vB Easy Archive - Nokia 8390 Review

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Nokia 8390 Review
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Posted by: Timsta

Another review of mine.. Again, for pictures and stuff, you'll have to go to the site to the site and see.

Nokia 8390 Review

So, you’ve looked around at all the stores in your area for a cellular phone that is most suitable for you. What are you looking for? If you are looking for a very cost friendly, small, lightweight phone, loaded with features, then this phone may be just right for you. If you are into decorating your phone with different face plates, keypads and such, this really is a phone you would be interested in. The Nokia 8390 is a mid-range priced phone with all these features.

This phone is one of smaller Nokia phones. It’s actually even smaller than its predecessor, the 8290 which came out last year. The size of the phone is 3.7 by 1.7 by 0.7 inches. It weighs only 2.9 ounces. This phone will fit in your shirt pocket, your coat or your purse perfectly, without being a nuisance.

The cost of this phone is from $99 Canadian ($50 US) to $399 Canadian ($250 US) depending where you go and what plans you select.

Look:
This phone quite small, as I mentioned earlier, weighing only 2.9 oz. It is the smallest of all the Nokia phones. By default, this phone comes with a white and a charcoal grey face plate. This combination gives it a great look and when the phone lights up, it gives a bluish look due to the blue LEDs in the phone. The faceplates for this phone for the front and the back are removable as well.

The layout of the keypad is similar to any other Nokia phone; it has a standard 10 digit pad, talk and end buttons and keys to navigate up and down. There are also two scroll keys at the left side of the phone. At the top of the phone is a power button.

The screen is a 4 line display and comes with a blue back light which gives this phone a really sexy appearance. While the appearance is sexy, the lighting from these Blue LEDs gave the screen much better visibility at night.

There's also a proprietary Nokia headset jack on the bottom of the phone and an IR port on the side of the phone.

Features:

The phone features a 4 line LCD display which is big enough for you to make calls, surf the web and etc.

The phone comes with a ton of features such as GPRS, GSM Internet access, Caller ID, alarm clock, voice recording, four games, call logs, calendar, EMS (enhanced messaging system), and an infrared port.

GPRS is used for going onto the internet, email or anything related to the internet. With the GPRS on this phone and the infrared port, you are able to connect your PDA, laptop or anything else that uses an infrared port to go onto the internet without the use of a modem or cable. By using GPRS you are always connected to the internet. You aren’t charged by the minute or anything like that, you are charged by the amount of downloading you do.

By being GSM, you might expect this phone to be able to be used all around the world without any problems, but this is not the case. This phone is a single band GSM phone, operating at 1900 MHZ. What this means is that this phone only works in North America.

This phone also features the same menu layout as you find on any other Nokia phone, so if you are familiar with Nokia phones, you aren’t going to experience any difficulties with using this phone.

Usage:
Using the phone was pretty easy. The menu navigation was a breeze, and everything seemed so logical. The keypad was responsive and easy to use, but I cannot say the same for the power button. The power button located at the top was small and very unresponsive. It takes several hard pushes to power on the phone.

Holding the phone was pretty good too, I was able to get a good grip on the phone and it didn’t easily slip out of my hands.

Reading off the screen was pretty awesome considering the screen was brightly lit with the Blue LEDs and backlight.

Feature Usage:

With the call logs, I was able to check what calls were made, missed or received. The phone keeps track of up to the last 10 calls that were made.

I also set up my own profile easily. If you are familiar with Nokia phones, this is really quite standard. My parents own the Nokia 3390 and I had set up these profiles for them before and it was really quite a breeze. There are 5 different profiles I could customize for different situations such as normal, outdoors, meetings, etc.). I would use a different profile for different situations.

Using features such as the phonebook was really fun. I could set up to 10 voice dialing entries for quick dialing with the phonebook. All I had to do was say the name of a person or place I wanted to call, and it would call that place provided I had set up the voice dialing for it.

The phonebook itself is able to store up to 500 phone numbers on the phone’s internal memory. You can also store numbers on your sim card but that depends on the sim card. I was able to upload phone entries too via infrared. A cool feature to this is that I could set up certain phone numbers in certain groups and when a call is made from that group of numbers, a different ring tone would be used.

This phone is able to store up to 5 customized ring tones to this phone and there are 40 pre-built ones that come with this phone.

I also tried some SMS messaging with my friend. Messaging was kind of fun but gets tedious, as I’m not really into messaging my friends on my phone. Typing in words is pretty easy as Nokia has provided a guessing dictionary that tries to guess what word you are trying to type in. A cool feature to all this messaging hype is that this phone can receive pictures and add them to the phone.

The alarm worked pretty alright too; it came in handy when I had meetings scheduled and such.

The 8390 comes with four games, Snake, Bumper, Snowboarding and Pairs II. All of these games are pretty fun and easy to play using the keyboard, but I found my eyes getting tired after continuous play.

The phone also comes with a calculator, to-do list, calendar, stop watch and voice recording. For voice recording, the phone allowed me to record up to 3 minutes of messages or conversation.

For web browsing, I found it was hard to surf as the screen was too small to surf adequately and the browser was kind of hard to navigate. This is just my opinion, though, and I suggest you try it out first before you think it inadequate for yourself.

Audio:
This phone gave really clear audio. I didn’t have any static or fuzzy conversations with this phone at all. No distortion whatsoever was experienced with this phone. In my testing, I went out to the streets of Victoria, and I was able to talk perfectly amongst traffic and listen well too. If the volume is strong on the streets, then it is pretty much perfect for all conditions.

Battery Life:
The battery life of this phone wasn’t all the great. I expected it to last a lot longer than it did. Nokia states that it the phone is able to last from up to 4 hours of talk time to 16 days of standby. When I was testing the phone, I got about 3 days worth of standby and I didn’t really talk too much on the phone to see how long it would go, although I’m estimating it would last about 2 hours.

Battery life also depends on if your signal is strong or not and what you are doing, but with regular use I didn’t get that great of a battery life even though I live in a area with a strong signal.

Conclusion:
Overall this phone is pretty good. It comes with a ton of features and is priced quite well. The only down points is that it is a single band GSM phone and that the power button is hard to use. The battery life wasn't that exceptional either. Overall, I rate this phone at 4 stars out of 5.

Posted by: rastaban

hi,, my friend has an 8390 and is wondering how to hook up his 8390 to his handspring visor pda. They both have IR ports and are compatible. How should he go about setting it up so he can access the 'net from his pda. He is using Rogers AT&T GSM in the greater Vancouver area. Any help would be greatly appreciated.