Early last year my LG U880 started getting hard to use. Some keys were not working properly – I’d have to press them hard which would really slow down my texting. I was well out of my contract period so I could have just ordered a new phone from 3, but none of those available on my plan really took my fancy. I’m on a cheap plan so I can only get the bottom model from each manufacturer.

At that time I was offered a second-hand Nokia 6280. I wasn’t that keen on the slidey style (the LG’s clamshell style seemed more stable) but the keys worked well so I decided to use it until I found something better and newer. I can’t remember if it was already unlocked or if I unlocked it myself but either way it worked fine with my 3 sim.

This Nokia was released about the same time as the LG I had been using, early 2006, so I had some idea of what to expect. The Nokia comes with a ridiculous 6Mb of internal memory which I think was tiny even in 2006. It has a MiniSD slot so I bought a 1 Gb card – gigantic for 2006 and about the smallest you can buy in 2009. I keep the phonebook, profiles, logs and messages in the internal memory but photos and videos on the memory card. My PC has a multicard reader so I transfer photos and videos via memory card.

Likes:

• the camera is excellent. I’m amazed that what is essentially a high-tech box brownie produces such good quality photos: quite sharp, good colour saturation and it performs well in low light conditions. I’ve written some tips about editing the exif data.
• the display is clear and bright.

Dislikes:

• the slidey mechanism is very loose. If I set it to vibrate it sounds like the phone is about to fly apart. It doesn’t seem to have got any looser over the months. I’ve read in forums that some people were worried about it and returned theirs as faulty. The consensus seems to be that it is just a characteristic of the model.
• the menu system is good except for the ‘Settings’ section. I can never find the right category for the setting I want to change. In particular I can’t really figure out the many display settings. And I don’t seem to be able to get the information I want onto the display.
• a minor irritation: when viewing a list of received text messages I can only see the sender and the beginning of the message. I’d like to see the date it was sent too.