The Nokia 6151: 3G on a budget

Looking at the black-and-silver Nokia 6151, one won’t be blamed for thinking that it’s one of those entry/mid-level handsets that are multiplying like mushrooms.

Its traditional styling certainly won’t turn heads. Its lightweight plastic construction, although a boon in your pocket or purse, makes it feel like a decidedly low-priced model. The size of its color screen, at two inches, is certainly nothing to text home about.

Without perusing its otherwise lengthy list of features, one would dismiss the 6151 as just one of the myriad similar-looking monoblock phones out in the market. (It does have a good 262,000-color screen with a decent 128 x 160 screen resolution and a nice rubber-textured finish.)

But that’s where the similarity with all those mass-market phones ends. Because over and above its expected Nokia levels of reliability and user-friendliness, the 6151 makes its mark as one of the first – if not the first – entry-level 3G phone on the market.

With a price tag of P13,000, the 6151 is easily the lowest priced 3G mobile phone on the market today; in fact, it even finds itself in the price range of many non-3G handsets.

Based on Nokia’s Series 40 platform, the tri-band 6151 offers a midrange mix of features which includes a 1.3-megapixel camera (with 4x digital zoom and landscape mode), Bluetooth connectivity, Personal Information Management (PIM), and a music player (MP3/M4A/eAAC+/AAC+/WMA) as well as a microSD card slot to extend the 30MB of onboard memory.

Other highlights of this EDGE-enabled phone include video playback and recording, a stereo FM radio with support for Visual Radio and Push-to-Talk (PTT) compatibility. Now that’s quite a list of features for an unassuming-looking phone!

The upside is that anyone who has ever used a Nokia – even the ancient dual-band ones – will instantly feel at home with the 6151. It looks traditional and it works and operates traditionally.

Some people might be intimidated by 3G technology, but they certainly won’t feel that way when they’re holding a 6151 in their hands and that, I think, is its strongest appeal.

With an idiot-proof interface and an impressive feature set, this value-packed handset should make the ideal starter phone for 3G newbies and traditional talk/text users alike. Now if only Nokia had placed a 3G logo on this understated-looking handset – now that will make for some cool bragging rights! – Manny de los Reyes