Nokia 6030 (AT&T)

Its very small and light, good battery life, not to expensive and the display screen is very bright but not bright enough to hurt the eyes. It is just right and i personally feel it is a great buy.

This phone, my first candy bar style, is not nearly the imposition I expected. It fits into my pocket well and has a keyguard that activates automatically to prevent you (the majority of the time) from dialing numbers in your pocket. You will probably get the occasional dialing pocket, but it's seldom enough to be humorous.

In terms of features, the phone is well-arranged for someone who doesn't care about a camera or videos, etc. One of my favorite features is the built-in radio, which has excellent sound quality and reception. The only downfall to the radio is that it requires an "attachment" to function. This is to say, it needs something to function as an antenna, and the included earpiece is a perfect fit. I find it strange that a product this small that can send cellular signals to towers far and wide needs and antenna to perceive radio channels. Just me.

Among the other high points of this is the external volume controls and speaker phone. Speaker phone was a necessity for me, and this phone turned out to have a typically raspy, but very audible and loud speaker phone. The microphone seems to pick up exceptionally well also as many people never know I'm on speaker phone. Also, this left and right directional keys on this phone serve as volumes controls for both normal and speakerphone modes. A nice, sort of hidden, touch.

One interesting benefit of this phone that I found an immediate improvement over the so-called "superior" samsung I had prior to this phone is menu change time. While the phone reacts slowly when you click "menu" (often takes two seconds or so for you to actually see the menu), it very quickly exits browsers and other RAM-intensive application (games excluded). Many phones take fifteen or twenty seconds to exit their built-in browser, but this phone drops you back to the menu very quickly.

The phone comes stock with a small but liveable selection of ringtones. Including the typical outburst-like musical tones, it also has a "vintage" and a "desk" phone ring tone. Each of which models the LAN line phone's ring you would expect. The "vintage" has been my tone of choice.

The only clear misses of this phone, to me, are in screen quality (it's screen just looks kind of crappy/pixelly), and connectivity. The phone has no infrared and no usb, no nothing basically. If whatever you'd like to send to it can't be sent online, there's no way that I found to get it there. It does have a usb-like connector (a usb in disguise), which, as I was informed by vendor after vendor, uses a connection type that is for the manufacturer only, not something consumers should be concerned with. Well.

I decided to buy this phone as I needed a replacement for my recently deceased Samsung flip phone. The Samsung I got for free, so I wasn't too inclined to pay a mint for a replacement. Likewise, I could've renewed my contract with the carrier I use and received a new phone that way, but the low price of this phone made it worth the out-of-pocket expense.