I’m not really that much of a gadget nut, but one exception is cell phones. I’ve been waiting for a phone that successfully doubles as an MP3 player for quite a while, and this year there are finally some models out that at least come close to working well. Forget about Motorola’s efforts - they’re not even close so far, and I’m not sure why Apple partnered with them instead of Nokia.

Speaking of Nokia, I’m pretty much stuck on their UI - it’s simply the cleanest and best out there. I looked at the 6680/1/2, the N series, and the 6270/6280 before settling on the 6280 for my latest purchase.

I skipped the N series because for the most part they’re too heavy and large. A friend has an N70, and it’s similar to the 6280, but runs the Series 60 OS and is therefore much slower. The 6670/80 are already obsolete, with only 1.3Mp cameras and nonstandard MMC card expansion slots. The 6270/80 both have 2Mp cameras and miniSD slots. MiniSD is already available in 2Gb capacity, and 4Gb should be out soon. This is critical as 2Gb is my minimum for a usable music player. The 6270 is a tiny bit larger than the 6280, and it has a quad-band GSM radio instead of the 6280’s tri-band GSM+3G radio — I decided that the smaller size was more important to me. Otherwise, the 6270 and 6280 seem more or less identical. There’s also a 6282 forthcoming for the US market, but it seems a bit crippled, having only a 1Mp camera.

Pros

• *Excellent* screen
• Fast — the UI is very responsive (except for loading Music Player)
• 2 megapixel camera w/ decent quality
• “Recently used” address list helps with quick SMS addressing
• Integrated SMS-to-email addressing
• Cool slider action keeps your hands busy and makes you feel more like you’re using a phone than speaking into a little lego brick

Cons

• missing “secure” Wallet feature in organizer. Why did they remove this? Even if it wasn’t really secure (not sure on this point), it was useful.
• no predictive text input mode for entering numbers
• Music Player application slow to load and, more importantly, it uses static playlists. While an iPod allows you to navigate based on artist, album, track, genre, etc., the Nokia only shows you all tracks at once, or static playlists built with Nokia’s Music-whatever PC software application.
• No way to disable the PTT button.
• Needs page up/down navigation in contacts list.
• Just a little too big to fit comfortably in my front pants pocket.
• Feels much more fragile than my 6230. I wince when the 6280 hits the ground, whereas the 6230 could really take a beating. The 6230 still worked well enough to recover my data after being _run over_ by a car!
• No standard headphone jack - you have to use Nokia’s stereo headphones, or an adaptor.
• No way to adjust volume of message alert beep (it’s _very_ loud — sometimes too loud)
• I can’t get the voicemail indicator to work with Cingular (I bought the phone unlocked)
• Top three number keys are blocked just the tinest bit by the top half of the phone, which gets in the way just a little when texting. Just a little though
• Built-in button on the splitter of the provided stereo headset advances the Music Player to the next track. Handy if you _want_ to do that, but annoying as hell when you keep bumping it while working out at the gym.

The other big “con” was the cost. I paid something like £290 for an unlocked, unbranded, white-market 6280. That’s $530, I think. In the UK, you can get a 6280 virtually “free” if you sign up for a 1-year contract at £20 per month. That works out to £240 right there, and any phone on a contract is going to be SIM-locked. I don’t see any US carriers with this phone yet, but they are for sale on eBay for _far_ less than I paid. Ah well.

Overall, I give the 6280 3 1/2 stars. I love the screen, the miniSD storage, the fact that it has a working music player, and I do like the slide action, but the little UI issues bug me, and the music player needs to get much better. They took away or left out as many useful features as they added, so the net result is that the UI is a little disappointing, especially given all the screen real estate. If their strategy is to move to Series 60 for fuller UI, they need to make it run faster before I’ll buy.

For a full review of the 6280 head over to GSMArena - they do a much more thorough job than CNet with cellphone reviews.