We've been reporting about 5-Megapixel phones for a while now, and Nokia's 62202 Classic is the latest of these high-quality camera phones. It's a fully-featured 3G smartphone, so it's good for Internet and email, but the consumer-oriented feature set make it a very different phone (and arguably easier to use) than the heavy duty Windows Mobile phones on the market.

Design
The 6220 stands out for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's amazingly slim considering the feature spec. The phone itself weighs 90g, less than the 133 gram Phone, and is 15mm thick, compared to 12.3mm for the iPhone. Mind you, it's a different phone for a different purpose, which we'll get to later.

Features
The 6220 is a good middle ground between hardcore business smartphones, and feature-light candy bar phones. The slim design makes this a consumer friendly device, but with Symbian S60 and HSDPA data speeds, you also have sold data access at your fingertips.

Side by side with the Navigator 6110 (on the left)

There's no WiFi, which put a slight dampener on our email syncing, but otherwise is capable of syncing to your office Exchange account. The main difference between this phone and a device like HTC's TyTN II, or Nokia E71, is the lack of a proper keyboard. The 2.2inch screen is larger than many other consumer phones, but not the same as the iPhone or the 2.8inch imate Ultimate 9502.

The 6220 is also suitable for music, and supports up to 8GB microSD, though has a 2.5mm phone jack, rather than the 3.5mm jack we needed for our earbuds.

Yes, you can replace your digital camera
This is possibly the first phone we've ever used that is practical enough, and has the quality, to replace our digital compact camera. We tested the device against a 10 megapixel Pentax Optio S10, and the results were very good, with superb colours and detail.

Test Photo 1: Nokia 6220 Classic. Click to Enlarge.

Test Photo 2: Pentax Optio S10. Click to Enlarge.

The phone has two cameras - 1 facing the user, and the main camera facing away from the user. The lens is Carl Zeiss lens, and max resolution is 2592 x 1944, enough for large pics (our test images shown here have been cropped to 700 pixels wide, and compressed in JPG format). The camera also has a Xenon flash.

Video quality was similarly impressive, to the point where Nokia is now pushing its phones as movie making devices for short film makers (see the Spike Lee promotional site here).

Test Photo1: Nokia 6220 Classic. Click to Enlarge.

Test Photo2: Pentax Optio S10. Click to Enlarge.

GPS
We're impressed with Nokia's current GPS functionality in Nokia Maps 2.0. Overall layout and usability is an improvement on the previous generation (as seen in the 6110 Navigator).

The 6220 is no exception, though a couple of things bugged us. Unlike the Navigator series (the new 6210 Navigator will be released in September), turn by turn navigation doesn't come as standard. You can try it for free, but it's not a free standard inclusion, and we found ourselves being bugged by the prompts to active a license each time we tried getting directions.

GPS phones like this one also take an long time to "lock on" and find your current location if you're not using A-GPS - it can take longer than 5 minutes in our experience. Remember to enable A-GPS if you're using this feature.


We also found the accuracy to be slightly off - often telling us we were in the next street when walking up the road to our office.

Overall the GPS functionality is good - the maps look great, and satellite mode provides a fancy extra way of viewing your intended destination. As a pedestrian navigation device, it's great. As an in-car navigation device, it's too awkward to be useful, and the screen's too small. It's not intended as a primary in-car navigation device, but these phones do have drive navigation features, so it’s worth pointing out.

Performance
The review model we used was a little laggy, much more so than other Nokia phones we've used like the 6110 Navigator. This became particularly noticeable opening apps and menus from the home screen. Other Nokia devices (the E71 in particular) are very fast, and this was the only major problem we had with what is otherwise a classy smartphone for consumers or business people who don't need to do a lot of texting.