Seven years on, my trusty Nokia 3310 was finally starting to become long in the tooth, so my wife and I went out scouting for a new phone. It was pretty obvious to me that I’d want to replace it with another Nokia, but we had a look at other phones anyway.
What I needed was basic telephony and SMS, FM radio for walks in the park and a basic reminder service.
The Nokia 2626 gave all this and a lot more for a mere 2500/-. It was educative to compare my old 3310 and this 2626 and see how far technology had come from 7 years ago. 65K colors in lieu of monochrome, *hundreds *of addresses storable, huge SMS capacity, and of course the FM - all this at half the price of the old phone! Technology is a wonderful thing - it allows you to have your cake and eat it too.
Battery capacity is great for a phone of this size, and though it uses the infamous BL-5’exploding’ batteries, I have no fear - the phone hasn’t even heated up remotely during prolonged usage or charging. Sound quality isn’t’great’, but its’good enough’. The reminder section is awesome, and the alarm clock comes complete with scheduled alarms; no alarm clocks at home any more.
I have two grouses: the first is the 2.5mm earphone jack, for which no aftermarket intra-aural earphones are available(the extra-aural ones tend to slip off while jogging); I wish there was a 3.5mm jack instead. The second is the lack of software to transfer my - now substantial - phone book to my PC as a backup. Now I’ll have to transcribe it manually, painfully, by hand. Boo hoo! But then, if I wanted these features, I suppose I should’ve been ready to fork out another grand or so.
No other phone comes this close at this price!