I’ve had it with my Nokia 3650. On paper it’s a great phone with just about all of the modern features that my inner geek demands, but in reality it’s a dog. It’s huge. The rotary keypad design is lame, the keys are horrid and the 5-way navigation key is even worse. The 12-bit display is a few bits shy of decent, completely unusable in bright sunlight. The built-in web browser sucks and it doesn’t have enough RAM to reliably run Opera. Both speakers suffer from volume issues — the tiny holes in front of the main speaker are easily obstructed and muted, the loud speaker is always muted by the lack of holes on the back. And then there’s the MMC card placed behind the battery…
All of that pales in comparison to the miserable experience of actually doing anything with this phone. Nokia’s program launcher somehow manages to turn even the most mundane tasks into an epic adventure. To highlight one of the most egregious examples, try to view a SIM contact. On every other GSM phone I’ve used, including three other Nokias, SIM entries are integrated with Phone entries and just a single key press away. On a virgin 3650 it takes 10 key presses to reach the special SIM Directory application. Twice as many if you’ve switched the launcher from Grid to List view.
On the plus side, the quality of the camera is better than I expected, battery life is excellent, and it remains difficult to find Bluetooth phones in the US.
