"Nokia 8600 Luna Cell Phone"

Nokia 8600 Luna

Luna, the Roman moon goddess (the Greeks called her Selene) is often depicted as a beautiful woman with radiant skin, golden hair, and riding a silver chariot pulled by proud, glittering steeds. Using the name of Luna in Nokia’s new mobile phone is a statement in itself for as the moon goddess radiates so does the new Nokia 8600.

Following the tradition of quality construction and design of Nokia’s high end mobile phone models, the Nokia 8600 has something that made it more elegant and sophisticated: a smoked glass cover.

If you have been captivated by the enchanting look of the 8600, wait until you touch her. The nearly opaque smoked glass falls into perfect place with the feel of the stainless steel. The construction is nothing short of being durable and the phone has excellent response and a great display. The new mobile has a 240×320 pixels of display on a 2" diagonal screen.

But despite the large screen, Luna maintains a very ergonomic design at 107 x 45 x 16 mm. It weighs a little hefty compared to other phones at 140g, but nonetheless is quite understandable given the steel and glass construction, even the battery compartment cover is made of steel. The same metal construction also makes the sliding mechanism to work very smoothly. No quality issues there.

The Nokia 8600 has a single micro-USB port, which allows users to streamline activities like charging, audio and data connectivity through a single connection. Luna comes with a few pre-installed applications like games, Converter II, World Clock, Presenter, and seven very unique themes as well.

Previous users of the Nokia 8800 complained of the mediocre battery life. The new Nokia has a 900mAh battery, which the maker says is good enough to last average users a couple of days. The battery life is rated for 10 days of standby and 3.7 hours of talk time, and hopefully it comes close to those figures.

Other features that seems to be lacking include memory card expansion slots, 3G support, and high-quality camera. Luna has a 128 Mb of onboard memory. Also, Nokia decided to equip the phone with a 2 megapixel (CMOS) camera.

Some would say that the camera is not enough especially in today’s standards, but at 2MP the phone’s camera is more than sufficient for everyday use. Probably Nokia intentionally did not put splurge on the camera system in the 8600 and instead paid attention to built quality and other features of the phone.

The Nokia 8600 Luna is not that cheap either. It starts selling at a retail price of US $700+. Still the phone is a tremendous success in engineering and design. If you want phones that have more functions, you can always go with higher models in Nokia’s 8-series.