Nokia 6120 Classic Review

With the launch of the N-series in the end of 2005 and the E-series in October the same year, Nokia’s Symbian smartphones became more targeted at particular groups of people and particular interests (multimedia / business), developing mainly in these directions. The good smartphones of the brand are invariably from one of the above series and the Symbian models with the four-digit model numbers, typical for the brand, have lost position, due to their more modest specifications. Thus, there came a time when it proved impossible to buy a balanced Nokia smartphone, availing of the contemporary phone functions and instead you had to choose between a multimedia phone (N-series), a business phone (E-series) or a middle-of-the-road option from the other models.

A tendency that we have observed lately is Nokia’s attempt to offer better smartphones also from the groups, which are not part of the N- and E-series. The compromises have been reduced and the new models are no longer ‘second-to-best phones’. The new generation of the said Nokia smartphones, launched during this year’s Q1 and Q2, proudly feature QVGA displays and 16 million colors, the most recent Symbian v9.2 OS, fast 369 MHz processors and 3G. The currently tested 6120 Classic even maintains 2 frequencies, one for Europe/Asia and one for North America.

6120, named „Classic”, is one of the few smartphones, included in this group. This is the ‘normal’ phones’ class: not the ones, targeted at people with particular interests, but the ones intended as mass sellers: phones that would appeal to different people in different age-groups, with different interests and social status.

6120 Classic is a small elegant phone but it is a mass phone, rather than a posh one. No expensive materials have been used to make it a fashionable or prestigious device, it is its design that makes it a phone to appeal to a lot of people. You might not fall in love with it, but you would not call it ‘ugly’.

Model	Dimension (Inches)	Dimension (MM)	Weight (OZ)	Weight (Gramms)
Nokia 6120	4.1" x 1.8" x 0.59"	105 x 46 x 15	3,0	84
Nokia 6300	4.2" x 1.7" x 0.47"	106.5 x 43.5 x 12	3,2	91
Nokia E50	4.4" x 1.7" x 0.6"	113 x 43.5 x 15.5	3,7	104

It is so small, it is practically the smallest Symbian phone and it does not even pretend to be one. It weighs only 84 grams, which makes it the lightest Symbian as well! Nokia might have used this as a competitive advantage, but this is not the point of 6120; it was intended to be liked.
It fits easily even in your shirt pocket and it stays steadily in your hand. When looked from one side, the combination of black and silver makes it look stylish and yet unpretentious.




To keep the phone’s small size, a compromise has been made with the display’s physical size, but not with its quality: it features the standard QVGA resolution and visualizes 16 million colors, just like the other S60 phones. This size/resolution ratio is a prerequisite for the small pixel size; the pixels are almost invisible and the images are very detailed. Thanks to the 16 million colors the color range is wide and the colors change gradually; they are saturated, the contrast is good and the different hints of the black and the white are clearly visible.

As with all standard phones, the keypad, made in two colors: black for the numbers keys and gray for the navigation keys, is in the lower part. The two soft buttons and the headphones are small in size, but you’re unlikely to get them wrong even if you’re not looking, thanks to their ‘edges’. It is a bit strange that the two software buttons are positioned towards the center and not along the phone’s edges (at the far left or far right). It is logical that they are right under the display’s headings that they refer to. Instead, they are shifted towards the phone’s center. Where these buttons should have been are the menu and clear buttons. Another interesting feature, untypical for a Symbian S60 phone, is the lack of a real edit button (a pen) and the fact that a part of its functions (e.g. selecting a few things simultaneously) are done by #, which has also an indicating ‘upwards arrow’ sign. However, some software, using „Edit Key”, does not recognize it as such.



The numbers keys perform perfectly for their small size, which results from the phone’s small size; we can hardly have any criticisms here. They are located very closely one to another, they are easily pressed and give a tactile response. There is very small backlit space between them.

The Volume Rocker and the camera shortcut are designed on the phone’s right. The speaker and the microSD cards slot, covered with a plastic lid, are on analogous position on the left. We approve of the sideways position of the speaker, because it is not covered if you leave the phone on the table.




In the middle of the upper panel is the power button, which performs also the function of a profile change link. On the lower part is the miniUSB port, a 2.5 mm stereo jack and the opening for the Nokia charger.

Nokia 6120 Interface

Interface:

Nokia 6120 Classic is a smartphone using Symbian Operating System and S60 Interface, as all the other smartphones of the brand. The operating system version is 9.2, as with the top models of N95 and E90. We are glad that it does not use the older 9.1 version, because 9.2 brings positive features only.

