Nokia’s S60 Symbian phone series has a special place in my heart. The Nokia 6600 introduced me to the world of smartphones and fostered my curiosity about smartphones, hardware, and technology. Below are my top 10 favorite Nokia Symbian phones!
Nokia 6600
My first smartphone and the device that showed me just how exciting technology can be. I remember getting it in late 2004 after I had drooled over my friend’s Nokia 3650 for months. I couldn’t believe just how powerful and feature-rich the Symbian S60 operating system was; you’ve had so many built-in apps, you could install a music player and play MP3s on the phone, surf the web, transfer files via Bluetooth and infrared (Man, I’m old) write notes, and do a bunch of other stuff that simply wasn’t possible of doing on feature phones of the time.
I loved its design, especially the asymmetric placement of the side buttons, and that jog dial was a joy to use. The huge screen was another standout element, as was the VGA camera I mostly used to record videos. After just a few days of using the 6600 I was positive smartphones would topple feature phones in popularity sooner or later, which proved true, but much later than I expected it would happen.
I shelled out a considerable amount of cash for a high school student on a massive, 128MB—yup, that’s megabytes, not gigabytes—MMC card, installed an audio player app, put more than 100 songs on the phone and turned it into a fully-fledged MP3 player. Stuff was wild! I was even able to play freakin’ Tomb Raider, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and Colin McRae Rally 2005 on my phone!
Those days were filled with awe and ignited a spark that eventually led me to my current career as a freelance technology and video game writer.
Nokia 3650
The Nokia 3650 was the first Symbian phone I had the pleasure of holding in my hands, and I was hooked after just a minute of playing with it. The uniquely bold, signature Nokia design, the huge screen (for the time), the graphical fidelity of games my friend had on it, the impressive camera that was capable of recording video, that phone had it all. It’s still one of my favorite phones of all time and while the Nokia 6600 was my first smartphone, the 3650 showed me what smartphones are capable of.
Nokia 6260
The 6260 was my second and last Nokia Symbian phone. I got it less than a year later, after the 6600, following a freak accident that included dropping the phone from a friend’s first floor balcony onto a ceramic tile-floored patio that didn’t damage its outsides—’twas a Nokia, after all—but it did result in the mainboard breaking in half.
Now, I’ll be honest here, I picked the 6260 for its design. The huge clamshell had a screen you could flip so it would be on the front when the phone was closed, which was the main reason I got it. The feature was super cool at the time. I had a clamshell phone with a front-facing screen and enough buttons that I could read messages, navigate around menus, and even play some games without even having to open it.
There was also the “wow factor” of the phone looking like a camcorder when taking photos and videos, which meant that I constantly used the camera and made tons of photos and videos just because I looked dope while doing it, or so I thought—talk about the “blunder years.”
I had used the 6260 for nearly three years, after which I switched to a Sony Ericsson W950, another Symbian handset but with Sony Erricson’s UIQ flavoring. The 4GB of storage was the main reason for getting it because, back then, I’d put the earbuds on as soon as I left the house.
Nokia N91
As soon as I saw that Nokia launched its multimedia-focused Nseries, I knew I had to have the music-focused part of the trio, the Nokia N91. Unfortunately, the phone was too expensive, so I settled for the 6260, but oh boy, was the N91 rad. A 4GB mini hard disk—there was also an 8GB version—2MP camera, a flashy sliding mechanism with media controls at the top that uncovered the keyboard when slid down, and the chrome color choice were everything a smartphone fan who was also a music fiend wanted from a phone. Unfortunately, I’ve never had the chance to hold the thing and hear the hard drive platters spinning while music was playing.
Nokia N-Gage
The N-Gage was one of the boldest moves made by Nokia. A smartphone and a handheld gaming console hybrid you could play console-quality games on, and also use for phone calls and messages.
A classmate got one in 2006, I believe, and I loved it. Yes, it looked ridiculous, especially when you took calls on it, but man did I love its handheld console-like design. The gaming experience was so much better than on my 6260, so much so that I tried to talk the dude into swapping our phones for a week or two, but he didn’t budge, so the only way of gaming on the N-Gage was during recess, before and after school, and occasionally when we’d skip class.
Nokia E51
One of my best friends got the E51 as soon as it came out, and he invited me over to his place the day he got the phone. I was impressed that a phone so compact could be so powerful. It even had Wi-Fi! That was the first phone I had the chance to hold in my hands that featured Wi-Fi connectivity; I was floored. So much so, in fact, that I managed to persuade him a few weeks later to swap our phones for a weekend.
I loved the thing. The compact design, impressive build quality, great camera, a microSD card slot, full support for MS Office 2007, the whole package. In 2015 or so, my then-roommate got a Nokia E71, which was a successor to the E51. Despite its age, the phone worked fabulously and was a decent replacement for budget Androids of the time, aside from the camera quality. I couldn’t believe a phone that old worked that well, another proof that Nokia made brilliant hardware.
Nokia N95
While we’re talking about hardware, I can’t make this list without including the Nokia N95. What a phone it was! An engineering triumph, the apex of the era when interacting with a phone was a tactile experience, filled with physical buttons that felt oh so good when pressed. The N95 had an abundance of those. The phone was dotted with buttons protruding from the shell, you also had a mechanical camera lens cover, and a dual sliding mechanism that unveiled a set of media controls when you slid the phone down. Perfection.
The phone was jam-packed with features. A front-facing camera, media controls, a 5MP main camera, a frickin’ 3.5mm audio jack, GPS, huge screen with 16 million colors, iGPU with 3D graphics capabilities and a dual-core CPU, the list just goes on. The N95 was the culmination of Nokia’s S60 Symbian platform, and it all went downhill after.
Nokia N97
The N97 had impressive hardware, but by the middle of 2009, the software part of the equation was lagging behind iOS and Android. The phone was, like the N95, an engineering marvel, but the Symbian S60 OS just wasn’t on par with its two main competitors when it came to the touch-friendly user experience. Despite its flaws, I still wanted one, but less than a year after the Nokia N97 launched I switched from my W950 and Symbian to Android and never looked back.
Nokia 808 PureView
The last of its kind. The Nokia 808 PureView was another triumph of hardware design with its 41MP camera that wiped the floor with every other phone camera available on the market at the time. The camera was so good that it would trump phone cameras that would arrive years later.
The rest of the hardware package was equally impressive but, sadly, the heavily modified Symbian OS known as the “Belle” OS just couldn’t keep pace with the advancements we were seeing in the Android and iOS ecosystems.
By 2012 I had fully moved on from Symbian, but I was impressed with the 808 PureView purely from a tech connoisseur’s standpoint, which is to say I admired it from afar but would never actually buy it. With it, Nokia’s Symbian story, one of the most impressive stories in the smartphone world, ended and the company never recovered.
Nokia 7650
Instead of ending this piece on a somber note, let us celebrate the Symbian S60 platform with the first smartphone based on it, the Nokia 7650. Not only was it the first Symbian S60 phone, it was also Nokia’s first camera-equipped handset.
I had the chance of using it in 2004 and compared to the 3650 and later with my 6600, the 7650 felt quite dated. In 2002, however, the phone offered cutting-edge mobile tech and while it lacked many features seen on its successors, the ability to install apps meant you could add many of the features seen on never Symbian S60 devices with third party apps.
This was a defining feature of smartphones of the time and while nowadays most of the advancements are served with major operating system updates, back then you could add a major new feature found in newer handsets simply by installing an app. Those were the days!
