Nokia 5160 Cell Phone
Out of stock |
Similar in Cellular Phones
- Performance: Dual Band
- Style: Candy Bar
- Network Type: TDMA
- Overview
-
Reviews
-
Compare Prices
User ReviewRead All Reviews »
358
Disconnect Nokia's 5160
Pros
The scroll buttons are nice. Well, I found something positive!
Cons
This is a really bad phone
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
There are better phones, cheaper phones and better and cheaper phones. Why bother?
Words sometimes fail me when I attempt to describe the miserable experience I had using the Nokia 5160 for almost a year. One of the groups I manage has a need for cell phones, and the manager in that group selected these because they were free after rebate. Once again, you get what you pay for.
Don?t Get Jiggy With It
Or jiggly for that matter. With six of us using similar phones, many of the experiences I?ll relate to you were shared by at least one other person. That does nothing, of course, to negate the fact that 94% of 280 plus reviews on Epinions currently recommend this product. At least the agreement on my own staff shows me, however, that I am not crazy (at least, with regard to cell phones) and that my experiences were not simply the result of receiving a bad unit.
The Nokia 5160 is a fickle beast who must be held in the correct position at all times while in use. At the risk of anthropomorphizing a cell phone, she was sometimes my only link to the outside world when I traveled and seemed to take great joy in cutting me off in mid-conversation. The culprit was nothing more than bad design. The battery?s fit into the phone, running three-quarters of the way up the back of the unit, was constantly loose.
Simply holding the phone the wrong way would cause one of the battery contacts to become slightly misaligned with the phone, resulting in a lost connection. A certain amount of space is necessary to allow the user to remove the battery, but the spec here was off by tiniest bit. I suffered in silence until two teammates related the same problem.
The Heaviest Six Ounces On The Planet
Let?s put it another way. It ain?t six ounces with a battery. The bulky design also ensures that you purchase a belt clasp or hold the phone in your hand like an expectant father. I don?t want to wear my phone, but there are times that a smaller, slimmer phone that slid neatly into a pocket would have been appreciated. You won?t find that on this phone. Yes, you could use a men?s shirt pocket to hold the phone, and may even be tempted to do so until the phone falls out when you lean forward and smashes into the ground or the weight wrecks the stitching on your shirt pocket. Neither is an attractive option.
Power Outage
My cell phone typically stays plugged in to my car?s cigarette lighter. I messed around with a variety of after market speakerphones and chargers, but all worked roughly the same, which is just barely acceptable. You?ve presumably seen the television ads claiming how bad cellular service sounds. I lived it, particularly when using the speaker.
But the real problem was that the stock battery never held a charge for any amount of time that closely resembled the manufacturer?s spec. I was lucky to get an hour of talk time before the battery would simply give way. The standby mode did seem to work as advertised so one would be able to keep their telephone on for the claimed time, but using it, ah, using the phone was a different story. Again, I was not alone in this boat. At least one other team member had a battery that would last perhaps an hour before dying. I simply cannot tell you how many day trips away from the car were ruined by the phone?s battery dying.
Nokia makes additional batteries for this unit, but given the phone?s overall poor performance, I was reluctant to pay anything for those batteries. Still, if you like this phone and want more talk time, Nokia offers five batteries from which to choose.
Silly Gadgets and Features
If you thought staring at a Palm or other PDA while playing a game was silly with a number of limited entertainment choices, then don?t even bother playing the alleged games on this phone. The games are Memory, Snake and Logic and a sheer waste of precious battery power.
Meanwhile, the phone features a solid but basic address book and the standard call logs and stats. One must pay attention to the phone?s display in order to select the appropriate option. I found this, as well as the two keypress Keyguard annoying to operate. Without an option to reconfigure the buttons needed to activate and deactivate the Keyguard, which locks out all activity on the keypad, one is left to fumble through the less than intuitive key combination.
One positive feature on this phone is the ability to dial a two or three digit sequence when in the configuration screens in order to bypass the menu. The options are logically grouped so that call information always starts with a 3, games with a 6, and tones and ringing options with an 8. Thus, pressing 33 will launch the dialed calls buffer and allow the user to scroll through those numbers.
The scroll keys are the only other positive I found on this phone. Big and set to the far right side, they allow the user to quickly scroll through the phonebook listings rather than attempting to use the keypad to search for a listing ? one of the silliest activities known to 21st century man.
