Nokia 8600 Luna - Martin's Quick Review

Smoke and Mirrors

The Nokia 8600 Luna has been billed as a sleek, unique, high-end fashion phone and, judged against these criteria, the phone certainly delivers. At the high end of the price spectrum, this is a phone for those who don’t mind paying to look the part. The slider phone is constructed from exotic materials such as soft-touch stainless steel and opaque smoked glass and, since the phone weighs a solid 140 grams, you may not notice the hole its purchase left in your hip pocket.

The Nokia 8600 Luna is predominated by a large (two inch) QVGA display that offers 24-bit colour and which resolves at 240 x 320 pixels. The alphanumeric keys are housed beneath a smoked glass cover, which slides down easily with pressure on the cleverly-located rubber ridge just below the screen. Somewhat frustratingly, the some keys are slightly obscured by glass casing even when it is slid to its limit. The problem mainly occurs when trying to use the "7" and "9" keys in the normal (thumb-pad press) manner and may be especially concerning for those with larger hands.

Nokia has made much of the 8600 Luna’s light system – when idle, the keypad’s white back-lighting begins to pulsate – rising to full light in six seconds, and then fading out. Although impressive, the light show doesn’t make up for the phone’s other missing features, such as a memory card expansion slot.

The Nokia 8600 Luna offers a two megapixel camera, however unlike the cameras of many of its competitors, the Nokia doesn’t offer basic features such as autofocus or flash. Captured images are of acceptable quality only in optimum light conditions – night shots, for example, will simply not be possible. The phone also offers a music player with equaliser, stereo widening feature and FM radio. Given that the phone is limited to 128MB of memory, using the phone as a dedicated music player is probably out of the question. Using the bundled headphones, music quality is average and you may need to make use of the 2.5mm universal jack and plug in your own high-performance headphones to improve the listening experience.

Connection options on the Nokia 8600 Luna are similar to those offered by many other competing phones – even those in lower price brackets. The phone comes with a built-in Internet browser, which offers XHTML browsing over a TCP/IP connection, and the email service supports SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4. The phone can be connected through mini-USB (which comes bundled with the phone) to a range of devices including PC, laptop or printer. Chances are, you will find the bundled cable frustrating and may instead resort to connecting the phone using BlueTooth.

The Nokia 8600 Luna is well-built and constructed from quality materials, but several elements of its design, including the poorly-accessible numeric keypad, let the phone down. Given the cost of the phone, absence of features such as expandable memory and good quality media player and camera mean that it is hard to justify the cost of Nokia’s newest premium phone.

Get the Nokia 8600 Luna on a free line rental contract deal, or select from a diverse range of vodafone free line rental mobile phone deals and you will minimize your costs.