Running on Nokia’s Symbian S60 operating system, the handset offers smartphone tools for business users such as email with Microsoft Direct Push support. The Nokia Surge is a compact phone, measuring 3.8 x 2.3 x 0.6 inches and weighing 4.39 ounces. It’s smaller than the Quickfire and much smaller than the HTC Touch Pro2 (which would be named “The Tidal Wave” in comparison). For a smartphone, it’s very reasonably priced at $79.99 with a 2 year contract. For those of you who are looking for a texting phone that does more than your last feature phone, yet works like a phone and isn’t terribly complex, the Surge is a good choice. The Surge’s glossy black finish and beveled edges give it a stylish look despite its plastic feel. The QVGA 320 x 240 pixel color display looks small at 2.4″ diagonal thanks to the rather large surround. But the good news is there’s room for a d-pad on the front face, along with call send and end buttons. In addition, there are two soft keys (hard to see unless backlighting is on) and a row of 3 application launcher buttons dedicated to the web browser, S60 applications screen and Nokia Messaging. The d-pad is very stiff and makes loud clicky sounds making it harder to use than it should be and annoyingly noisy.
Nokia Surge is a quad band GSM world phone with EDGE that works on the all the world’s GSM bands (850/900/1800/1900MHz). It has 3G HSDPA 3.6Mbps on AT&T’s 850/1900MHz bands (it will work on EDGE overseas and when roaming on T-Mobile or in a non-AT&T 3G coverage area). Nokia’s call quality and reception are in general excellent. In fact, the Surge has excellent reception on 3G and GSM, and very good quality. Calls aren’t quite as sharp and clear as they are on Nokia N series and E series smartphones, but to be fair, those phones do cost more. Volume is good via earpiece and very loud with relatively little distortion via the loudspeaker located on the phone’s bottom edge. The Nokia plays well with Bluetooth headsets and car kits (Nokias usually do) and we enjoyed good range and call quality with a variety of Bluetooth headsets including the Jawbone 2 and Plantronics Discovery 925. The phone comes with speed dial, call history and Nokia’s voice command which isn’t the most accurate.
Runs on the Symbian 9.3 OS with Nokia’s S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2. Like all S60 Nokia smartphones, you can sync with Outlook in Windows via USB (AT&T doesn’t include a cable) and Bluetooth. Nokia usually develops iSync plugins for Mac OS X users, but they hadn’t posted one on their website as of this writing. The Surge comes with Nokia’s usual suite of PIM applications: contacts with myriad fields, calendar, tasks and notes. Quickoffice 4.2 is included and it can edit, read and write MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (but not MS Office 2007 format, which requires a paid upgrade to a newer version of Quickoffice). Adobe Reader LE is on board for PDFs, and there is a group of useful Nokia apps: calculator, unit converter, Message Reader (reads messages aloud), settings wizards, profiles and a file manager.
Multimedia comes in several forms from Nokia’s own music player that handles MP3, AAC and WMA files to Real Player, CV, AT&T Music (Napster) and Flash Lite 3.0. The phone works with stereo 2.5mm headsets (not included) and A2DP Bluetooth stereo headsets and headphones. There’s an SDHC microSD card slot to store tunes and video.
Applications are arranged in folders, as per S60′s usual convention. You can move things around, create your own folders and customize the active home screen with calendar, messaging and other info along with adding 6 application/website quick launch icons. You can’t remove the AT&T’s horde of applications and trial-ware however. These include the usual suspects: AT&T Navigator, Yellow Pages, AT&T Mall, Mobile Banking, Mobile Email, XM Radio and many demo games.
The Surge runs on the same 369MHz single core ARM family CPU used on many other recent Nokia S60 phones. The phone is generally responsive, though we experienced occasional 1 to 2 second lags a few times per day. This is more pronounced when many applications are running in the background. The phone has 128 megs of RAM (program memory) and 256 megs of flash ROM with approximately 115 megs free for you to use as storage.
The Nokia Surge comes with a huge battery both in size and capacity. The Nokia BP-4L Lithium Ion battery is 1500 mAh, and that’s about as high capacity a battery as you’ll find standard in any phone. Given the lack of WiFi, the smallish display and lack of a camera flash, this phone is the Energizer Bunny among 3G smartphones. With moderate use, it easily lasted us 2 to 3 days. The GPS eats battery fast, and CV streaming video consumes more power than any other application.
As a phone sans a data plan, the Surge is still a winner in our eyes. The keyboard is phenomenal, the OS is snappy and texting fiends will undoubtedly adore it. It’ll be tough knowing you have a functional email client and a ho hum web browser there that you can’t use without being charged eleventy billion cents per kilobyte, but at least you won’t be forking out $30 per month for a data plan that’s really too rich for what the Surge offers in terms of connectivity.
Leave a Reply: