Nokia 3600 slide

Nokia 3600 slide is one of those handsets which no one seems to covet, love and lust but everybody ends up buying or having. It's a straightforward guess that a S40 handset of subdued but comfortable styling and sufficient skill will simply go around. The neat and compact Nokia slider has all the basics duly covered and strives to deliver beyond its price in terms of imaging. A 3.2 megapixel camera, VGA video and TV out should be enough of an identity booster.

Key features:

Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support 2" 16M-color QVGA display 3 megapixel camera, autofocus and LED flash VGA video recording S40 user interface, 5th edition, FP1 Bluetooth with A2DP, USB Stereo FM radio with RDS microSD card slot (up to 8 GB), 512MB included 2.5mm standard audio jack, TV-out Rich preinstalled content Nokia Maps Voice commands Compact and lightweight Nice oval shapes and neat slider design

Catering to the mid range is by no means an easy task. Affordability goes without saying, but you won't do without personality. How do you set your goods apart without ending up with a niche product? Plus, the midrange is a stretchy concept already. The limits are blurring over megapixel count, 3G and multimedia. Last but not least, yesterday's high-enders are getting cheaper, to make the utterly overcrowded midrange extra unfriendly.

Those are the kind of issues for Nokia 3600 slide to tackle and it chooses to do so by focusing on imaging. The 16M-color screen, 3 megapixel autofocus camera, VGA video and TV-out are the only goodies that are a bit too haughty for the midrange.

The Nokia 3600 slide screen supports QVGA resolution and up to 16M colors on a 2" diagonal. A Nokia trademark, sunlight legibility is way beyond the reach of most other phones. The 2" diagonal might sound right for the price bracket, but we're talking a slider and a focus on imaging, so a 2.2" screen might not be too much to ask.

Signal reception and in-call sound are no concerns with Nokia 3600 slide. The handset is pitched for the so-called Background Noise Cancellation. The one thing that Nokia are missing to say though is that almost all current S40 phones also feature this noise cancellation feature called Voice Clarity. We even found that it performed better in removing the background noise with the Nokia 6500 classic. Anyway, sound is loud and clear on both ends and you will have zero trouble with your calls. Vibration strength in the 3600 slide is very good too.

Music player is well known

Without doubt, the music player is among the nice applications of Nokia 3600 slide. It has decent looks and all-round functionality, including album art and a good number of formats supported.

The music player is controlled with the D-pad. Besides all the typical functions, the music player of Nokia 3600 also sorts songs by artist, album and genre. The player works with AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, MP4, WMA, AMR-NB, Mobile XMF, SP-MIDI, MIDI Tones (64-tone poly) and True tones. Naturally A2DP profile is supported, allowing the use of stereo Bluetooth earphones.

The player has one extra skin on top of the default. It's called Charcoal and we did like it. The currently playing tracks are displayed on the active home screen.

If you don't like the headset that ships with the phone, you can easily replace it thanks to the 2.5mm standard jack.

Back to the player, we have to say it offers a large number of configurable options. The sonic experience gets enhanced by equalizer presets and stereo widening. There are 5 equalizer presets on Nokia 3600 but you can easily create new ones thanks to the two user defined slots available.

Audio quaity Even though it is not a music phone, Nokia 3600 slide has a rather good frequency response. The rest of the readings in our audio quality test weren't as impressive but there is nothing too disturbing about them either. Still, we have to amit that most of them are slightly below average. Given the realitively low price tag of the device and the fact that we've seen Nokia do far worse, we would call the audio quality of Nokia 3600 slide decent.