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The Nokia 6500 Classic is one of two handsets in Nokia's 6500 series. Like its brother, the 6500 Slide, the Classic sports an elegant look, quad-band GSM/EDGE and dual-band UMTS support, and the latest version of Nokia's S40 user interface. It is a sharp looking, thin bar handset that can turn a few heads as well as keep its owner's personal music soundtrack playing in the background.

Physical Aspects:

At only 89g (3.1oz) in weight and measuring 110mm x 45mm x 10mm (4.3" 1.8" x .4") in size, the Nokia 6500 Classic is quite a compact little candy bar handset. The Classic's design, reserved and elegant, makes use of simple lines and curved surfaces.

The 6500 Classic's 16 million color display may only be 2" in size, but its QVGA resolution makes for some very sharp looking images. The display is also brighter than that found on the 6500 Slide, and is also quite readable even in harsh sunlight conditions.

The small d-pad on the Classic works quite well thanks to its easy to find and raised silver edge that surrounds a large central select button. The two softkeys and the red and green call control keys are also small, but work well. The alphanumeric keypad takes some getting used to, though. The raised silver bars on the keypad separate very small keys. The silver bars can not be pressed, but act as guides for the pad of the fingertip. You can use a fingernail to press the hard and somewhat stiff keys, but most people will find that a fingertip works best. All of the keys and buttons are backlighted well.

Apart from the camera, flash, and speaker on the back of the 6500 Classic, there is little else to talk about. The phone's design is that simple. Charging and USB data connections are handled by the covered micro-USB connector on the top of the device. A small hole on the bottom allows access to the microphone. That's it. The curved sides of the 6500 Classic have no volume or camera shutter keys. Volume is controlled by using the d-pad.

The most interesting physical aspect of the Classic to me is how solid it feels. This phone feels very, very sturdy. It feels like the kind of phone that you could open beer bottles with, or use to break through a car window in an emergency. In fact, when the bottom cover is slid off to expose the battery, the 6500 Classic's metal frame is easily seen. It is a tough little phone, and a pretty one at that.

Core Functions:

Our Nokia 6500 Classic had some reception troubles. Its internal antenna appears to be somewhat weak, and in poor signal areas I had trouble initiating calls. The call audio quality, once connected, is very good, though. Better than any other phone I've tested in recent history, save for the Nokia 6500 Slide. The Classic appears to have the same audio qualities as the Slide, which should surprise no one. The speakerphone also provided good quality audio to both ends of the call, but lacked volume. Our 6500 Classic managed 4 hours and 5 minutes of talk time in our battery tests on T-Mobile's 1900MHz GSM network. That is 1.5 hours short of Nokia's estimated maximum of 5.5 hours. This is likely due to the poor performance put in by the Classic's antenna.

[Nokia has pointed out that, like the 6500 Slide, the 6500 Classic has been optimized for the 900 and 1800MHz European frequency bands, even though it supports all four GSM bands. With that in mind, our European readers might have less trouble with the device than we did. -editor]

The contacts system on the 6500 Classic is fairly complete in terms of data stored, and also offers a good multi-character search function. The interface might not be as pretty as those on some smartphones, but it gets the job done. The 6500 Classic has a very nice profiles system. All of the profiles can be heavily customized, and there is support for vibration alerts and even for timed profiles, which are great for business users and others that frequently change profiles (and often forget about it) for meetings and other appointments. With timed profiles, the phone reverts to the general profile after a designated time period has elapsed.

Speed dials are assigned from the contacts editor, and can be accessed by long pressing the associated keypad key.

 

More useful, however, is the 6500 Classic's speaker independent voice dialing and command application. It can be used to call any contact in the phone and also lets users control many other phone functions, such as the radio or the ring profiles. The system worked very well for me, far better than other Nokia developed systems I've used in the past couple of years.

The 6500 Classic is capable of email as well as typical SMS and MMS messaging functions. I was able to setup and use an IMAP based personal email account without any problems at all. SMS and MMS also worked just as expected. The 6500 Classic supports EDGE and GPRS data on any of its four GSM bands and faster 3G UMTS data on the 850 and 2100MHz bands. I was unable to test 3G data on the 6500 Classic, but the EDGE system performed well. Other connectivity options include Bluetooth 2.0+EDR devices, including A2DP stereo headphones, and micro-USB cables. Unlike the micro-USB connector on the 6500 Slide, though, the Classic's connector can be used for charging as well as for data.

Multimedia / Applications:

The camera on the Nokia 6500 Classic is equipped with a LED flash. Its lens has a fixed focal point that seems to be tailored towards portraits and other subjects that are relatively close to the camera. The automatic white balance system performs well outdoors, but often seems to tend towards a cooler look when used indoors. The camera is capable of shooting some half-decent photos in decent light, but performs quite poorly in dim situations in spite of its flash and night mode setting.

I was unable to test video recording on the 6500 Classic because the early firmware on our 6500 Classic consistently crashed when we initiated recording. I fully expect that this will not be the case in production devices.

