Nokia 6270

I am not particularly concerned with the VM icon issue, although it is disappointing and annoying. I have the German model with Firmware version 3.53. What I have found is that every now and then (rarely but often enough to be a concern) it completely drops the signal; loses its mind. The "bars" drop to nothing and the GSM Carrier logo goes away. This has nothing to do with the actual signal available in the area. The only way to fix this is to power cycle the phone. I have missed a few incoming calls because of this. I have not been able to correlate the problem to any specific action or reaction to an interaction with the phone. This is very un-Nokia like.

The speaker independent Voice Activated control is also flakey. I know that the speech recognition challenge takes some practice, but after you activate a Voice Command and then try to turn on the Media Player or Radio, it gives you a "not allowed" error message. You have to recycle the power to fix this as well.

I like the phone, but these bugs need to be addressed in a new Firmware build. I remember that the 6230 had several annoying bugs and Nokia finally fixed them. There is no good reason for Nokia not to fix the VM icon issue for use in North America. Afterall, it is a quad band phone, a natural for this market. How hard can the fix be? The 6230a (900, 1800, 1900) works all over the world on carrier networks all over the world, why should the 6270 be any different. This is not rocket science.

I have not experienced "low volume" with this phone. The sound levels seem normal.

I understand that there is a Firmware 3.66 version out. I have been in touch with iUnlock about this and they say that they have the software, but don't yet have the cables to flash this phone model. I have no idea what 3.66 will fix (or will not fix), but I will have it flashed as soon as iUnlock is ready to go. But I am not hopeful that it will fix the Voicemail issue. I am hoping that it will fix the "signal drop" and Media Player issues.

In the mean time I am still using my trusty old 6230b (swapping to the 6230a when I go overseas). This is still, in my opinion, the overall best phone that Nokia ever produced. It is small, feature packed, EDGE enabled, good battery life, peppy menus and great UI. I had hoped the 6270 would be a worthy replacement, but I am now doubtful. The N80 looks promising, but it may be trying to do too much in one package. The battery life has got to suffer. But, as I am a compulsive geek, I will probably buy one just to play with it for a while. I use the 6680, but only to roam in Japan on 2100 WCDMA 3G. The N80 will also do this, plus have Quad band EDGE and wifi (not to mention being an S60 OS). There is a balance between phone, smartphone and PDA. Everyone has their preferences and sets of requirements/needs. The S40 phone (with a few features) meets most of mine. If the 6230 were a Quad band phone, it would be perfect. Then there is always Moto and Samsung (horrors). OK, enough rambling ...