Nokia 6110 Navigator

Nokia 6110 Navigator (not to be confused with the older Nokia 6110 model) is meant to be a fully functional stand-alone satnav device right out of the box. It is no wonder its navigation software and hardware are taken to a new level, with Nokia, Route 66 and NAVTEQ contributing alike to its development. On the other hand, the 6110 Navigator is a full-fledged Nokia smartphone armed with the latest user interface version: Symbian S60 3rd edition with Feature Pack 1. Therefore it is hard to tell whether its greatest market share rivals will be smartphones or GPS-enabled mobiles. In any case, they will have a hard time standing their ground to the Navigator.

Key features:

• Top notch navigation solution
• Excellent display with great picture quality and great legibility under bright light
• Fast user interface
• Symbian S60 3rd edition FP1
• Decent camera with lens protector
• Good connectivity

Main disadvantages:

• Sound quality is not impressive
• Rather thick body
• No Wi-Fi
• Battery life could've been better
• Detailed maps are to be purchased separately

Out of the box

The box contents of Nokia 6110 Navigator are on the rich side. Along with the phone itself, you will find a wired handsfree, a USB cable and, naturally, a DC charger. Other niceties include two CDs - one with the Route 66 software and add-ons, and the other with the required software for pc synchronization. A manual, a quick start guide and a 512MB microSD memory card are also to be found in the retail package.

Likable fatty

A glance at its dimensions is enough to convince you that the Navigator is by far a generously sized fellow. Measuring 101 x 49 x 20 mm in closed position it has a bulky volume of 89 cc. Working with it on the other hand leaves different impressions. The phone feels surprisingly light when held in hand and, due to the comparatively large screen,it doesn't look as big as it really is. Plus, the build quality is very good and that let's it get away with being difficult to squeeze in tight pockets. The slide mechanism also feels very sturdy and reliable, although it is not even nearly as smooth as in Samsung U600's for example. As a matter of fact, Samsung are way in front of any other company when it comes to sliders . Anyway, let's start exploring the phone's hardware.

Beginning with the front panel, we see the ambient light sensor located in its upper left corner. Right under it are the video-call camera and the loudspeaker grill. The 2.2" display follows, with the soft keys right under it. They are placed on each side of the D-pad and above the Call and End keys. A small innovation in this phone, compared to most recent Nokia models, is the End key also acting as a Power key, instead of having a dedicated button for that purpose. Under The D-pad, 3 more keys are situated in a row: Menu key, Navigator key and Clear key.

Opening up the slider unveils the keypad, which is quite flat with the keys placed in level surface rows with gaps etched between them. It is quite comfortable but, still we found the one on Nokia 5700 more enjoyable to work with. Making out the borders between keys within the same row is a bit trickier here, if you rely solely on touch orientation. After a little time spent with the Navigator this will cease to bother you and you will go texting at full speed.

On the top side of Nokia 6110 Navigator you will find two apertures - a charger connector and a 2.5 mm audio jack. It seems 2.5 mm is the standard Nokia has picked for most of its new models, leaving the 3.5 mm for the high-end multimedia devices only.

All we see on the right of the phone are the volume rocker and the dedicated camera key. One good thing about the handset being this thick is that both controls are big enough and very comfortable to operate. Their ample size and elevation are great for touch orientation.

Turning to the left, we come upon three essential elements. The miniUSB connector is placed closest to the top, its plastic lid making sure the phone looks are not spoiled by the aperture. The same holds true for the microSD card slot, which is towards the middle of the left side. In between these two, is the My Own key. We are used to seeing this one in the E series but apparently it is gaining ground in other Nokia phones too.

Bottomside, we find the back cover release button, the mouthpiece and the neck/wrist strap eyelet.

The elements to be found on the backside are the stereo loudspeaker grills and the camera, which is hidden under a stylish metal cover. This cover might seem a bit too rigid at first but after opening it a couple of times it loosens up a bit and works fine. You will then be able to open it with one hand, which might seem an impossible task in your first attempts.

Opening the back cover is very easy, indeed. All you need to do is press the back cover release button at the bottom of the handset and it then opens up by itself. Under it you will find the 900 mAh battery, which under moderate usage (10-15 minutes telephony, 40 minutes of navigation and an hour of using different applications a day) will probably give you about three days of operation.

