Gadgetory

hey what's up guys John rettinger from technobuffalo here at three of you for you of the nokia surge for AT&T Wireless the suckers going to run you 7999 after a fifty-dollar mail-in rebate and of course on the two-year contract this is running symbian s60 which surprising you're not surprised I'm late depending on where you're located is the most popular mobile operating system in the world and this was my first foray into it so I was very excited to use it and give you my Piggins on first off one thing I have to mention about this phone is the hardware design is bizarre you guys saw out during the unboxing and i'll put a link in the sidebar to the unboxing that is just a very strange design with this big lip it's got a nice accelerometer that slides out to reveal a really big keyboard when you turn it but it's just a very strange design it's a relatively thin phone but I've just never seen anything like this it's nothing that I would want to show off to my friends but it is very functional so speaking a functional let's talk about the symbian s60 operating system for those of you outside of the US odds are you're familiar with it and you used it for those of you inside the US you probably haven't had that much experience with it and i will say that it's very very functional it's very useable it's intuitive it was easy to learn i was able to give it to other people who had never used it before and they are able to pick it up very quickly so certainly kudos the symbian foundation before putting together a very intuitive operating system now this is not the touch screen version that was just released for the n97 this is sort of the old-school non-touchscreen using the d-pad to click around and navigate this does come with a full HTML flash capable browser so you can you flash content right on your phone you can play youtube videos right from the browser and all kinds of other cool flash stuff and it does work very well it displays the website the if we like it what I'm a computer although the zoom controls and navigations we're not so good i would have liked sort of an easier zoom but i can overlook that to have flash capabilities something I which devices like the iPhone would have so moving right along to the symbian OS I will say one thing that I do like about this as well that displays your calendar items right below the main row of icons if you're like me you forget things very easily and having to either set reminders in your calendar or go through open your calendar on a you know once twice three times a day basis to see when your meetings are can be a little bit annoying often times you might forget to do so on device like the surge every time you turn on your phone you see a list of what your calendar items are for that day or week or however you said it that's something i really like i like that the blackberry the old school black breakers had it something i wish my current device the iphone hand so definitely give the s60 credit for that so moving along to sort of what it looks like it's definitely a well old school looking user interface it doesn't look as elegant as some of the modern user interfaces so again like the iPhone like Android even like the n97 that they sort of refreshed the OS it just looks antiquated it looks like a phone you could have picked up five six years ago you would have said well this is looking a little bit old even then but you know if you like Simeon and you like the operating system it's going to be very familiar to you however if you're in the US and you've not use this before you're definitely going to want to play on it a little bit to make sure that you like the way the operating system works it's got a GPS and then it's got a micro SD card slot it's got all the goodies that you would expect from a smartphone minus Wi-Fi so something to keep in mind when you go to your purchase so this is a phone and it's got to make good phone calls and it will say that the radio in this is very very very strong I got a much better 3g signal 19 with several devices I have lined up including the iphone samsung epix and the HTC touch pro all lines up together this had the strongest 3g signal and they were sitting right to each other so definitely a plus to nokia for that call quality was fantastic i could hear people nice and clearly they could hear me nice and clearly with no white noise so if you want to use this as a bone you're not gonna have any problems and the speakerphone was quite loud so on a rating scale on a one-to-five scale will you write this well it's going to be I'm asking myself questions here it's going to be hard to rank this and standing alone on itself up looking at the comparisons of other phones that are available for the carrier it's a nice phone it does a lot of things well however I don't think I could get past this atrocious design for a phone it is really tragically ugly it does have a nice feel on the hands but every time I look at it wonder what the designers were thinking the engineers were thinking so for 79 bucks it's not a steal of a phone it's not a free phone when it's not one of those twenty dollar phones 18t has I give it a 3 the operating system is certainly functional it looks old it doesn't have sort of the fun and the flare that you get with some of the newer devices that are coming out but it is usable so if your first stepping into the smartphone world when you're looking for a calendar and a way to send text messages you know then this is going to be a decent way to go if you looking for something more advanced and it's really something with a touchscreen this is not going to be for you so guys hope you enjoyed my relatively lengthy review of the nokia surge for exclusive content be sure to follow me on twitter twitter.com / john for lakers and if you want to learn more about technobuffalo definitely check out technobuffalo com or follow us on twitter at twitter.com in the next video bye bye