Many states have laws about using your cell phone while driving. Even where the law permits it, using your phone while driving can be dangerous. I have to admit, I talk on the phone while driving a lot. Although I can still drive safely, it’s inconvenient and ties up my free hand. Nokia sent me something that makes it all easier.
About the HF-510
The Nokia Speakerphone HF-510 is a hands free kit for your car that connects via Blue Tooth to your phone. Simple enough, but what makes this different from other hands free kits out there? I’ve seen a ton of them and decent kits start around $50 last time I checked and the HF-510 comes in a little over that mark. The first difference this device has over others is easily noticed the first time you look at it. The large, easily mountable speaker allows for nice clear audio and can be pretty loud if you want, too. Because I didn’t want to mount the speaker for my review, I found myself throwing it in the cup holder in my car. The speaker size is just about a perfect fit for the cup holder, so if you want to share it between cars, you could try that.
The next stand-out feature I found on this device was the OLED display for caller ID. The whole point of a hands free kit is to not be messing with your phone while driving, so it’s nice to have the incoming caller’s number displayed. This is a great feature and shows up nicely. I hate getting stuck on the phone in my car with someone I don’t want to talk to or someone trying to sell me something. If you don’t mount the speaker or use the included visor clip, though, this feature is not as easy to notice without taking your eyes way off the road. So if you need the caller ID, mount the speaker or use the visor clip.
Other Features, Likes, Dislikes
Additionally, the Nokia HF-510 has a ring around the outside that is used to control the volume and sift through the phone book. While it’s kind of cool and probably works fine if you mount it very stable, it otherwise makes the phone book navigation and volume control harder to accomplish with one hand. While I didn’t really use it long enough to notice any battery issues, it boasts up to 30 hours of operation time and 180 hours of stand by time on the included battery. That’s pretty decent, but they provide a car charger for those really long trips.
Conclusions
This hands free kit just worked well. I might have liked it a little smaller for my visor, but it has a nice design and was generally easy to operate. Call quality was as good as being on my phone, itself and it paired up really really easily. For the extra extra mile the HF-510 goes, I expected a slightly higher price than what I’ve seen and that doesn’t hurt one bit. The Nokia HF-510 looks and works great at a good price, leaving little to ask for.
Unaware of what would be announced, I stayed up late for the Nokia virtual press event I was invited to check out. While it wasn’t some hot new Nokia handset as I had hoped, it was still pretty cool news.
I was greeted with a video from Anssi Vanjoki (Markets) who announced that Nokia will now provide their OVI maps for free… forever. How’s that for a nice bold statement. That’s a great thing for you Nokia users, but what about me? OVI Maps is a product for the desktop, too.
The picture above shows OVI Maps in it’s 3D view displaying the Eiffel Tour, which I thought was pretty cool, but there’s a lot more to the maps than some 3D tricks. At first glance, it seems they’ve really set out to compete with Bing and Google in the map and mobile navigation space. Now I just need another Nokia phone to play with so I can really give it a spin.
I’d love to hear opinions from any of you Nokia users.
A few weeks ago, I got a fun little package in the mail. It was from the UK and inside it was a shiny new Nokia E75 phone for me to use and review and so I did before sending it back this week.
Small footprint and stylish
My first impression when I pulled the E75 out of the box is how small it is. It’s about as thick as some of the thinner smart phones, maybe as tall, and definitely less wide. The trade-off for the small size is the screen, which is also on the smallish side compared to a lot of the high end smart phones that boast large colorful screens. I love my screen real estate, so that was a drawback for me.
The E75 just looks good on the outside. It’s not the best looking phone I’ve had the pleasure to review, but it’s definitely up there. I want a phone to look good from afar, but then the small details really drive it home for me. In the case of the E75, it starts with the vibrant red or deep black front color and silver back combined with more oblong rounded corners, creating a noticeable break from the popular rectangle with slightly rounded corners in black and gray. When you get closer you catch some of those details like the muted silver contrasted by chrome accents and a textured metal back plate. The keypad on the front is pretty easy to handle by touch, alone, and the two little bumps in the middle help you know where your thumb is on the key pad or provide a starting point. At the top of the key pad are some multi-purpose buttons that might have been better as just individual buttons. However, this phone does provide a lot more options right from the key pad, which is nice. An unexpected visual treat was the slider’s full keyboard. Colored to match the phone, it looked good, and the layout is great, offering slightly larger keys than some others while providing all the right keys. The only think I didn’t like was that the keys were so flush with the phone, which had me hitting the wrong keys a lot. Keys should be raised an appropriate amount from the surface to prevent this. The keys had a coating that felt a bit like a matte paint coat. On a phone like this, I thought it made it feel more exclusive. It’s definitely a unique phone in it’s class.
Every day use
The call quality was decent, as I had expected, but what about the user experience? The smaller screen detracted from the on-screen experience only in that I felt I was scrolling a lot, especially during web browsing. Luckily, Nokia makes up for that quite a bit with the really smooth scrolling. Through menus and applications, the scrolling was probably smoother than I’ve seen on any other phone that wasn’t a touch screen. Everything seemed easy enough to get to without a lot of hassle and the center navigation button proved useful for easy and accurate navigation. Two thing I use a lot on a phone are email and web browsing that’s becoming more and more the case with the rest of the world, too. The email functionality of this phone was decent. The mailbox access and filtering options were easy to change and general email operations were up to par. The web browsing experience suffered from the screen size to an expected degree but also helped show off the vibrant screen, which didn’t seem so vibrant otherwise. The keyboard slides out smoothly, the buttons are all in the right places, and it’s very responsive. The 3.2 Megapixel camera is full featured, but seemed to fall short on photo quality in my tests.
Conclusions
It’s a great phone, but it could use some improvements. Namely, I’d like a bigger screen and raised keys on the keyboard. The camera is, after all, a cell phone camera, so improvements in photo quality would be nice, but it still takes decent photos for a phone. The phones aesthetic is nearly perfect and it’s a great size and weight. The E75 is a decent offering for the price, and is a great tool for the traveling business person, and at $399, it’s decently equipped for the job.
