A Month with a Nokia 3555
For the past month or so, I put away my shiny Nokia E71 and have been living with a dumb phone, namely a Nokia 3555. While they are both Nokia phones and the 3555’s S40 might bear the slightest resemblance to the E71’s S60 OS, they are completely different beasts, but the 3555 with S40 comes out surprisingly well. The 3555 came free for signing up with new service with Cincinnati Bell. It actually looks a bit nicer and seems a bit sturdier than your basic free phone, and it’s also 3G, though that part may not matter much.
Coming from a smart phone, I don’t really use voice much, but instead use text, e-mail and web browsing. While I knew a non-smart phone wasn’t really meant for this, I just wanted to see what was possible out there. Out of the box the situation was grim. No mail client and the built in web browser isn’t that great it slow, and while it renders well for this class of phone, it’s far from ideal. Text messaging at least was alright(about the same as every other phone), though the lack of a QWERTY keyboard took a long time to get used to, but now I can finally type on T9 after all these years.
Despite all the initial shortcomings, I soldiered on with the phone, and lucking it supports mobile Java apps quite well. While S40 isn’t a smart phone OS like S60 with all its native apps, S40 does at least support a wide range of Java applications that really saved the day for me. The first stop was Opera Mini. If you have a dumb phone, or even many smart phones as a backup, get this browser. I was already a fan of Opera Mini when it replaced Blazer on my Treo 755p to make web browsing usable, and I even have it on my E71 as a backup web browser for the occasional stubborn site that won’t let the native browser display it nicely on the small screen. Messing around page layouts to fit to a small screen is a tricky thing, but I don’t think anyone does it better than Opera. It actually made browsing on my little 3555 pretty decent. As for mail, I’m not aware of any JavaME POP3 or IMAP clients, but I use GMail, so Google mobile app worked admirably, though I’m not a huge fan of the GMail interface it general, but it gets the job done. One more must have app that I was able to use was Google Maps, though the 3555 has no GPS, so not as useful as on the E71. One major issue I had with the 3555 was the data speed. While EDGE data on the E71 isn’t fun, it’s near unusable on the 3555. 3G on the 3555 feels closer to EDGE of the E71, though a lot of this could be attributed the slower rendering of the browsers, and at least the job does get done for the most part.
All in all the 3555 far exceeded my expectations as an “in between” device, though it obviously does not end up as practically a laptop replacement for communication purposes like my E71 and most modern smart phones can for many people.While on the go I could get basic mail and web browsing, though unlike my E71, I would still end up looking for PCs to use. The moral of the story is that I was pleasantly surprised by the 3555, but I’ll be keeping the E71(or some other smart phone) while keeping the 3555 in a drawer as a backup.
