Nokia 6750 Mural Review

Introduction:

Sure we all know that Nokia's presence has been lacking in the US mobile phone market, but they've been more proactive in grabbing a portion of the pie of late. We might not see as many high-end smartphones that the manufacturer is known to dish out elsewhere around the world, but we've been more fortunate of late seeing their name across AT&T's lineup. With its specific form, the Nokia 6750 Mural closely resembles the Nokia 6650. It might not be good for painting extravagant murals , but it sure does target the style-conscious user with its polished look and hidden external display. Although lacking the smartphone components found on the 6650, the Mural is lined up to be a more simplified device to hopefully make it a pickup and go handset for customers.

The package contains:
•    Nokia 6750 Mural
•    Charger
•    Users Manual
•    Quick Start Guide


Design:

There's just something about a phone that resonates a fashionable appeal with a uniform shiny look all around – the Mural can almost be mistaken as a mirror. When it's closed shut and not powered, the chrome like material reflects light at every angle and graces it with a shiny aura. There's even a nice glow emitted by the phone whenever someone is calling. Although the material is uniform all around the phone and exudes quality construction, it's prone to both smudges and scratches. After playing around with the phone for 10 minutes, we just noticed how much it's a magnet for fingerprints. In addition, there were some minor scratches on the chrome body after a good day of lugging it around in our pockets. It's not heavy at all (3.9 oz) and average sized; snug enough to hold in the hand and pockets. Even though we're confident this will withstand some of the daily wear and tear, dropping it will cause some serious scratching and denting. Nokia managed to design one great looking phone with the Mural that definitely will turn heads when you use it.



You can compare the Nokia 6750 Mural with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

When you flip open the Mural, you'll be greeted to its 2.2” LCD screen which boasts a resolution of 240x320 pixels with support for 16 million colors. Granted that it's more than adequate for viewing text and pictures, the outdated looking menu interface pulls down the overall quality. On the other hand, the external 128 x 160 pixel OLED screen discretely mixes into the chrome material and comes to life with an elegant glow thanks to the various colored lights.  It simply provides a cosmetic wonder with your choice of six colors. The  bottom portion of the phone also gets beautifully illuminated. For the most part viewing it in direct sunlight didn't pose too much of an issue unless it was held at an extreme angle.

Underneath the external display are the music playback controls for reverse, pause/play, and forward which we found to be well sized and tactile. You necessarily don't need to go into the menus to play a song – all the functions can be performed directly from the external controls. Flipping the phone open will set your eyes on the well-sized keypad of the Nokia Mural. Every nook and cranny of the surface is used for the keypad with a few of the keys being used for dedicated functions  – camera, web browser, and media player. All the buttons on the keypad are flush, tactile, and evenly sized with the navigational pad large enough for just about anyone to use. Our only gripe with it is the dim backlighting on the keys – making it difficult to see in dark lighting conditions. The left side of the phone has the 2.5mm headset jack, push-to-talk button, and volume rocker – the latter being somewhat difficult to press due to a lack of separation between the volume up and down keys. The only item you'll see on the right edge is the microUSB port, hidden behind a flap, and used for charging and connecting the phone to a computer. The speaker phone is located solely on the bottom of the handset and covers every area of it. Turning it over to its back will reveal the 2-megapixel camera by itself with no flash or self-portrait mirror. Removing the sturdy metallic back cover will expose the battery, SIM card slot, and microSD slot.

Software/Features:

As we stated earlier, the Mural has been stripped down out of the S60 3rd edition platform that was found on the Nokia 6650 in favor of a simplified interface. It almost seems like remnants of S60 could be found just by the overall look and feel of it. There won't be too much time being invested in learning how to use the phones thanks partially to the straightforward menus – it runs fast without any lag. There's a good amount of personalization when it comes to modifying the home screen, menu style, and external color lights. From being able to choose various wallpapers to selecting the layout and text font of the home screen, we enjoyed the multitude of options that are offered on the Mural. We'll guarantee that two devices won't look exactly alike when you place them side by side.



Even for a basic flip phone, the Mural can store various pertinent information for each contact in the address book – up to 1,000 can be saved on the phone. Not only are traditional items such as phone numbers and email addresses available, but also more personal ones like birthdays and nicknames can be inputted.



Sending text messages is the same you'll find on other handsets – you can quickly even add media files like sounds, videos, or pictures. Inputting text is done through the keypad – either the traditional way or enabling predictive text for a faster method.

Composing an email is accomplished by using the Mobile Email application that we've been accustomed to seeing on AT&T phones. You can choose from popular clients on the list like Yahoo, Windows Live Mail, or AOL for instant access with your email address and password. Unfortunately, there's no option to manually input settings for ones that are not offered.

Similar to the email application, the Oz Instant Messenger can be used for chatting with friends. The only clients that are available are AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger. If you happen to accidentally press the end key and get back to the home screen, the IM client will continue to run in the background and notify you if a message has been received.