The media player on the 6500 Classic turned out to be a better performer than the camera. I was able to sync the application with Windows Media Player and Nokia's own music manager on my desktop PC, and the player supports on-phone playlist creation, multiple equalizer settings, and features such as stereo widening. The application organizes music found on the phone's 1GB internal memory by artist, album, and genre. I found the audio quality to be acceptably good, and was overall quite pleased with the music experience on the 6500 Classic.

The web browser supplied on the Nokia 6500 Classic is reasonably capable when it comes to dealing with mobile formatted websites, such as our own. The user has the option of 3 different font sizes, and a handy 'page overview' mode that it borrows from S60 makes navigating long pages a breeze. The browser cannot handle most full HTML sites with any reasonable success, though.

The 6500 Classic comes with the typical array of personal information management (PIM) type applications, including various timers and alarms as well as a calendar, to-do list, calculator, and notes program. All of these applications perform as expected. The calendar and to-do list apps are made more useful by the fact that the phone can be synchronized to a Windows PC running MS Outlook by using the free PC Suite application that Nokia provides. Our 6500 Classic also came with a few games pre-loaded, including a decent version of Rally 3D and Nokia's own Snake III.

Our 6500 Classic offered about 940MB of internal storage that could be used for things like apps, photos, and music files.

User Interface:

The Nokia 6500 Classic runs Nokia's S40 5th edition user interface with Feature Pack 1. The S40 UI is fairly mature, meaning both that it is quite familiar to people now and is also getting a bit long in the tooth. In my opinion, it is starting to lose ground to some more modern looking feature phone user interfaces, such as Sony Ericsson's. For example, while the 6500 Classic supports list, grid, and tabbed main menu views, which is great, it lacks support for more refined features like cascading sub-menus and deeper level tabbed menus. While the 6500 Classic has a QVGA resolution display, the S40 UI manages to hide that pretty well. The extra resolution is only really appreciated in a few parts of the phone, such as in the web browser and the messaging application, both of which have user selectable font sizes.

I do like the addition of the tabbed main menu view, though.

 

I just wish that it could be navigated with the keypad keys in the same way that the grid and list menu views can. I also wish that Nokia would remove the time limit for keypad use in the main menu. As it stands, you have but a few seconds to use the keypad to skip through the menus before that ability gets disabled for no good reason. Most phones allow the keypad to be used for navigation at any time, even Nokia's own S60 smartphone UI. At least late numeric key presses will no longer start dialing a number as they would have in older S40 versions.

Speaking of S60, the Active Standby screen offered by the current version of S40, while useful, is not nearly as handy as the one on S60. I find that too few of the main menu options can be added to its shortcut bar, for example, and that its cell based system for displaying information wastes too much space and offers too few options. At least S40 does have decent theme support and animated menu icons.

S40 is a good system for a feature phone. That's perfectly clear. I just believe that there are a number of better systems out there, and that Nokia really should put some resources into making sure that they are keeping up with the current state of user interface technology.

Conclusion:

The Nokia 6500 Classic has an impressive spec sheet. 1GB of internal storage memory, a 2 megapixel camera, and a very sleek and elegant form factor. It is also very solidly built. Not bad for a company that only very recently started making thin phones.

But like the 6500 Slide that we recently reviewed, the Classic suffers from less than ideal reception abilities - at least on the 1900MHz network we tested it on. When it has a connection, it offers great audio quality, but that dosen't count for much if you can't place a call in the first place. But overall I like the phone. I think it would be a good choice for somebody that wants to take some music with them - as long as they live and work in areas with a good signal.

It is a good phone, just not a great one because of that reception issue. I still give it a "Recommended" rating, with some reservations.

 

Nokia 6500 classic Specs
//	General Network UMTS / GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900v Announced 2007, May Size Dimensions 109.8 x 45 x 9.5 mm Weight 94 g Display Type 24 bit Size/Resolution 240 x 320 Sound Alert Type Polyphonic (64 channels), MP3 Customization Download Vibration Yes Audio Player MP3/AAC/AAC+ player Handfree Handsfree Speaker Memory Internal Max User Storage: 920 MB Max JAR Size: 1 MB Heap size: 2 MB External No Battery Type Li-Ion, USB Charging Stand-by Up to 12.5 days Talk Time Up to 5.5 hours		Camera Still Images 2 MP, 1600x1200 pixels, video(QCIF), flash Video Recording Yes, Video Resolution: 176 x 144 Video Formats: 3GPP formats (H.263) H.264/AVC MPEG-4 Data/Internet GPRS Class 32, 53.6 kbps Data Speed Class 32, 296 / 177.6 kbits Infrared port No Bluetooth Yes, Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR 3G Yes, 384 kbps Modem Yes,Class 32, 296 / 177.6 kbits USB Yes, microUSB Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML Features Messaging IM MMS+SMIL SMS Games Yes + downloadable Colors Black, Bronze Java Java MIDP 2.0 Others BT Audio Handsfree Speaker MP3 Ringtones SyncML Themes