Nokia 6280 is a 3G slide phone with almost all the features of a smart phone, minus the Symbian operating system. It comes with a Series 40 operating system.

At the first glance, Nokia 6280 is less flamboyant. The bodywork is clean and simple. It may seem bulky; but for a 3G phone its easy to be kept in the pocket. The phones slider function is very smooth and the frontage keys make quick access to the functions feasible.

A 2.2-inch, QVGA quality display with 262k colour screen and 320 x 240 pixels resolution adorns this gadget. The phone has two high quality cameras, on the rear side a 2 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom and integrated flash and on the front an excellent VGA camera.

But sadly, its 3G performance is not so impressive. The video calling feature may be a disappointing one. The video streaming is however good, but when it comes to fast moving footage; the video quality is a turn off.

In terms of connectivity, , the phone offers Bluetooth, USB 2.0 and infra-red internet access via EDGE or 3G with up to 384 kbps download speed. To ask for more, the phone has video ringtones, SMS, MMS, Instant Messaging, email (SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4), Java games and XHTML web browser. The battery life is also fair.

Nokia 6280 has 74 Mbytes memory with miniSD card. As of the music player, the phone has MP3 and MP4 players. The sound quality is superb and has equaliser settings as well.

All this integrated in a sleek 115g case is impressing. Being a 3G phone its packed with features, but may have certain faults such as battery and memory card problems. You may get cheap Nokia phones as well as Nokia contract phones on a number of networks such as O2, Vodafone etc.

Nokia 6280