The Nokia 603 is one good looking device at a glance. It has a style of its own; simple and elegant for the black version, playful and fun for the white version, both trifling as it conjure a high end first glance impression yet regularly made built-wise. Majority of its framework is plastic with the back cover being rubberized and prone to scratches or breakage just like any other regular phone on its price range.
The phone is trimmed into a desirable length of 133mm, a manageable width of 57.1mm and a conventional 12.7mm thickness, weighing 109.6 grams, quite sub par to most high end devices as everyone is racing to create the thinnest, the widest, the biggest or the lightest, but it’s very conventional on its price bracket for typical user, it’s not too big nor too small, just enough for custom users to enjoy.
Screen size is about 3.5 inches scratch-resistant glass with 360 by 640 pixels, smallish in the touchscreen standard but shows more than enough for what it was designed for. It uses the IPS LCD display technology with Nokia Clear Black Display creating a bright, vivid and sharp display, one of the best in the market both indoors and outdoors and very much remarkable in direct sunlight. Users can clearly see the screen even on the brightest time of the day.
Staying true to its design plan of simplicity, the phone’s sides had less buttons than the current standard, it doesn’t have a button on the right side nor the bottom of the phone.
It only have the tactile and responsive thin camera and volume rocker button on the left.
And a congested top corner, stuffing therein the USB port that serves both as a connection and charger port, the 3.5mm audio jack and the quite displaced lock and unlock key. As much as I want to agree with its design plan, putting the lock and unlock key on top was just strange. Not that users wouldn’t get used to it in the long run but it makes the process taxing. Would it be that phones should adopt to human behavior and not the other way around?
The stereo speaker was caved in at the back, bottom part of the phone, another minor offset since it can be covered by the hand when used, plus the fact that the speaker is not loud enough to my standard, its a double offset. If you’ve used a Nokia 6233, you will know that huge difference.
The camera lens was unprotected but I believe Nokia, upon rigorous study and test, found it unnecessary as I would rather agree since my Nokia N8's lens, also uncovered, was unharmed and never did among other users. You won’t also find any cover for the flash because it doesn’t have one.
If you’re looking for a challenge in opening back covers, then this phone might give you what you want. The thin slash of back cover opener on the left side of the phone makes you wonder it the designers were serious enough in wanting it to be open even if it’s the only way for you to access the battery, micro-SIM slot and memory card slot.
And speaking of battery, the phone has the BP-3L Li-Ion which accordingly, is capable of handling up to 460 hours standby time in 2G and 490 hours in 3G, talk time of up 16 hours on 2G and 7 h on 3G, and a music play of up to 75 hours. Base on my personal use, I would say less than a day when use extensively and more than a day on regular used. Say if you are to compare this with other phones like iPhone, battery life is twice longer, so you need to charge the iPhone twice rather than once on the Nokia 603 as its equivalent.
To sum things up, the phone is above average when it comes to hardware built and construction. With its mid-range price point, users will get to enjoy a semi high end mobilephone style, verging on the cross line of being among the best on its bracket or perhaps the finest of them all. There is a huge gap in differentiating quality and low price, but Nokia 603 blurs that line by being apt and affordable. It won’t be a question of how much users have to spend for the phone but rather a question of how far did their money went with it.
Software review follows, stay tuned!
Apr 3, 2012
Nokia 603 Review Part 1, Hardware
1 comments:
What's interesting about this phone is that it runs on Symbian Belle OS and powered by 1 GHz processor with 512 MB RAM! Sounds cool for the price, so if ever you want to have a new phone, selling your old or used phone is really ideal.
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