Nokia 6288 review

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The Nokia 6288 is a revamped version of the ill-fated Nokia 6280, a handset that was plagued with problems and eventually just retired in favour of redoing it properly. Visually little changed, with the 6288 being now available in either black, blue, red or white being the most major, but under skin and in the box, things improved somewhat. The old 6280 bundled a 64MB MicroSD card to enhance its small internal capacity, but the 6288 goes several better than this, hiding a 512MB card inside the package.

Without getting all needlessly technical, the 6288 benefits from using Nokia's Series 40 software to keep everything running smoothly and seeing as software was the main issue with the 6280, this should come as a relief for Nokia fans. Series 40 is also about as close as a normal phone can come to having the advantages of Symbian control without actually being a Symbian phone. For instance, on a Symbian device you get all sorts of information on the main screen about the phone, and the 6288 emulates this with something called Active Standby. With this activated, the main screen gives information about applications running, calendar events, new messages and a series of shortcut icons to your most used features.

If all this sounds very Microsoft to you, then you will have grasped what the operating system is like generally on the 6288. Clear text links, simple to recognize icons and lots of space in between choices to avoid confusion make this a very easy-to-use phone. Even the font and blue background theme makes it look like you are using a mini version of Windows! You can also customize the menu screens to prioritise the phones functions to your requirements. All this PC-style familiarity should make the phone attractive to anyone unsure of learning a new phone, but requiring some more features over a simple model.

The Nokia 6288 is a slider phone, but instead of the 2MP camera lens being behind the slide itself, it's mounted on the rear of the phone body. Quality is good and it has a zoom and flash, but the lack of auto focus seems a little strange on a supposedly high-end mobile phone. While this lets the regular camera down, it scores highly when taking video thanks to the ability to shot footage at a resolution of 640x480. Obviously the amount of time you can do this depends on how much memory you have available, but it's worth keeping some aside when it looks this good. Since the 6288 is 3G enabled, you can find a separate VGA camera for video calls on the front.

Overall the 6288 is a distinct improvement over the 6280, but it still has some gremlins in the system, for example the software is not faultless and will freeze, plus the slider mechanism doesn't feel as robust as it could. Worst of all is the affliction that many modern phones suffer from, dust under the glass on the main screen! These things aside, this a well priced and a very good looking Nokia 3G phone that most importantly, is simple to learn and use.

Nokia 6288 specs and features

• Tri-band
• 2 Megapixel Camera
• MP3 Player
• 6MB internal memory
• miniSD Card Slot (hot swap)
• EDGE
• 3G
• Infrared and USB connectivity
• FM Radio
• Dimensions: 100 x 46 x 21 mm
• Weight: 115 grams
• Standby Time: Up to 250hrs
• Talk Time: Up to 4hrs 30mins