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Nokia 8600 SummaryThe Nokia 8600 mobile phone is the new premium handset from Nokia. Designed for the discerning mobile user, an exclusive design combining stainless steel and glass for a fresh and innovative look. Beyond the elegant design, the 8600 is a powerful tool for managing your professional and personal business – manage contacts, schedules and more with PC suite software, take conference calls with the integrated hands free speaker and download applications to manage specific needs.View all Nokia 8600 deals on
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Nokia 8600 - Editor's Review
Just by looking at the packaging it comes in, you can see that the Nokia 8600 is a premium phone for the higher-end market. Our overall impression is that it is indeed a very fashionable phone with great features, although it has a high price tag to accompany it, and that considering the quality of newer value and moderate Nokia handsets, this price tag is difficult to justify.
The Nokia 8600 is a slider phone that measures 107 x 45 x 15.99mm when closed. It is surprisingly heavy for its size at 140g. To look at, the handset immediately looks like a premium item with its smooth black finish and carefully curved edges. The slide mechanism isn't quite as smooth as the latest Samsung slider phones but is still very comfortable. Also, despite its black finish, the cover is in fact glass so that as you are opening the slider or just after closing it the lit up keypad glows through the cover. This finishes off a comfortably sized and superbly finished exterior design.
When you open the slider, it reveals a relatively compact standard Nokia keypad with the newer Nokia joystick style button with a separate select button in the middle of the directional pad. One small complaint is that the cover doesn't slide down quite far enough meaning that it is a bit tricky to press the bottom row of buttons on the keypad. This is only a problem for regular text messaging but is worth bearing in mind because of the thickness of the glass cover. Above the keypad is the 2 inch TFT screen displaying up to 16 million colours with an impressive brilliance, especially when shown off by the background/screensaver animations. When you're using the phone, despite its relatively compact size, the screen is very clear and easy to read. However, when you've opened the cover but haven't pressed any keys, and screen somewhat oddly appears slightly out of focus so that you can't easily read the text on the useful organiser-style front page.
As mentioned, the first page you see when you open the cover is a well laid out customisable personal organiser layout. This is a great feature when using the phone instead of a PDA or at least when using the diary feature. The Nokia 8600 is running the Series 40 interface (basic when compared to Series 60, 80 & 90 interfaces). The interface is easy to navigate although the platform does not support multi-tasking unlike on some newer Nokia models. However, the feature list is suitably strong for a phone of this class. The organiser functions include a calendar, to-do list, notepad, alarm clock, stopwatch and calculator.
The 8600 has a 2 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom. However, it lacks either autofocus or a flash, so is only really suitable for daytime photos of stationary objects. It has a video camera function that can take videos in the more appropriate landscape format and playback QCIF, 3GPP, H.263, and H.264 formats.
The impressive music support is typical of all moderate and high-end Nokia handsets now, with an integrated FM radio that unfortunately must be used with a Nokia headset, and a music player supporting AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, MIDI, AMR and WMA audio formats. The ringtones can also be stereo audio although oddly you can't use MP3 files as your ringtones. The 8600 has several audio themes that you can change between or even customise. Our biggest complaint from a multimedia standpoint was the relatively poor quality of audio playback over the phone's inbuilt speaker, although this wasn't a concern when playing back using the Nokia headset.
Browsing the web with the Nokia 8600 is a somewhat painful experience. The speed is the worst part as it only works on GPRS or EGPRS in the UK. In addition, a lot of websites were at least partially converted to rich text format rather than HTML so it was a little hard to work out where everything was on some pages. The handset's own messaging/email application can handle IMAP, POP3 and SMTP protocols as well as the usual SMS and MMS (multimedia messaging) functions.
The 8600 is a quad band phone making it possible to use it in any country that has a mobile phone network (if there is an appropriate roaming agreement). The call quality was fine during our tests and unlike many phones with multitone ringtones, the volume of the ringer was loud enough to be heard from within a handbag or backpack. Any purchase of a Nokia 8600 Luna includes 2 years of the Nokia Care Premium Service giving customers enhanced Nokia Care contact centre assistance and repair service (according to the Nokia website). Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately we haven't had any experience of this service, so are unable to comment on its added value.
