Compare & Buy Nokia 8600 Luna Contract Mobile Deals

 
It’s not often that an expert in its field gets it wrong, and so spectacularly into the bargain, but that’s exactly what Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia has done with the 8600 Luna. Although it looks like another successful entry into Nokia’s range of market leading handsets, it doesn’t bear up so well to closer scrutiny.

Accentuate The Positives
However, before mentioning the (numerous) drawbacks of the 8600, there are still some positives to be had from the phone, which perhaps should be expected from Nokia. For a start, it’s an extremely good-looking handset – from its mix of stainless steel and smoked glass exterior, the Nokia 8600 Luna certainly wouldn’t look out of place in a high-tech fashion parade.

Size-wise it’s no failure, with a slim 16mm width combining with a weight of just 140g, which gives the unit a feeling of small yet sturdy. The screen is another success, coming in at 2 inches tall, with a seriously sharp resolution factor of 16 million colours displayed on a crystal clear screen of 320×240 pixels.

 
 
The phone has the standard camera, this time a 2.0 mega-pixel effort that helps the pictures stay sharp on the admittedly impressive screen. The multimedia side of the 8600 continues with both Real Music ringtones, as well as supporting MP3 and an FM radio.

Web browsing is fairly straightforward as well, making use of 2.5G technology for the WAP services, and the display screen allows web pages to look sharper on this mobile phone than on many other similar handsets. However, this is about as good as the 8600 Luna gets.

A Costly Disappointment When you take a proper look behind the Nokia 8600’s attractive façade, you’ll notice that it isn’t an impressive addition to the Nokia library at all – in fact, it could go down as one of the company’s biggest mistakes. For example, although the finish is particular stylish, the material is prone to scuffs and scratches, and your shiny new handset could soon resemble a rather expensive cheese grater.

The same goes for the display. Despite Nokia making it one of the clearest available on any phone yet, it comes at a price – to get it so sharp, they’ve used an almost impossibly small text font for the settings, and it can make menus extremely difficult to navigate. Not to mention how bad text messages can look. Speaking of text messages, there have been reports that the 8600 sends multiple versions of the same message, due to a software anomaly

However, perhaps the biggest problem is that there is absolutely no way to upgrade the fairly paltry 128MB of internal memory. In an obvious ploy to keep the phone as stylish as possible, Nokia has omitted any slot space for external memory cards.

This is a severe letdown for anyone wanting to store music or videos (although in the case of videos shot by the onboard camera, perhaps it’s a good thing, with grainy images the result of a poor 176×144 pixel allowance).

This might have been acceptable on an inexpensive handset, but the Nokia 8600 Luna won’t be remembered as one of the company’s finest moments.

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