Over the weekend at an electronic music festival that took placed in Berlin, Germany, this exquisite Nokia 3250, Nokia’s latest music phone, captured the spotlight of Nokia Trends by several people who attended the festival. Given a unique design, the mobile phone added a twisting axis down the centre of the phone, to transform a traditional phone keypad into dedicated music keys. In addition, it can store up to 1 Gigabytes (approximately 750 songs) of high quality music, offering 10 hours of continuous non-stop music playback. With camera becoming part and parcel of today’s mobile phone, Nokia 3250 comes with 2-megapixels built-in camera for consumers to take advantage of the smart phone’s capability. Equipped with tri-band functionality, it also allows connection to GSM 900/1800/1900 type of network. It is expected to be released to public during the first quarter of 2006, at an estimated retail price of EUR 350 (excluding taxes or subsidies).

According to Nokia’s Senior Vice president, Kai Oistamo, he said, “Nokia connects people to their passion, music; and as the world’s largest manufacturer of digital music player, Nokia is leading the charge to make mobile music widely accessible.” The key note focuses on the introduction of the unique twist design, making it quick and easy to switch between music keys, regular phone keypads and camera mode.

Users can toggle between music control and phone keypad by twisting the lower half of Nokia 3250 by 180 degrees. In the music control mode, the music player supports a wide variety of formats, i.e. WMA, MP3, M4A and ACC, making it easy to upload and transfer music. Furthermore, music can be downloaded from the air while on the move. The phone includes an microSD memory card slot, supporting memory storage up to 1 GB. The music player also comes with FM radio receiver, to make it a complete music package. The phone uses Nokia Audio Manager software to ease transfer of music files between Personal Computers (PC) and Nokia 3250.

Based on the Series 60 platform and Symbian OS, Nokia 3250 offers a broad set of features and messaging functionalities, enabling any third-party application developers to create their own music applications. Newly developed applications can be downloaded and installed on the Nokia 3250 with little hassle. To assume both the capability of a mobile phone as well as a music player, with music capabilities on the go, the Nokia 3250 has a talktime of up to 3 hours, charged by lightweight Li-ion battery.

The Nokia 3250 comes with a two-megapixel camera, which is activated in the landscape mode by twisting the Nokia 3250’s phone’s keypad 90 degrees. With a couple of additional key strokes, images can be instantly shared with others via MMS, or printed on a compatible printer via Bluetooth wireless technology.

With Nokia leading the trend of merging music players into camera-capable mobile phone, I do not see why consumers would want to carry two devices when a single electronic device is sufficient. Tagged at approximately EUR 350 at its initial release, I would believe the price will start to fall once the demand for it starts pouring in.

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