Jørgen Sundgot passes judgement on Nokia's most recent camera phone, which shares both the pros and cons of its predecessor - yet offers a tad more bells and whistles.
While the phrase "variations over a theme" has recently come to mind increasingly often when looking at Nokia's line-up , it has seldom been more fitting than with the Finnish manufacturer's most recent camera phone - the 7250i. It is, in fact, identical to its predecessor, the Nokia 7250, except for a few more bells and whistles in the shape of a software upgrade.
 | When compared with its predecessor, the 7250i comes off as only marginally better
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Still a tri-band GSM 900/1800/MHz handset with GPRS support, the Nokia 7250 performs adequately as a handset, although at such a high price the omission of Bluetooth is quite disappointing. Even more surprising, the handset does not offer Infrared transmission of pictures, which renders MMS the only - and a pricey one, at that - method of transferring pictures to other phones or computing devices.
This is even more puzzling considering the emphasis that has been placed on improving camera functionality in the 7250i, as it offers several new features. Particularly worthy of note is the night mode which does a good job of improving pictures taken under poorly lit conditions, and the handy option for users to assign pictures to contacts stored in the phone's internal memory - a photographic caller ID feature, if you will. Also, a new image editor lets users add clip art to pictures, while the contrast of pictures can be adjusted to achieve better viewing results.
Another welcome addition to the 7250i is its ability to browse XHTML sites, enabling access to a wide number of web sites adapted for HTML capable mobile devices. Thus far, quality content in XHTML is far from abundant, however, and as such the feature does not yield any immediate gain. In comparison, the new MMS abilities of the phone - resizing pictures to adhere to operator message size restrictions and the ability to conduct group messaging - shine as instantly useful features.
Similar to the 7250, the listed standby time of the handset is up to 12,5 days and the talk time up to 5 hours: our experiences rather proved these times to be 10 days and 4 hours, respectively.
Availability
The Nokia 7250 is now available throughout Europe, selling in the 550 EUR price range without subscription. It is expected to be available in North America.
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