After weeks of leaked photos, including one from Carphone Warehouse’s own site, the UK retail giant has gone official with the Nokia 8600. As now advertised on CW’s homepage, the ‘Black Beauty’ 8600 is available on the O2 network and is claimed to be ‘exclusive’ — which may explain the curious fact that, as yet, Nokia hasn’t announced the phone itself.
CW lists the phone has having a 240 x 320 pixel QVGA screen with 16,000 colours, a two-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, USB (but no mention of whether it’s 2.0 speed), and quad-band networking… But no 3G. And while it says the 8600 has 128MB of on-board memory, CW says the phone doesn’t support memory cards — which, frankly, just isn’t good enough for a 2007 phone. Let’s hope that when Nokia does get around to officially revealing the 8600 it proves CW’s specification listing wrong.
Other factoids for the 8600 include its 107 x 45 x 15.7mm dimensions and 140g weight, that it’s not a Symbian (S60) phone — which confirms earlier speculation that it would be Series 40-based — and that it has a claimed 264 hour standby/ 3.5 hour talktime battery life. The inclusion of a FM radio is of medium interest, but there seems to be no sign of a 3.5mm headphone socket which means we’ll be stuck with Nokia’s own low-quality headphones.
We think this seems like a nice-sized, good-looking handset but the specifications are a bit low compared to other mid-range phones out there from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG — and even Nokia itself. Hats off to Carphone Warehouse for securing an exclusive, but style and size aside the 8600 leaves us feeling a bit lukewarm.
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