Nokia 6103

Available now
6th January 2006
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The Nokia 6103 is essentially a Bluetooth version of the Nokia 6101 announced early last year - a budget clamshell phone coming in at around €200/£140/$240 before taxes and subsidy.

It's an attractive looking phone, but really the best thing about the Nokia 6103 is the price. Try to bear in mind that this is a good value budget phone before you read the rest of the story.

The bottom line is this - Nokia are awful at making clamshell devices, and simply warming over the Nokia 6101 isn't going to win hearts and minds. The 6101 looked old fashioned even last year - so the specification of the Nokia 6103 reminds us rather more of January 2004 than January 2006. Inside there's a 128x160 pixel TFT display with a smaller 4096 colour 96x65 pixel subdisplay on the outside, plus a VGA resolution camera with video capture capabilities. The 6103 has just 4.4Mb of internal memory to store pictures, clips, ringtones, Java games and other data. Talktime is pretty unimpressive at just 2-4 hours.

On the plus side, the Nokia 6103 comes with an FM radio and email client, in addition to a WAP browser. You can use MP3 files for ringtones, but there are no multimedia playback capabilities other than that.

It's a tri-band GSM phone in two versions - 850/1800/1900 MHz for the Americas and 900/1800/1900 MHz for the rest of the world. The Nokia 6103 comes with GPRS as you would expect, but it also comes with EDGE.. combine the high-speed data of EDGE with Bluetooth, and you get a neat little device to as a laptop modem (assuming your mobile network has EDGE support).

It's a nice looking phone, although the external antenna makes it look a little old fashioned. But really, this is just an old fashioned handset that's had a makeover and a couple of enhancements. Amusingly Nokia's press release refer to this is a "mid-range handset", but it isn't, it's an entry-level Bluetooth clamshell that does appear to offer pretty good value for money in a simple-to-use and attractive design.

We just hope that Nokia will one day come up with a decent clamshell phone.

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