plenty – via attractive and informative live thumbnails. There are also three home screens onto which you can add a series of widgets for, say, music or email.

This is one area which shows how far Symbian still has to go in polishing its user experience, as the implementation falls a million miles short of that in Android. Widgets can’t simply be dropped onto the screen and dragged into place; and they’re all of a uniform size as well, regardless of how little or how much information being crammed into them. It creates a cluttered feel, and we opted for a more refined ‘main’ home screen instead.

As always Nokia has not skimped on the software. There’s a full suite of PIM apps, as well as Exchange support for business users, while the free Ovi Maps is a selling point in itself. A new web browser has been promised for Symbian^3 but there’s no sign of it here, instead there is the older version, which is functional but not the most enjoyable to use. The new browser will be available as a download in due course.

On the hardware front the N8 truly excels. Star of the show is the camera: 12 megapixels, Xenon flash and what Nokia says is the largest sensor seen in any phone. The company is pretty proud of what it has done with this camera, and rightly so – it’s phenomenal.

There’s no optical zoom, of course, and the quality does inevitably start to fall off in lower light conditions, but for average use it is the first smartphone camera good enough to replace – and at times, surpass – a dedicated consumer compact.

The camera is aided by the presence of a dedicated shutter button, one of the surprisingly few hardware buttons on the device. There’s no call/end keys, for instance, just a single home button on the front, while sides sport SIM and memory card slots, as well as ports including 3.5mm, microUSB, and HDMI out, so you can play HD videos recorded on the N8 directly on a TV.

The metallic casing is sealed, and while you can unscrew the compartment if you want to, you almost certainly won’t. Thankfully this proves to be a non-issue as Symbian is less power-hungry than some operating systems, so the device is able to last a day or more on one charge.

Other specs to note include the screen, which is very usable outdoors, but has a slightly lower resolution than other top end handsets at 640×360 pixels; 16GB of internal memory, and support for 3G bands the world over.

There’s plenty more as well – you get an awful lot of smartphone for your money in the N8. And yet it doesn’t feel quite as much like a must-have device as others we have seen this year. The N8 sees Nokia catch up to much of the competition, but not surpass it.

Symbian fans will love it, and cameraphone fans will admire it, but existing iPhone and Android users will not be feeling any need to switch just yet.

Price: £429 SIM-free
Web: www.nokia.com

Essential Verdict
Performance: 9/10
Design: 8/10
Features: 9/10
Value for Money: 8/10
Overall score: 8/10

With Symbian^3 arriving hot on the heels of this device, we wonder if the C6 has any caché at all, but Nokia has pulled the stops out anyway, equipping the C6 with HSDPA, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, a 5 megapixel camera and a slide-out keyboard. There is even that rarest of things these days, a front facing camera for making video calls.

The Nokia C6 is quite a small handset. It feels very comfortable to hold, and the sliding mechanism is extremely solid. The keyboard pops out and back with a really loud thunk. But the overall impression is of something chunkier than, say, the HTC Desire which sports a considerably bigger screen. That is because the Nokia C6 is thicker than the average. It has to be to support that keyboard.

The keyboard has an unusual design with a physical divide half way along it which does not separate the qwerty keys equally, but rather leaves more of them on the left than the right. This looks a bit weird and experienced typists might find it takes a little time to accommodate. The space bar, in particular, is irritating because it is offset to the right.

There is a separate @ key which regular emailers or tweeters will like, and, on the far right, a navigation pad that you can use to move around within and between apps. It might seem odd that this is here alongside a touchscreen, but it can come in handy at times. We found it useful when web browsing, for example.

However, the need to make space for the navigation pad means that the qwerty keys themselves are on the small side. You will need fingertip precision to be accurate with them.

If you are working in portrait mode without the keyboard on view you can use a T9 style keypad or handwriting recognition. The latter works fine, but you’ll need to resort to a finger tip or some sort of stylus for accuracy. The resistive screen means you can use the bottom of a pen or something like that.

The screen is really a bit small for easy use though Nokia does a good job of cramming access to features onto it. The Nokia C6 has a widget-based approach to its single home screen, with six areas available for shortcuts.

These rearrange themselves automatically as you flick the screen between wide and tall modes and there is plenty of opportunity to customise what you see.

The camera performs quite well but on bright sunny days outdoors it struggled to produce crisp, vibrant results. That’s not unusual for a smartphone, of course, and there is a good range of shooting options on offer.

The rather small 200MB of on board memory is augmented right out of the box with a 2GB microSD card. We can’t fault Nokia for its attitude to applications. The Nokia C6 is brimming with them from the FM radio to Ovi Maps, PDF reader, unit converter, a drawing app, and plenty more.

In general use we found the processor to be a bit slow to respond to finger presses. It was nothing excessive, but this is not a blisteringly fast handset. On the other hand the battery life is good and unless you thrash power-hungry elements like the GPS it might deliver two days of usage between charges.

In the end, though, S60 5th Edition just feels out of touch. The need to double tap at some times and single tap at others, the nested menu structure, and the general look and feel of the visual design all seem behind the times.

The refinements that Symbian^3 will bring in future handsets are long overdue, and make the C6 feel dated right from the moment you first turn it on.

Web: www.nokia.com
Price: £250 SIM-free

Essential verdict
Performance: 6/10
Design: 7/10
Features: 6/10
Value for Money: 6/10
Overall score: 5/10

Written by Sandra Vogel. Originally published in Smartphone Essentials magazine.

The device will be available from www.nokia.co.uk/N8 during the last week of September, before arriving at Carphone Warehouse, O2, Orange, Phones4u, T-Mobile, Tesco Phone Shops, Three Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone from Friday 1st October.

The N8 is the first Symbian^3 smartphone, and includes features such as a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash, HD quality video recording, full social network integration, and an improved and more responsive user interface.