Nokia 3220 Review

On most phones, ringtones are a purely audio experience. Not so with the Nokia 3220. With its vibrating body and pulsating lights, it's like a portable dance party wherever you go. Set it upright on a table and it becomes the first actual dancing phone. It's sure to seem unspeakably annoying to anyone over 16 and irresistibly attractive to anyone younger.

The 3220 is a chubby little phone with tiny rubbery keys that give good physical feedback. Four rubber baby bumpers on the side flash multicolored lights when the phone rings, receives messages, or plays games. Like the Nokia 3205, the 3220 has a clear back cover with replaceable inserts; you can print your own inserts or buy them from Nokia.

The 3220's ringtones aren't that great from an audio perspective: many phones do better than 16-voice MIDI. But the whole experience of a flashing, vibrating phone is pretty amazing. It's a good thing the phone comes with seven themes and 26 ringtones, because standard MIDI ringtones don't turn on the lights. The same goes for games: the 3220 plays Java games, but only the five that come on the handset use the lights and vibration.

If pulsating lights and vibration aren't enough, Nokia also sells a snap-on cover with a "wave message" light, similar to that found on the Curitel Identity GA-400B. Waving the phone back and forth in a dark room can spell out a message in lights. (Click here to see our photo of this trick with the Identity.)

The phone is pretty rugged; it survived several drops in our tests, though at one point the battery flew out and we had to put it back. It has a loud speaker and speakerphone, and it makes very clear calls. Although there's no Bluetooth, it does have fast Class 10 EDGE, so you can connect it to a PC or laptop with a $50 cable to sync information, transfer photos and ringtones, and use it as a modem to your laptop.

Game performance is sluggish, and the 128-by-128, 4,096-color screen is small and not terribly lively, although it's perfectly viewable in all kinds of light. That said, the 3220 beat similar phones, such as the Nokia 3205 and Siemens CF62t, on Java gaming benchmark tests; none of the phones in this class perform very well. The VGA camera, too, is just okay for a phone camera; it gave us somewhat blue, washed-out, jaggy images, but they were perfectly viewable.

For kids, the 3220 is more impressive (though less rugged) than the Nokia 3200/3205, and far cheaper than the more powerful Curitel Identity GA-400B: in fact, we've seen it sold for free with a T-Mobile contract. At a price like that, what kid wouldn't want a fun-loving, light-blinking, dancing phone?

Benchmark results:
JBenchmark 1.0: 773
JBenchmark 2.0: 36
Continous talk time: 8 hours 14 minutes

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