Today eco-mentalists are raging on about how we are all going to die a horrible and painful death if we don’t revert back to using horses for transport, wood stoves to cook our food and start to barter chickens instead of currency. You know the type, those weird beards that constantly go on about “the corporations” and how we are destroying the planet with our BMW’s and Jeep’s.
Up to about a week ago I thought that the cell phone market was free from the “green brigade” of Toyota Prius driving, organic cereal munching communists. But alas, Motorola has just created a pamphlet on how to ‘talk green’ this was just to please the green communists because; quite honestly absolutely no one cares about how green their cell phone is.
This brings me onto the mobile of which I have been using for the past two or so weeks. Eco-mentalists would rather eat their own than be seen with this phone, The Nokia 8600 Luna. The reason for this is the Luna represents all that is good and enjoyable in life; it is cool, classy, packed with features and made from non-organic metal and glass. This makes it better than other phones and therefore a luxury and this is what the eco-mentalists hate, they don’t want you to be happy, they don’t want you to enjoy life, they want you to eat organic cereal in the morning and then go and cultivate your pesticide free field of organic vegetables.
The Nokia 8600 Luna is positioned just below its big brother the 8800 Arte. It will cost about R6 000, this may seem like allot of money and it is but honestly after using it for two weeks I simply cannot go back to another phone. It just feels so good in the hand, yes it is heavy but hey, it’s made from stainless steel and glass. This means it won’t break so easily. So if you are hard on phones this is a great option.
Feature wise it has all of the features common on today’s mobiles, a great colour screen, Bluetooth, a camera, a brilliant calendar, MP3 Player and a FM Radio. The screen on the Luna is really fantastic, besides being nicely proportioned its is also transflective. This means that when you use the phone in sunlight a coating on the screen lets the sunlight pass through the it, another coating behind the screen then reflects the light back through the screen in the opposite direction. This makes it possible to see the screen clearly in sunlight. Not many phones have transflective screens and the truth is they should all have it as it really makes using the phone outdoors a pleasure.
The one thing Nokia has licked is its sync software. It works with Vista, XP, Mac (Tiger & Leopard) and even Linux. What is even more amazing is that it really does work seamlessly. You turn on the phones Bluetooth, pair it with the computer, tell it what you want to sync and wham! You are full sync’ed.
The software on the Luna is good, but you just get the impression that it was lifted from a Nokia 6333 (which it was). But that is not that much of a problem because the 6333 had great software.
The only thing that I don’t like about the Luna is its camera. It really isn’t very good. But what really bugs me is it uses the same camera as a Nokia’s low end mobiles and this is just wrong. How can you put the same camera on a R6 000+ mobile as you do on your R1 500 cheepie?
Another thing that the Luna is not is a media phone. It does have a MP3 player but it is seriously mediocre. But then again if you are using the Luna to listen to music or the radio, you have missed the point of the phone. When you have a phone that is made of glass and stainless steel, and that has a keypad that glows subtly under the smoked glass cover to “emanate breathing” you know that the engineers that designed the phone have really not focused on the entertainment abilities of the phone and therefore nether should you.
This is the honest truth about the 8600 Luna it is really good I’m most aspects but it just for some reason does not seem finished, almost like the engineers had run out of time to polish off the Luna.
But you know what I don’t care. The Luna’s little foibles are really in the larger scheme of thing irrelevant and would buy one in a heartbeat.
Brendon Ambrose
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