Inspiring display

Nokia 6110 Navigator has a 2.2" diagonal and QVGA resolution. The 16M colors are no news with Nokia phones and legibility under direct sunlight can hardly be compared to any other phone. This is a must for the Navigator, as it is likely to be placed on a car's dashboard and thus exposed to a lot of sunlight. If the phone lacked in legibility in such conditions, the navigation experience would surely be ruined big time.

You have a call

Not much to say about the telephony on the Navigator. As with all contemporary Nokia phones, it is but flawless. The reception is crystal clear on both ends, so you may rest assured that communication is well taken care of in this device.

When dialing a number, large and easily visible digits display.

A phone with brains

Nokia 6110 Navigator is powered by Symbian 9.2 OS and uses the Series 60 3rd edition with FP1 user interface. This comes as no surprise, consistent will all recent Nokia smartphones. Therefore when used as a regular smartphone, the experience with Nokia 6110 Navigator differs little from other Symbian 3rd edition FP1 devices. Feature Pack 1 offers a couple of advantages: a repeated alarm clock and a voice recorder, which is not limited to a miserly minute, plus some interesting UI customization features.

We also find the blue circle displayed on running applications' icons in the menus useful, as it reminds you to turn off those you're not using to save some RAM. This leads us to phone speed. The Navigator's overall mark is very good. Though not as fast as Nokia 5700, it is still very quick and responsive, and you have our word that it is not going to bother you. Nokia 5700 was just a bit better. The size of the built-in memory here is 40MB which is an unnoticeable change when compared to the 38MB of Nokia 5700.

The display naturally features an active stand-by mode. You have a band with icons for instant access to pre-selected functions at the top of the display and scheduled events from the calendar, together with tasks, at its bottom. When selecting the shortcuts, you can choose any application or even a website. The two softkeys' functionality is also configurable. The handset can be configured to autolock its keypad upon closing the slider or to at least prompt you to lock. In the bottom area of the display you will also find the title of a running song or the name of the tuned radio station.

The phone has an Offline mode, switching off transceivers but allowing the use of the other capabilities of the device. It is also used if you start the handset without a SIM card. The radio is not available in Offline mode. Other functions, such as Bluetooth connectivity and GPS are usable though, but the A-GPS will naturally be impossible to use.

As with any smartphone, a Task Manager is present. It is launched by a longer press on the Menu key on the keyboard. This pop-up allows switching between applications and you can shut any application down by pressing the Clear key. In most cases the red End key closes the currently running application, but there are some cases when you have to manually close them by pressing the exit key or using the task manager, unless you want to end up with a lot of applications running, eating up your precious RAM.

The phone's main menu has four different view modes. The first two are the well known grid of 4 x 3 icons and the list view. There are also two additional looks brought in by the Feature Pack 1. Same as in Nokia 5700, there is a V-shape and a Horseshoe mode. Both are 3D and look quite nice but are not that user-friendly . Navigation in any of them kills the joy of working with the phone. Most of the submenus also allow changing the type of view. Navigating the menus is fast with instant response to keypresses and no delays.

A nice addition is the My Own button, which can give you access to any application of your choice by a single press. To put it otherwise, it is another shortcut if you find the existing ones insufficient, or if you don't want the active standby ruining your phone's wallpaper.

On a different note, the voice recognition system is doing very well, managing commands fine and truly speaker independent.

The phone has the same four Main menu views and comes with four preinstalled themes. Given the Navigator alias of our device, there was no surprise that we enjoyed the default one the most. Still, if you are of a more conservative taste, you can always go for the classic Nokia theme

Phonebook Unlimited

As you might have already guessed the phonebook hasn't undergone any changes. The entries number only depends on the amount of free memory, and you are really unlikely to go anywhere near using that up on phonebook entries.

The number of fields that can be assigned to a contact is also unlimited, and you can repeat a field as many times as you like. Furthermore, you can create new fields if the existing ones do not meet your needs. Naturally, assigning ringtones, pictures and even videos to contacts is also an option. PC synchronization of your contacts works seamlessly too.

The Calls log department of Nokia 6110 Navigator can show you up to 20 records in each of the tabs for Dialed, Received and Missed calls. Should you need more information about the past days you can enter the Log application that shows all the calls and data connections for a predefined period (no longer than 30 days ago though).

