Ouch.
The combination of Nokia and AT&T hasn’t exactly produced fruitful results – look at the N75 and E62, for example.
And just when you thought that things were starting to look up with the release of the Nokia E71x, a phone that’s not *that* crippled compared to its high-powered cousins, here comes the Surge.
I look at this phone and I see a whole lot of ouch. It’s not too hard to see why.
The Surge, at first glance, looks like your typical slider, albeit a little squattier than most. That’s correct, except the slide houses a QWERTY keyboard, and not a dedicated number keypad. There’s no touch-screen either. Ouch.
I’m not too sure how this works. You open the phone to make a call, then talk with the slide open, or you close it again and continue talking as if nothing’s changed. Either way, it’s bad design or bad usability. It also makes no sense. Why not just throw in the touch-screen and release the phone as a cheap N97 wannabe?
I’m also not feeling the bottom portion of the phone, or more specifically the “jutting-out” section. It doesn’t look right, mainly because you’ve got three buttons sticking out like a sore thumb, giving the phone that dwarvish, stout look.
Marketed as a cheap messaging phone, the Surge doesn’t provide a whole lot more than that. There is US 3G, A2DP, and your typical AT&T-branded preloaded junk. But Nokia opted to put in the 2.5mm audio jack instead of the more standard 3.5mm. Hey, who’re you marketing these phones to anyway, Nokia?
The Surge does have two things going for it: price, and the fact that it runs Symbian 3.2. It’s good to see that Nokia is ever-so-slowly bringing out more smartphones to the US market. And at $129.99 (2-year agreement required, you can also get a $50 Visa rebate with a $30+ data plan) it definitely won’t be breaking any banks.
I was going to write about the nice, fat 1500 mAh battery, and the resulting extra-long talk time, but it appears that the battery only provides a talk time of 4.7 hours. Man, being fat sure ain’t easy.
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