Although slightly personalized (with themes and icons arrangement), this system is in fact a full Symbian 9.2 and many things of the phone software will be as with the other models.

The top part of the home screen displays a clock and the date, as well as the usual signal strength and battery, while the name of the carrier or Offline can be seen in the middle. The Offline tag indicates that the 6120 works only as an “organizer” and multimedia device with the phone function switched off (that’s handy for using the smartphone during a flight). Just below these is located a row of 6 shortcuts which can be personalized to suit you best. The rest of the display, below them, is used for “notifications” – this is where missed calls, upcoming tasks (or To-Do in the calendar), received messages are displayed, as well as the music player status (the song that’s played at the moment). Located at the bottom of the screen are the two software buttons which can also be personalized from the Settings menu.

The main menu can be viewed as 3x4 grid of icons that can also be displayed as a list (it’s chosen directly from the main menu) but the icons are not animated in both cases. Just like the N76, here you have two new possible visualizations – Horseshoе and V-shaped, which are interestingly-looking, but inconvenient to use 3D menus. The numeric keypad buttons can be used as shortcuts – a function which is much better implemented than version 6 of the S60 interface but still a lot of things should be changed: as the menu not always holds 12 icons (they can be more or less), scrolling up/down shows you different ones that should be associated with the keypad – but they’re not. Like other Symbian phones, you can rearrange the icons in the menu and move links in folders.

A nice extra of the Symbian v9.2 is that each application which is active has a small circle next to its icon in the menu. For example, if you left any application running in the background, than in the main menu next to "Applications" link an indication would appear. As all other Symbian S60 phones, you can see the running applications by holding the Menu key, and shut some of them off by selecting them and using the C key.

The menu can be personalized by using themes, and if you combine various screensavers and personalized homescreens, two identical phones can look quite different. Definitely, the operating system provides many good personalization options.

Phonebook:

Symbian phones are not only smart pocket computers, they are phones at first place. And every phone should have a good system for managing the contacts. The phonebook of Symbian S60 phones is one of the best on the market, together with those of Windows smartphones. All the contacts are displayed as a list and if there is a picture ID, it can be seen in the top left corner of the screen as a thumbnail with a very small size (it’s the same when you have an incoming call and that’s why we find this feature useless) when you select the contact. If you want to search, you type in directly from the keypad and searching is done for the whole name (not only the first word), even if the name is saved in more than one field (first and last name for example). If you want to edit a contact, you can only change the already defined fields. For adding more information you need to select the Add Detail menu. When adding a new contact you are provided with the “basic” fields, but with the “Add Detail” function you have almost no restrictions on the fields and their number and you can add a lot of phone numbers.

We also like having the option for adding a given field several times and in that manner for example we are able to record the numbers of three phones each one with a status “Mobile”.

The phone has a set of voice commands – they are speaker independent and you don’t have to “train” every command, something that can save you a lot of precious time. By holding the right soft key, the “recognizer” turns on and you can say a name (from the phonebook) to be dialed. Names like “Father”, “Brother”, “test”, “John” and “Neo” were no problem, but we had no success with others like “Amy” for example.

The commands can activate various programs or perform different functions, like “New SMS” for example, but a list with different capabilities must be added to the menu as not all of them are added by default so that they’re easier to recognize with any speaker – thus by adding only the ones you need, you can achieve best possible accuracy without the annoying training. Аnd it works, the voice commands were very accurate and we rarely experienced mistakes when launching applications.

A voice recorder can record your voice using the speakerphone. The duration of the recording is limited only by the available memory and as you can record on the memory card, you can have a long recording. In that way the smartphone can replace your voice recorder without needing third party software.

Organizer:

The Organizer tools are in a folder called “Organiser” in the main menu. The calendar can be viewed by month or week and of course, you can easily add notes (Meeting, Memo, Anniversary, To-do) with options for alarm, to a particular day with a few clicks. To-Do notes are also displayed on the homescreen if you have set the active standby in such way.

Notes are just annotations with no option for adding an alarm like the To-Do notes. The Converter works with various quantities (Length, Weight, etc.) but the interface has not changed much, compared to older versions. The calculator is very simple and is not scientific one, which would suit a smartphone.

In the Clock menu, you will find the alarms. In Symbian 9.2 you can add as many alarms as you wish and for each one you could choose whether it should repeat (daily, weekly, or workdays). This is excellent and there is no stupid limitation in the number of the alarms like with other even smart phones (i.e. Symbian 9.1 allows for only one alarm that even can not be set to repeat).