Overall the Nokia 8600 Luna seems to be a beautiful shell with a somewhat mediocre phone inside it. With a lower price tag, it would undoubtedly be popular but at its current price, it is only likely to appeal to people who really see the exterior looks as being vastly more important than true functionality. This doesn't remove the fact that it will do more than enough for most mobile phone users looking to purchase a phone, just not all of them.
The Nokia 8600 is a slider phone that measures 107 x 45 x 15.99mm when closed. It is surprisingly heavy for its size at 140g. To look at, the handset immediately looks like a premium item with its smooth black finish and carefully curved edges. The slide mechanism isn't quite as smooth as the latest Samsung slider phones but is still very comfortable. Also, despite its black finish, the cover is in fact glass so that as you are opening the slider or just after closing it the lit up keypad glows through the cover. This finishes off a comfortably sized and superbly finished exterior design.
When you open the slider, it reveals a relatively compact standard Nokia keypad with the newer Nokia joystick style button with a separate select button in the middle of the directional pad. One small complaint is that the cover doesn't slide down quite far enough meaning that it is a bit tricky to press the bottom row of buttons on the keypad. This is only a problem for regular text messaging but is worth bearing in mind because of the thickness of the glass cover. Above the keypad is the 2 inch TFT screen displaying up to 16 million colours with an impressive brilliance, especially when shown off by the background/screensaver animations. When you're using the phone, despite its relatively compact size, the screen is very clear and easy to read. However, when you've opened the cover but haven't pressed any keys, and screen somewhat oddly appears slightly out of focus so that you can't easily read the text on the useful organiser-style front page.
As mentioned, the first page you see when you open the cover is a well laid out customisable personal organiser layout. This is a great feature when using the phone instead of a PDA or at least when using the diary feature. The Nokia 8600 is running the Series 40 interface (basic when compared to Series 60, 80 & 90 interfaces). The interface is easy to navigate although the platform does not support multi-tasking unlike on some newer Nokia models. However, the feature list is suitably strong for a phone of this class. The organiser functions include a calendar, to-do list, notepad, alarm clock, stopwatch and calculator.
The 8600 has a 2 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom. However, it lacks either autofocus or a flash, so is only really suitable for daytime photos of stationary objects. It has a video camera function that can take videos in the more appropriate landscape format and playback QCIF, 3GPP, H.263, and H.264 formats.
The impressive music support is typical of all moderate and high-end Nokia handsets now, with an integrated FM radio that unfortunately must be used with a Nokia headset, and a music player supporting AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, MIDI, AMR and WMA audio formats. The ringtones can also be stereo audio although oddly you can't use MP3 files as your ringtones. The 8600 has several audio themes that you can change between or even customise. Our biggest complaint from a multimedia standpoint was the relatively poor quality of audio playback over the phone's inbuilt speaker, although this wasn't a concern when playing back using the Nokia headset.
Browsing the web with the Nokia 8600 is a somewhat painful experience. The speed is the worst part as it only works on GPRS or EGPRS in the UK. In addition, a lot of websites were at least partially converted to rich text format rather than HTML so it was a little hard to work out where everything was on some pages. The handset's own messaging/email application can handle IMAP, POP3 and SMTP protocols as well as the usual SMS and MMS (multimedia messaging) functions.
The 8600 is a quad band phone making it possible to use it in any country that has a mobile phone network (if there is an appropriate roaming agreement). The call quality was fine during our tests and unlike many phones with multitone ringtones, the volume of the ringer was loud enough to be heard from within a handbag or backpack. Any purchase of a Nokia 8600 Luna includes 2 years of the Nokia Care Premium Service giving customers enhanced Nokia Care contact centre assistance and repair service (according to the Nokia website). Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately we haven't had any experience of this service, so are unable to comment on its added value.
Overall the Nokia 8600 Luna seems to be a beautiful shell with a somewhat mediocre phone inside it. With a lower price tag, it would undoubtedly be popular but at its current price, it is only likely to appeal to people who really see the exterior looks as being vastly more important than true functionality. This doesn't remove the fact that it will do more than enough for most mobile phone users looking to purchase a phone, just not all of them.
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1. You must own or use the phone to leave a review
2. Do not use this form to ask questions
3. Inappropriate submissions will not be accepted