Nokia 6210 Navigator

If you want satnav combined with real business features on your mobile should you be heading in the direction of the 6210 Navigator? We find out.

The camera is an average 3.2-megapixels and though you do get LED flash plus a video call camera on the front, picture quality isn't great. The autofocus facility, in particular, doesn't work well and the result is that that most of the photos taken with the 6210 end up looking distinctly blurry. If you want crisp, in focus shots, get a proper camera or buy one of Nokia's high end consumer-focused handsets such as the N82. It's also worth noting, at this juncture, that there's no Wi-Fi facility built into the phone either - an odd omission.

But even without the Wi-Fi, browsing the web is about as good as it gets on a non-touchscreen mobile. And the 6219 also harbours a decent set of business capabilities. You can sync the phone to your desktop via Nokia's PC Suite software, and setting up POP3 and IMAP email accounts such as Gmail is a breeze. And Nokia also offers the ability to pick up push email with this phone, either via its own email tool, or via an Exchange server with its Mail for Exchange (MfE) client software. The latter is a boon, and though we had to rummage around for it on the Nokia website before downloading it, it provides a surprisingly rounded feature set. Particularly useful is the fact that it enables you to set peak and off-peak periods so that you don't waste battery life checking for email in the middle of the night or at the weekends.

That's just as well, incidentally, as the battery is just a 950mAh lithium-ion unit. And while in light use this will last two to three days without needing a charge, start to browse the web heavily or leave the Mail for Exchange client connected solidly, and you'll need to start topping it up once a day. That's disappointing, as is the software complement. For, though the phone is equipped with a PDF viewer, a ZIP tool for decompressing archive software and QuickOffice for viewing spreadsheets and documents you can't create or edit documents on it out of the box without paying for an upgrade to the full version of QuickOffice.

Verdict

Other than the lack of document creation out of the box, and the weird omission of Wi-Fi, the Nokia 6210 Navigator, is a pretty decent handset for those who don't want the bulk that a full-on Qwerty keyboard inevitably brings with it, but want to hang on to a few business features. It's nicely made, and the navigation features are very good, especially the compass and the ability to tell when the GPS is active or not. We're a little concerned about the battery life - and would preferred to have seen a higher-capacity lithium polymer unit for longer life under push email - but all-in-all this is a solid, business-capable phone, with just a little bit extra.

Dimension: 103 x 49 x 15mm Weight: 117 g Battery type: Li-ion Talk time (mfr): 180 min (WCDMA) Standby time (mfr): 9.6 days (WCDMA) GSM frequencies: Quad-band EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 GPRS: Yes 3G: 900/2100 HSDPA Display: 2.4 inch Resolution: 240x320 pixels Colour depth: 16 million colours On-board memory: 120 MB Memory card type: microSD Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB, GPS receiver (AGPS) Operating system: S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2