The World Clock is also located in this menu and you can add various cities that you like to view – that's very convenient and saves a lot of time compared to the standard way with “moving across the world map". You can easily review given cities, which you are interested in without searching them each time.

The File Manager is in the Settings – Data Manager menu, together with the application manager (to remove installed programs), and a few other options.

Messaging:

The Messages menu has nothing new to offer – you can easily compose SMS/MMS or Email and located in My Folder are templates which are handy for text that is often used in messages. The fast T9 can help you enter text quickly. The EDGE and UMTS connection helps for fast retrieving of Emails. In order to limit the generated traffic, you can set the phone to download the headers only, or to limit the size in KB.



Connectivity:

Nokia 6120 Classic is quad-band GSM/EDGE phone supporting UMTS 850/2100 MHz for 3G in both America and Europe/Asia. 850MHz is one of the bands, currently used in the US for 3G (the other one is 1900MHz) and the 2100MHz is the band used in Europe and Asian GSM UMTS (3G) networks. Being a quad-band GSM phone, 6120 will work on any GSM network in the world.

For local connectivity, it supports Bluetooth v2.0 + EDR (enhanced data rate) which allows for fast transfer between the phone and compatible device. We transferred with speed of 120KB per second, which means a MP3 song (approximately 5MB) will be transferred for about 45 seconds via Bluetooth. This is a fast speed for Bluetooth, but still you can obtain better transfer speed using a miniUSB cable: in the Data Transfer mode we were able to copy files to the phone’s memory card with speed of 810KB per second, so we transferred the same song for 6 seconds, almost 8 times faster than with Bluetooth. Once you have connected the phone to a computer, you can choose either Data Transfer, PC Suite or Media player modes.

With synchronization, you can use the PC Suite of the set or download a newer version from the Internet site of Nokia. We used the same version we had used with Nokia N76 without any problems. We used the Bluetooth connection between the computer and the phone for the synchronization of 140 entries (contacts & calendar entries) and the transfer took us less than 20 sec., which is a very good speed.

Internet:

Thanks to the UMTS data and the QVGA resolution of the display, loading and viewing a standard HTML web pages is easy job. The phone has no problem rendering all pages and reading phoneArena's news was a pleasure. Scrolling left-to-right and top-to-bottom is done with the phone's d-pad, and a mini-map shows you, which part of the page you are looking at. The pages loaded pretty fast and as a whole, we had a great experience with the browser, so we definitely like it more than the Internet Explorer, built in Pocket PC phones based on Windows Mobile. The browser can load RSS feeds for even faster access to information.


What we also loved about it is the history: when you use 'back' to see pages you've seen earlier, you see the pages as thumbnails, you can open from the phone's cache.

Camera:

Like every modern phone, 6120 has a built-in digital camera with resolution of 2 mega-pixels and a small photoflash LED. It is started 3 seconds after pressing its shortcut when the whole screen turns into a horizontal interface. We were surprised that although the phone operates on Symbian 9.2, this interface is not like those of N95 and N76, but is much simplified. In this way Nokia want to show that the phone is not of the multimedia series, without intentionally reducing the quality of the camera images.



There are several modes in the Options menu: Video, Panorama, Night, Sequence, Self-Timer(10/20/30sec). You can use the settings to adjust the White Balance, Color filter and the photoflash (on/off/auto) and the resolution and compression of the photos taken.

Two seconds after pressing the shutter button, the photo shows on the display and after pressing the button again you can make a new photo after another 1.5 – 2 seconds. 4 seconds between two photos is good time, allowing you to take lots of pictures.

The photos quality is acceptable in strong light bearing in mind that the phone is not trying to replace a pocket camera. The White Balance is a problem, because of which most photos are with yellowish tint and unreal colors and almost all of them, if viewed at full size (100%), have lots of dots next to one another as ‘spots’. With weaker lighting and shooting at closer objects, the LED provides light but the colors are highly greenish and the noise is so much that it covers all.


The Panorama regime offers an easy to use software showing by a gray/red arrow whether you have to move closer of away to/from the previous photo when taking the second one, to put together the panorama. Unfortunately, it is limited to two photos only and we would like to be able to take at least 3 or even 4-5 in the best case. Yet there is no point in using the panorama since the end result is a photo of a size much smaller than 2 megapixels.