Messaging Symbian style

The message editor hasn't seen any changes and, frankly, it doesn't need many.

A counter of the characters left of the 160 limit shows when writing an SMS. If that limit is exceeded, the number of separate parts the message needs to be divided into for sending is shown in brackets. On request, delivery reports can be activated and then each of them will popup on the standby screen, provided that the phone is not locked. Delivery reports are stored in a dedicated folder in the Messaging sub-menu

Overall, the editor is very intuitive no matter if it comes to SMS, MMS or email. Speaking of email, Nokia 6110 Navigator supports POP3 and IMAP4 email protocols. The email client can download headers only, as well as full messages. The client manages email well and is also capable of handling attachments.

Music comes second

As you might have expected, the music player has nothing extraordinary to show us. A little facelift of the Symbian classics is the only novelty in the player in Nokia 6110 Navigator. It is very convenient indeed, and manages audio files and playlists seamlessly. Furthermore, the convenient sorting by genres, artists, etc. is also present here, so you will have no problem organizing your favorite songs.

Four different equalizer presets are available, but if they don't seem enough, there is an option for creating new ones or editing the already existing. Other audio settings include bass boosting, stereo widening and reverberation and this is quite enough considering the fact that Nokia 6110 is not among the music-centered phones of the Finnish company.

Where the phone really lacks is the audio quality of the sound produced by the audio jack. We have done several tests and we noticed that when the phone's volume is at its top levels it behaves very badly in terms of frequency response and total harmonic distortion (THD). If the volume is reduced, the performance in these two components improves but at the expense of worse noise and the dynamic range figures.

Video scores a mark

A Flash player and a Real player handle the needs for playing videos on Nokia 6110 Navigator. Naturally, you can play the videos fullscreen. The videos play nice and smooth in the Real player, so if you are among the people who do watch videos on their phones you won't be disappointed with this device.

Gallery

The gallery in Nokia 6110 is quite regular in terms of functionality. We are missing the better looking rotating gallery from the N-series but that is definitely not a big deal. The pictures can be viewed in both portrait and landscape mode and can be zoomed in if you wish to see more detail. Picture editing also allows quite a good range of features.

Furthermore, the gallery has good file-management and allows selecting and sending of multiple files at a time. Besides, the smartphone has the usual file manager that does a great job when it comes to filtering files according to the memory used, and marking, moving, copying and managing files. As for application management, there is also a separate Application manager. The latter is the well known pop up menu that comes up upon a long pres of the menu key in Symbian Series 60 devices.

Unluckily, Nokia 6110 Navigator doesn't have the "Search" application among its preinstalled content. You can either download it additionally from Nokia's website or you will have to be very careful when organizing your files unless you want to spend ages looking for them later.

Picture spree

The Navigator is armed with a 2 megapixel camera hidden under a stylish metal cover. It is complete with a LED flash, placed at the side of the lens. Sadly, the camera lacks autofocus. The interface is decent looking and easy to use but doesn't allow a great number of configurations. You can select the white balance and the effects applied to the picture. The effects here are referred to as color tones but the functionality is the same. The flash can be used as a fill light, as there is an option to force it to work regardless of the light conditions. There is also a setting for the image quality which can be set to one of three levels - basic, normal and high. The secondary camera can be used for shooting self-portraits or for taking pictures to add to your contacts details. It takes pictures in QVGA resolution, which should be just fine for that purpose.

The image quality of the camera on Nokia 6110 Navigator is at a good level, given its hardware characteristics. It is a class above Nokia 7500 Prism for example, but the lack of autofocus doesn't allow it to stand up to the best 2 megapixel cameras. Here are some samples, so you see for yourselves what the Navigator's camera can do.Video can also be taken with both cameras. The primary camera records video in QVGA resolution, while the secondary only manages QCIF. There is no limit to the video length, except for the free phone memory.