Third party applications on the handset are similar to ones found on other phones in AT&T's lineup. These include Make-UR-Tones, Mobile Banking, MobiTV, MusicID, Music Videos, My-Cast Weather, Where, WikiMobile, XM Radio, and YPmobile to name some. AT&T Navigator is also loaded to provide a sufficient GPS program for turn-by-turn directions and searching for points of interests. Although the screen may make it difficult to view your route, it did a good job of announcing directions with no problems.  The usual set of tools can be found as well – alarm clock, calendar, notes, calculator, timer and stopwatch.




Handsets packed with 2-megapixel cameras are no longer considered as average. However, that is just what the Nokia 6750 Mural has to offer.  Reason being is that images produced were washed out for the most part and lacked any fine detail. Shots taken Indoors in low light conditions in particular produced muddy looking photos with drab colors. Fortunately, outdoor shots with good lighting came out a bit better. The camera application can be instantly accessed by pressing the dedicated button on the keypad. There's a decent mix of options offered for the photo enthusiasts like white balance, effects, and brightness. All in all, you can obtain decent images with the camera by playing around with the options – otherwise it's best reserved for MMS use.

It's nice to see that the phone is able to shoot videos at a maximum resolution of 640x480. When recording at any of the resolutions offered, videos had a tendency to stutter as you move around the camera quickly. Colors looked washed out as well with audio being recorded perfectly without much distortion. We wouldn't say that the Mural is the best handset to record precious memories, but at least it does a tolerable job at it. In addition, it's also a video share capable phone – unfortunately we were unable to test this feature out.




This fashionable handset does a good job for being a portable music player – thanks mostly to the superb speakerphone. The music player has a nice looking interface which displays the album cover, artist, album name, track name, and elapsed time. The on-screen functions such as pause/play, reverse, and forward correspond to the directional pad. Luckily, exiting the player or closing the handset will allow music to continue playing – you'll have to use the external buttons on the front cover to control it. Audio was brilliantly reproduced with the ability to tune it to a specific genre through the use of the equalizer. Even setting the volume at the highest setting, there was no hint of crackling from the speaker phone.



Surprisingly, video playback performed much better than what we anticipated. We were able to load up two movie trailers, coded in MPEG-4 at 320x240 and H.264 at 320x136. No slowdown or lag whatsoever were witnessed during the entire playback. Sound accompanying the video was right on the mark – voices synced perfectly to the video and they were distinct with good tones. Videos would initially play in portrait mode; making it difficult to view on-screen. You can select the full view option which, of course, requires you to turn your phone sideways – making it somewhat awkward to watch. Just being able to play these videos was good enough in our books – even despite a smaller sized screen.



If you plan on using the Nokia Mural as a media hub, you'll probably want to use a microSD card  because it only has 70MB of internal memory – it can accommodate cards of up to 32GB in capacity.

Going on a trip overseas? The Nokia 6750 Mural is a quad-band GSM phone (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) with tri-band UMTS capability (850/1900/2100 MHz). 

The Mural is capable of loading complex sites like ours in a timely manner and displaying them almost perfectly. It took about a minute for our site to be entirely loaded on the display – although you'll have to manually select the zoom levels for adequate viewing. There's no option for page overview – so even choosing a 50 percent zoom level results in an awkward layout with text overlapping images. Other than that zoom level, the web browser renders pages nicely. We'd recommend to slowly scroll because attempting to quickly navigate to the bottom of the site will result in some minor lockups with the browser – after some time it catches up and scrolling can be resumed. It's nice to see that pages load up quickly, but the scrolling issues hinders the overall experience. If you're able to look past that problem, you might be able to make use out of the web browser.

Performance:

If it weren't for a couple of minor issues with call quality, the Mural could've been perfect in that category. First of all, voices just sounded too low on our end even when volume was at its highest. Second, there was a faint static noise in the background that was audible during our conversations – it was made more noticeable when no one was talking. Other than those two qualms, call quality was decent. On our callers’ end, they stated that our voice was loud and distinct. The experience with the speakerphone was perfect because it provided ample volume to easily distinguish our conversations even on the loudest setting.

No problems with the Mural maintaining signal strength in the greater Philadelphia area. We did not get any dropped calls or major fluctuations in bars during our use.

For being a simple clamshell handset, we were disappointed with the battery life we received out of it. The battery (1050 mAh) provided us with full 3 days of normal use before it was completely drained – that's a far cry from what other similar devices can offer. It's rated for 4 hours of talk time and 350 hours of standby. We assume it could've been extended if we lowered the brightness down from the maximum setting we used it on.

Conclusion: 

It's a mixed bag with the Nokia 6750 Mural – there's an even amount of good and bad things about the phone. There are some areas where it overexcels and beats our expectations, but then falls flat on others – making it unbalanced in a way. The look and design is definitely unique with its cosmetics being accentuated with the subtle glow of colors to choose from. At its core, the interface isn't complex and users will easily be able to adapt quickly to navigating on it. This isn't the usual inexpensive Nokia handsets that US consumers are used to seeing, instead it's one that will impress your friends with its depth in personalization. Going for only $49.99 with a two year contract places it in the correct price bracket to compete with other similar offerings like Verizon's Nokia Intrigue. If you are able to overlook at some of its short comings, we're sure you'll warm up to it and be able to adjust.

Nokia 6750 Mural Video Review: