Nokia 3250

Available now
26th September 2005
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At a first glance, the Nokia 3250 looks almost identical to the Nokia 3230, and indeed it's pretty closely related in technical terms. But there's one immediately noticeable difference.. the keypad on the bottom of the Nokia 3250 twists around to reveal a set of music controls.

We've seen twisting phones before, for example the Nokia 6260, but this is the first time we've seen it in a candybar format phone. Like the 3230 and 6260, the Nokia 3250 is a Symbian Series 60 smartphone, and it also features a 176x220 pixel TFT display in 262,000 colours, a 2 megapixel digital camera, expandable memory up to 1Gb on microSD cards (only 10Mb is included internally though) and Bluetooth.

However, the Nokia 3250 is really a music phone, and it can play back MP3, AAC, eAAC+, RealAudio and WMA files plus more. Nokia state that the 3250 is capable of stereo media playback, unlike the 3230 which was mono only. Nokia also say that you can fit up to 750 tracks on a 1Gb memory card, although presumably at pretty low quality, although it's probably enough space for 16 albums worth of high-quality MP3 audio.

There's also an FM radio and Nokia's "Visual Radio" over GPRS feature, and it's also possible to download tracks directly from your mobile phone network. There are a set of other media related features too.. probably far more than most people would need.

The Nokia 3250 isn't a 3G phone, but it does have EDGE which is useful for those people who have access to an EDGE network. Other than that, this is a standard tri-band 900/1800/1900 handset with GPRS. Downloading tracks over GPRS is not going to be much fun, however. There's a WAP 2.0 browser and email client, Wireless Village instant messaging, mobile blogging features and enhanced MMS.

One unusual feature is what Nokia call "Nokia Sensor" - a way of creating "spontaneous social circles" with other Nokia users. Read more about it here.. although it does remind us a little of the infamous Toothing hoax.

The Nokia 3250 weighs 115 grams which is quite heavy compared to some phones, but remember this is a Symbian smartphone, and they always tend to be heavier. Physical size is 104x50x20mm, with a maximum talktime of 3 hours, 10 hours playback time and up to 10 days standby.

This is a good handset, and it compares well against the Sony Ericsson W800i which is really the benchmark in this sector. It's certainly a much better phone than the Motorola ROKR, except that the ROKR has very good inbuilt speakers. Compared to the Nokia N91, the 3250 is much lighter and less ugly although it lacks the N91's hard disk and 3G capabilities. Finally, the Nokia 3250 makes the recently announced Nokia 6630 Music Edition look like the stopgap it really is.

Nokia say that the 3250 is planned for release in the first quarter of 2006.

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