We had been excepting Nokia to introduce Symbian-based Nokia 603 recently, but assumed that it would be in Nokia World at the end of this month. For this reason, it is a surprise for us to see this device launched in Istanbul. Thus, we had the opportunity to be the ones that are the first to experience this device.
Nokia 603, as the name suggests, is a member of 600 family. It resembles Nokia 600 a bit, however, curved corners and the back covers of different colors distinguish it from its sibling. The device comes in the primary colors of black and white, but can be customized via colored battery caps. In this respect, the Nokia 603 reminds us the old Nokia mobile phones which were on the market at the end of 90s.
Nokia 603 has 113.5 x 57.1 x 12.7 mm dimensions and 106.9 gr. weight. Thus, it is a very well-fitting, lightweight, easy-to-use phone. Device is rugged, with a plastic chassis. As mentioned above, the battery cover can be removed. When you remove it, you will see the 1300 mAh battery pack which gives Nokia 603 seven hours of talk and 460 hours of standby time, as Nokia suggests. It is interesting to see that Nokia 603 works with microSIM cards. We wonder if this trend would continue in Windows Phones, also. If you remove the battery from its place, you will see a sign which shows the place of the microSD card slot. It is a pleasure to see that kind of sign, because microSD card slot seems a bit hidden inside the chassis. The phone has 2 GB of internal memory, however you can add up to 32 GB of extra space via microSD cards. So, this means you are up to 34 GB of storage.
Like its predecssors, Nokia 603 is comming with a single core processor with 1 GHz clock frequency, 512 MB RAM and 1024 MB ROM. This combination shows a good performance on Nokia 603. The response of the device is satisfying, navigation inside Symbian Belle is fast, we didn’t experience any hitches during our short hands on time. We saw that some applications had been preinstalled. Besides, Nokia stuff also added some Turkish apps from Nokia Ovi Store.
Nokia 603 has a 5 megapixel camera on the backside. It can record 720p / 30fps HD video. There is a dedicated camera button on the left side of the device. However, you can shoot by touching on the virtual shoot button that appears inside the camera interface. We hope to see the exact photo and video shooting quality of the device in the near future, when it comes to our hands.
NFC is also in the menu of Nokia 603, like its previously introduced Symbian Belle siblings. The Finnish company generally use this technology for pairing of its devices and accessories. However, we saw some NFC based tag applications in the demo area. There was a taxi miniature which has NFC tags on it. When you tap Nokia 603 on the tag, you see the brief information about that taxi. Another application was the NFC based version of Angry Birds. This version lets users unlock further levels by tapping particulat tags on which the level information was previously stored. In addition two Nokia 603 owners can tap their devices to each other, and exchange extra levels of Angry Birds.
Nokia 603 is said to arrive in Q4 2011. The recommended retail price of the device in Europe ise 200 EUR, without taxes and fees. We are expecting to see this device being sold in Turkey between 650 and 700 TRY.
Video: Nokia 603 Hands On
