The Battle For Middle-Ground - Nokia 7250 vs. SE T610

by Chris "ngws"

26th June 2003

The Camera

    The T610 has a fixed aperture camera with a choice of two image sizes, 288x352 and 120x160. There are no quality settings like Fine, Medium or Normal and the viewfinder shows sign of laggings and not as smooth as expected (compared to Panasonic GD88, NK 7650, SE P800 and Samsung V200). When compared to the NK 7250, the T610 is somewhat better and the screen does refreshes itself at a faster rate. Flickering can be seen clearly when it's in camera mode and it's especially bad along the edges of the screen. There is also a Night Mode, a self-timer and real time photo effects (B&W, Sepia etc). To help you take better pictures in the dark, SE has an optional add-on flash module too (to be released soon). There is no option to switch off the shutter sound and I wouldn't comment much on the picture quality but I will let you guys decide for yourself.

'Live' viewfinders ....

     When I mentioned one to two major addition in the NK 7250, the integrated camera is one of them. Nokia chose to label the photo sizes as Standard (352x288) and Portrait (80x96) with a choice of High, Normal and Basic setting. There is a self-timer and an option to switch off the sound of the shutter. Unlike the implementation on the T610 which has a permanent non-removable glass lens to protect the camera, the 7250 is the direct opposite - with an open concept. The camera is exposed whenever you remove the back cover to change the battery (if you ever do) and the protective lens is actually built into the back cover when it's back on. There are pros and cons for something like this. The pros will include things like easy maintenance - you wouldn't worry too much about scratching plastic lens when you're cleaning, would you? I wouldn't rub the glass lens on the T610 as hard as I do on the 7250 ... The cons are stuff like accidental damage when the cover is off but you are safe as long as you don't change battery that often.

'Live' viewfinder continue ... exposed camera lens.

No modification / resizing done. Top left clockwise: NK 7250 (352x288), SE T610 (288x352), SE P800 (320x240), NK 7650 (640x480)

The Memory

    Owners of the SE P800 will understand my predicament when it comes to memory issues. No matter how much I spent on MemoryStick DUO, it's never enough. I can always do with more :) and more is not what the T610 has. It comes with a puny 2MB memory and there is slightly over 700+kB left when you unwrap the phone from the box (the other 1.2MB taken up by default wallpapers, tones, games etc). After deleting some wallpapers and tones, I am left with slightly over 1MB. This is the time where the much vaulted saying comes in "Nothing is perfect in the world ... even handphones". For what the T610 promises, this is an area that is solely lacking. To make it worse, the T610 suffers from memory leak issues. For readers not familiar with this term, memory leak simply means you have less when you are supposed to have much more. For example, you have 1000kB left in the phone and you save a picture, say 10kB in size. You should have 990kB of memory left but the T610 will report that it has 940kB left. This could be a software issue and I hope SE will resolved this thru. a firmware update soon ... but from what I have heard and read, this 'memory leak' thingy is normal. The phone uses the 'leaked' memory as a buffer, cache of some sort. Definitely .. uncool.

Size of our 'test' jpeg file as reported by T610 (7KB) and NK 7250 (3.4KB). Total amt. of free memory before deletion.

A 7KB file is taking up 39KB??!! Total amt. of free memory after deletion.

    In the rival's camp, the NK 7250 has an awesome 5MB of memory and read this - A full 5MB of memory after deducting the space occupied by the default wallpapers, tones and games! Like I mentioned before, no one has more memory with the exception of the SE P800 and MS Smart phones! It's truly a joy and really cool to have 30+ Java games, loads of pictures and you are still left with a little over 3MB of free space! On the issue of memory leak, the NO 7250 has no such problem but I need to highlight something interesting that I've discovered while testing - The NK 7250 uses half the amt. of memory to store a jpeg photo! For example, a 10kB photo takes up 5kB when transferred to the 7250?! Did the phone compress the photo further or is it shrinking the photo with a loss in details? I viewed the photo on my PC and didn't notice any difference between them .... odd.

A whooping 5.2MB of free memory!!

Next

(C) Copyright 1998-2009 OCWorkbench.com