Review of GSM/UMTS-smartphone Nokia 6210 Navigator

Mobile-review have posted their review of the Nokia 6210 Navigator. Here is the final impression.

Impressions
Call quality was never an issue with the 6210 Navigator, as it easily lived up to our expectations of a Nokia-branded phone. Ring tones sounded quite loud thanks to the handset’s dual speakers. Surprisingly, we found the 6210’s vibro alert to be very shrill.

The 6210 Navigator is set to land this August with the price tag of 300 Euro, which includes a pre-pair license for pedestrian and in-car navigation (accounts for 50 Euros or so). Obviously, the maker gets it at a lower rate.

How does the 6210 fare as a portable Navigator? Quite well – it has no crucial failings, but it’s no different from the rest of S60-powered devices either (bar the on-screen compass, which is a quite useless trinket that will keep you entertained for 5-10 minutes at best). Will Nokia be able to sell it in droves and bring it into the mainstream? For this to happen a lot of things have to click in and align the right fashion, plus it will do only for some specific markets, where navigation-savvy handsets are all the rage, and the 6210 will look appropriate in terms of price-quality (again we stumble upon the all-in-one device dilemma). However it won’t work out on most market (including CIS countries), since there is still only a very thin layer of people who do realize what navigation is all about; the truth is, this market isn’t mature enough. Meanwhile those few savvy users will rather prefer top-of-the-line NSeries solutions or the upcoming ESeries devices. At the end of the day there is no way-out for the 6210 Navigator – while this phone aims at the mainstream, there is just no market for it to flourish on. The interesting thing, though, is that it’s exactly the same story as what we witnessed with the Nokia 6110 Navigator, basically the same hurdles killed the sales of Nokia’s first navigation-centric solution. It seems as if the manufacturer is waiting for the market to explode and come to love smartphones of this breed, so that they’ll happen to have an affordable mass-market device on offer at the right time. As far as my opinion goes, I see no compelling argument for buying the Nokia 6210 Navigator right now. It doesn’t differ from older offerings in terms of navigations, for they can be upgraded with the latest version of Nokia maps too, and sure loses to the maker’s latest and greatest FP2-equipped handsets.