Connecting people

Connectivity on Nokia 6110 Navigator is achieved via Bluetooth v2.0 or through a USB cable. The phone also has a microSD card slot if you prefer to exchange data through card readers but that is not very likely as the phone itself supports data storage mode for USB connection, which makes the memory card appear as a removable hard drive to your PC. Network connectivity is among Nokia 6110 Navigator's elements. It supports all the four bands and has 3G too. HSDPA ensures even better data transfer speed and EDGE can be used in areas where 3G networks are not available. All in all, rarely will connectivity in Nokia 6110 let you down

Web browser: making a difference

Now, this is yet another field where Nokia 6110 Navigator scores great. Browsing the web with the phone is very enjoyable and user-friendly. The great web browser makes even very large and elaborate pages fit on the screen and the experience is almost as good as browsing on a computer. The large display also contributes to that.

There is even a mouse cursor, which can be operated through the four-way navigation button. It works great and is very easy to control, except for the uncomfortable joystick. A semi-transparent mini-map of the page shows up on the screen when scrolling a webpage. The mini-map has its own hotkey - the "8" key. You can zoom in and out on the page using the "-" and "#" buttons. These features are also available on the Options soft key. Furthermore, the browser excels in speed and shows no slowdowns in scrolling. Add the Java scripts and Flash support, and you'll see the browser in Nokia 6110 is worth the effort of the Nokia's R&D department.

Plan ahead

The phone also offers a great variety of organizer applications and features. The Calendar, as usual, has Month, Week and Day views and gives you the ability to schedule Meeting, Anniversary, Memo and To-do events in it. An alarm can be assigned to those of them you need to be reminded of.

The lack of the Quick office applications was a real downer with Nokia 5700. Luckily they are back with the Navigator and are working like a charm. Excel, Word and pdf files are no problem for the Nokia 6110 Navigator, which handles them without any delays, freezes or crashes.

Other applications include Calculator, unit converter and voice recorder. Luckily, the days before the introduction of Feature Pack 1, when voice recording was reduced to a miserable minute, are now long forgotten

Finally, we once again meet the Tutorial - a very user friendly application that describes the main functions of the phone through a nice series of slides.

Having fun with the Navigator

Opening the games folder invoked mixed reactions in the GSMArena team. On the positive side, we found that the 3D Snake is making a comeback. We missed it in the last couple of phones we tested. But on the other hand, the City Bloxx game, which was widely appreciated within our team, is now dumped. Pity, it was truly a game to spend quite a few pleasant hours with.

On a different note, the Marbles game is obviously becoming an essential part of the Nokia gaming package, as it is present in all recent Nokia devices we have reviewed, no matter Symbian or not.

Nokia 6110 Navigator also features the Sports Tracker application. This is a GPS based activity tracker designed for S60 smartphones, that automatically fills up your training diary with all the information from your workout. It records speed, distance and time and stores them in your phone with the date and time of each training session, so you can keep track of progress. By the way this application is available for download to Nokia N95 user, too.

The Navigator

The GPS receiver of the Nokia 6110 Navigator is doing a great job. It has nothing to do with the frequently criticized built-in GPS receiver of Nokia N95 and is far more enjoyable to work with. Being much more sensitive than the one mounted on Nokia's top multimedia device, the receiver of Nokia 6110 Navigator will find you practically anywhere. Tall buildings are not that much of a problem anymore and, in most cases, you will get pretty exact bearings even in areas where these are a common sight. Still, there will be situations when the phone won't be able to track enough satellites and the coordinates will probably lack in accuracy.

Overall, there are only a few minor issues in terms of GPS signal reception but these are fully compensated by the great Route 66 navigation software. It has extensive settings and great looks, as well as a huge number of route planning options. The routes themselves are also very customizable, so you can pick one that best suits your taste. For a small extra payment, you can unlock a few additional features such as traffic information and speed trap tips. This will help you avoid losing a few hours stuck in traffic or a few bucks on speeding tickets. Another feature that needs unlocking is the weather forecast, which may also be put to good use when calculating some of your routes. The maps for the areas that are not included in the retail package can be bought separately too. All the required purchases can be completed with the phone itself or on a computer.

The selected voice (there is a male and a female speaker in almost any language) will prompt three times of the next action you need to take. One is a good time before the required turn is to be made, one just before it and one at the exact moment. There is an incredibly small chance to miss a turn, and still voice guidance is not at all bothersome and ear-hurting. If you still have doubts about being able to successfully navigate, you can simulate your route in advance to check when and where you will need to change direction or switch lanes.