Rogers recently launched the Nokia Surge 6790 last week, a unique messaging device that’s part of their Smartphone lineup.
We know that Nokia takes great pride in creating and testing their products. The Nokia Surge 6790 is so far stretched from all the other Nokia devices we’ve seen, it seems their engineers just threw everything together and just placed keys were they needed to, rather than caring about the design. It’s a bit confusing with the call/send keys, directional pad and shortcut keys to the web browser, S60 menu and messaging keys all clumped together in one general area… facing different directions.
The weight comes in at 124 grams and overall dimensions are 97.5 x 57.9 x 15.5mm. The Surge feels good in the hand and will not be bulky in your pocket, purse or suit jacket. With it’s 2.4 inch QVGA screen it has a resolution of 320 x 240. Depending which way you are using the device it’s accelerometer configures to portrait or landscape (horizontal to vertical) mode. I personally wished they would have stretched the screen out to at lease 3-inches as there was room to accommodate this.
What is desirable about the Surge, and probably it’s main purpose, is the messaging aspect. The side slide-out QWERTY keyboard is well designed, has big keys and the back lighting in dark areas is impressive. The slide mechanism is solid and I cannot see it having any issues of breaking or coming off its hinges in the future. With all the messaging clients one can dream of: corporate, Yahoo!, Gmail, Rogers, IM (MSN & Yahoo! Messenger) and Text and picture messaging (max. number of characters is 160), the Surge certainly delivers with ease. It’s easy to start messaging and the only downside is the directional pad as this is the only way to navigate around your messages… and depending how long they are it can be a bit frustrating using this all the time.
The 2.0 megapixel camera has 4x zoom, no flash and video capabilities. This was decent and the camera quality was a bit pixelated, but perfect for sending or posting to your favorite social networking site. The night time shots were a bit of a challenge and they didn’t show up nice. However, the camera sound quality was very good.
Some other key aspects to the Surge are the full-HTML Web browser, quick access to Facebook, 2.5mm jack (wish it was a standard 3.5), FM Stereo, Music Player and the ability to hold up to 8GB with a microSD card, Integrated GPS support for OviMaps and TeleNav GPS Navigator and Bluetooth 2.0 capabilities.
This is available at Rogers on the following price plans:
$29.99 on a 3-year contract
$99.99 on a 2-year contract
$199.99 on a 1-year contract
$279.99 with no contract
