8600 Nokia
Willa Stiff
Though we admire Nokia for never being afraid to try a new and daring cell phone design, we must admit that the results aren't always satisfactory. Take, for example, the Nokia 8800. Sure, it's shiny and pretty, but the cramped keys were frustrating and its battery life was miserable. Now, two years later we consider the Nokia 8600 Luna. While it's not an official update to the 8800, the Luna could certainly be a distant cousin. It has a similar slider design with almost identical dimensions, but it replaces the 8800's silver-steel casing with a more subdued black. The feature set shows positive upgrades as well, as it now offers a 2-megapixel camera and stereo Bluetooth. On the whole, the Luna surpasses its predecessor as a stylish and feature-rich cell phone, but we wish Nokia would have given us a better keyboard, an expansion slot and more juice out of the battery. As of this writing, the GSM Luna isn't offered by a North American carrier, so it's only available unlocked for a pricey $729. You can find it at a variety of online retailers including Dynamism.com. To find accessories for this phone, see our cell phone ringtones and accessories guide.
The Luna has a rated talk time battery life of 4 hours. Our tests revealed a talk time of only 3 hours, 30 minutes. That's rather low, for both a Nokia and GSM handset, but unfortunately that seems to be where Nokia is reading these days. We had a similar experience with the recent Nokia 6555 and Nokia Prism 7500. Really, Nokia, don't we deserve at least 6 hours of gabbing time? Fortunately, the promised standby battery life is a more respectable 10 days. According to FCC radiation tests the Nokia Luna 8600 has a digital SAR rating of 0.72 watt per kilogram.
I was given 2 Nokia 8600 Luna's for free as well as an 8800 classic the other day and one of them was water damaged and very corroded, while the working one was obliterated so I did some swapping between the two. I'm surprised the display actually works and doesn't have any liquid damage to the backlight layers.
df19127ead