Nokia 3250 reviewed

Steve Litchfield has made again good work, this time reviewing Nokia 3250 - in Allaboutsymbian and in Smartphones Show episode 7.

I would like to highlight:

The upshot of all this is that, for the first time, you can pop a (legally owned) CD in your PC’s drive, allow Media Player to grab track info off the ‘net, rip the music to WMA format and then click on ‘Start Sync’. Switch the 3250’s keypad into music mode and use ‘Options | Music library’ and then ‘Options | Update Music library’. This sounds like a lot of steps but in practice it’s simple, intuitive and quick. I popped in Camel’s excellent Rajaz album and the whole process to starting to hear music on the 3250 was only five minutes, of which by far the slowest part was waiting while my PC ripped the CD to WMA files. Impressive stuff and long overdue. Almost as easy as music in the iPod/iTunes world, and with all the functionality of the S60 smartphone to boot.

Well well well, it looks like Nokia S60 devices, even the cheaper ones, are starting to become “good enough” to disrupt the dedicated mobile music player market (see my previous entry about this). Congrats for all of my colleagues who made this happen! I believe you will hear this kind of feedback much more in the future…

About your other point:

By including a 3.5mm stereo jack in the remote control section, it’s easy to substitute your own noise-cancelling or in-ear headphones for Nokia’s ear buds and this will make a big difference. Nokia, I’d like to see these shipped with every smartphone from now on…

Dream on As people update their phones quite often, it is just too expensive (and to wasteful) to have high-end headphones shipping with every device…
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Update: I misunderstood the latter Steve’s comment completely. Sorry. I thought you wanted Nokia to ship Shure E3c headphones or something with every Nokia S60 device…

Note to myself: must-not-write-when-tired. Now tired.