You can also shoot a video with maximum resolution of QVGA 320х240 and up to 15 frames per second, which is less than the necessary 24, but is still usable. Compression decreases quality but the videos can still be viewed on a computer.

Multimedia:

You can view photos from the memory in the gallery where the files are visualized as a vertical list with small thumbnails. The 3D gallery of the N-series phones is missing here, too, like in E65. The video-clips are viewed in a RealPlayer which has a fullscreen option. In our test we used QVGA videos in MPEG4 H.263 and were surprised to see that they were chopped up as if streamed from slow-connection Internet. The same videos can be viewed without problems on E65 whose processor is much slower (220 instead of 369 MHz). Our attempt at opening a H.264 video resulted in what we had expected – only the sound was heard.

The music player is not the one we know from the N-series phones with Symbian 9.2 either, but is quite similar. In the Now Playing interface you can navigate the directions of the d-pad, while information on the played track is visualized below. An album cover image is visualised, if there is one attached to the music file. You have 4 equalizers, bass boost, reverb and stereo widening.


You can sort your music by Artists/Albums/Genres/Composers, as well as by Track lists, including most played tracks, Recent tracks, Recent additions.

The sound quality through the speaker is acceptable, but the volume is weak even in maximum position. You might miss a call if you use music as ringtone and fail to feel the vibration. You have to connect stereo earpieces if you want to listen to louder music with higher quality. You will need them to turn on the radio, too, because they will act as aerial. You can save up to 50 stations with names.

Software:

Nokia 6120 classic has about 35 MB of free memory which can be increased by several GB by a microSD card. The phone has 64 MB RAM but after the system is loaded, about 20 MB remain for the user.

Preloaded you have a QuickOffice to view Word/Excel/Powerpoint files, and to be able to edit them you will have to order a full version (Quickoffice v3 (activate editing) full license for EUR9.79 or 30-day license for EUR2.26 or Quickoffice Premier (v4 upgrade + editing) full license for EUR15.06). The inconvenience with Quickoffice is that it opens files saved only in the Documents folders of the memory of the phone and the card. Still, if you reach a file through the file browser and select it, it will be opened by the program. A complex Excel file is visualized OK and scrolling in it is easy, too. We only had a problem with a PowerPoint file where not all images were visualized properly.


Adobe PDF takes care for viewing of the pdf documents in your phone’s memory. Like with the office applications, we loaded a 50 pages document (and over 1 MB) and scrolled through it without any problems.



You also have 3 games: Marble, where you have to fit balls of the same color so that they destroy one another, City Bloxx, which is on a similar principle (putting blocks one on top the other) and Highroller Casino, including Hold’em Poker (tournament), 5 card drawn, Video poker and Blackjack. We liked all three games and find them very suitable to make good use of one’s free time.

Performance:

Thanks mainly to the 369 MHz processor of the ARM 11 type, 6120 classic works very fast. There is rarely a delay when scrolling the menu, even when opening longer and heavier menus such as Messaging, for instance. Together with N76 these are two of the fastest smartphones not only of the Symbian S60 platform, but generally.

We tried to install Fring on the phone but obviously there is no compatible version for this model yet. On the site of Fring, 6120 classic it is missing as a model, but we tried by selecting N76 and N95, which use Symbian v9.2 S60, too – the program was installed, then we selected an Internet connection but it never started – several white screens only changed over to no effect.

Typically, we checked the signal reception power of the phone. It behaved just like Nokia E65, 4.75 of 10 (average), untypical for Nokia, which is famous for its capacity in this respect.

In the continues talk test, the 6120 classic was live for about 3 hours and a half, which is better than the claimed 3 hours but still just average. You will probably have to charge the phone every two days or so.

The sound during conversation is very good; it is strong in both directions and there is no noise. You are heard clearly and realistically and you hear the voices slightly deeper than they really are, but still comprehensive and clear.

Conclusion:

We like Nokia 6120 classic – it is a nice and small phone, but with the functions of a real Symbian S60, using the latest current version (v9.2), which is definitely better than the previous. It is convenient to hold, easily fits a pocket and offers a good sound during conversation. Its multimedia capabilities are not like the N-series, but still you have a good music player with MicroSD slot for memory and a 2 megapixels camera although with mediocre quality. Bearing in mind that it is a 3G phone which can work both in Europe and America, with excellent Internet and e-mail browser, typical of the platform, and with a very fast interface, 6120 classic is an excellent choice for people looking for a small and nice smartphone.