The Bottom Line ? One Ringy Dingy
Even Ernestine, Laugh-In?s famous operator wouldn?t fob this hard-to-use gadget off on consumers. One can find a much better phone at an even better price. As for my group, we switched carriers and moved to Motorola?s i1000. Sure, they were $75 or so each, but at least we can use them to communicate. Even free, this phone cost too much.
? 2001 Joubert
Don?t Get Jiggy With It
Or jiggly for that matter. With six of us using similar phones, many of the experiences I?ll relate to you were shared by at least one other person. That does nothing, of course, to negate the fact that 94% of 280 plus reviews on Epinions currently recommend this product. At least the agreement on my own staff shows me, however, that I am not crazy (at least, with regard to cell phones) and that my experiences were not simply the result of receiving a bad unit.
The Nokia 5160 is a fickle beast who must be held in the correct position at all times while in use. At the risk of anthropomorphizing a cell phone, she was sometimes my only link to the outside world when I traveled and seemed to take great joy in cutting me off in mid-conversation. The culprit was nothing more than bad design. The battery?s fit into the phone, running three-quarters of the way up the back of the unit, was constantly loose.
Simply holding the phone the wrong way would cause one of the battery contacts to become slightly misaligned with the phone, resulting in a lost connection. A certain amount of space is necessary to allow the user to remove the battery, but the spec here was off by tiniest bit. I suffered in silence until two teammates related the same problem.
The Heaviest Six Ounces On The Planet
Let?s put it another way. It ain?t six ounces with a battery. The bulky design also ensures that you purchase a belt clasp or hold the phone in your hand like an expectant father. I don?t want to wear my phone, but there are times that a smaller, slimmer phone that slid neatly into a pocket would have been appreciated. You won?t find that on this phone. Yes, you could use a men?s shirt pocket to hold the phone, and may even be tempted to do so until the phone falls out when you lean forward and smashes into the ground or the weight wrecks the stitching on your shirt pocket. Neither is an attractive option.
Power Outage
My cell phone typically stays plugged in to my car?s cigarette lighter. I messed around with a variety of after market speakerphones and chargers, but all worked roughly the same, which is just barely acceptable. You?ve presumably seen the television ads claiming how bad cellular service sounds. I lived it, particularly when using the speaker.
But the real problem was that the stock battery never held a charge for any amount of time that closely resembled the manufacturer?s spec. I was lucky to get an hour of talk time before the battery would simply give way. The standby mode did seem to work as advertised so one would be able to keep their telephone on for the claimed time, but using it, ah, using the phone was a different story. Again, I was not alone in this boat. At least one other team member had a battery that would last perhaps an hour before dying. I simply cannot tell you how many day trips away from the car were ruined by the phone?s battery dying.
Nokia makes additional batteries for this unit, but given the phone?s overall poor performance, I was reluctant to pay anything for those batteries. Still, if you like this phone and want more talk time, Nokia offers five batteries from which to choose.
Silly Gadgets and Features
If you thought staring at a Palm or other PDA while playing a game was silly with a number of limited entertainment choices, then don?t even bother playing the alleged games on this phone. The games are Memory, Snake and Logic and a sheer waste of precious battery power.
Meanwhile, the phone features a solid but basic address book and the standard call logs and stats. One must pay attention to the phone?s display in order to select the appropriate option. I found this, as well as the two keypress Keyguard annoying to operate. Without an option to reconfigure the buttons needed to activate and deactivate the Keyguard, which locks out all activity on the keypad, one is left to fumble through the less than intuitive key combination.
One positive feature on this phone is the ability to dial a two or three digit sequence when in the configuration screens in order to bypass the menu. The options are logically grouped so that call information always starts with a 3, games with a 6, and tones and ringing options with an 8. Thus, pressing 33 will launch the dialed calls buffer and allow the user to scroll through those numbers.
The scroll keys are the only other positive I found on this phone. Big and set to the far right side, they allow the user to quickly scroll through the phonebook listings rather than attempting to use the keypad to search for a listing ? one of the silliest activities known to 21st century man.
The Bottom Line ? One Ringy Dingy
Even Ernestine, Laugh-In?s famous operator wouldn?t fob this hard-to-use gadget off on consumers. One can find a much better phone at an even better price. As for my group, we switched carriers and moved to Motorola?s i1000. Sure, they were $75 or so each, but at least we can use them to communicate. Even free, this phone cost too much.
? 2001 Joubert
