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..and the Ugly. Notable mentions
The Nokia 5330 XpressMusic is easily one of the ugliest phones announced during 2009,
but Nokia still haven't launched it which makes is think that it has been cancelled,
and the upcoming Nokia 5330 Mobile TV Edition takes the original 5330 and gives it a very
pleasing makeover. The Motorola W7 is thankfully a pretty rare phone, mostly selling in Asia.
The Samsung B7620 rather pointlessly slaps Armani branding on what is actually a rather
good smartphone.
For some reason, the US market seems to have more than it's fair share of ugly looking
devices, including the Motorola Karma QA1, Samsung Comeback, Motorola VA76r Tundra and
Nokia Surge (also sold in Europe as the 6760 Slide).
Ugly: Samsung B3310 A dinky little messaging phone, the Samsung
B3310 comes with a useful slide-out QWERTY keyboard that can be used for texting or on
social networking sites.
But the odd thing about the B3310 is the weird set of number keys along one edge, leaving
the whole design lopsided when closed.. and in an arrangement that's almost completely
useless.
To be fair, other manufacturers have tried messing around with keypad designs before..
but do you see any of them about? No? There's a good reason for that!
Uglier: Nokia 6700 Classic Gold Edition One of the best looking phones ever made (in
our opinion) was the Nokia 6300, and over the years Nokia have tried to make a handset
that would be a worthy successor.
With the Nokia 6700 Classic, they succeeded. Here was a handset that picked up the styling
from the 6300 and applied it to an up-to-date midmarket phone that managed to combine understated
good looks with a useful set of features that almost everyone could live with. A little
bit upmarket while still being tasteful, the Nokia 6700 Classic is a successful phone,
and deservedly so.
So, what do you do with a handset that manages to get that difficult combination of elegance
and features just right? Well, apparently Nokia thought that covering the whole thing
in gold was going to make it a more attractive handset. We think that they really missed
the point. Too vulgar to be classy, and too cheap to be blingy the Nokia 6700 Classic
Gold Edition all seems a rather pointless and tacky exercise.
Ugliest: Telstra T165i "Ugly" doesn't necessarily mean "bad", and
although the Telstra T165i looks absurd, it looks the way it does for a very good reason.
The Telstra T165i targets a very particular market - Australian 3G users who live away
from main urban areas. To this end, the T165i has an extendable antenna, something very
rarely found in 3G phones these days. If that's not enough, it can also be mounted to an external
antenna either in a fixed location or a vehicle.
Despite the ridiculous retro looks, the T165i comes with 3.5G support, GPS, expandable memory,
2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth and an FM radio. It's also a fairly rugged device and it comes
with a anti sun glare display, meaning that it should adapt to life well on your sheep
station or wherever you are using it.
There's something very Australian about this phone, it looks like the sort of handset that
you could beat off a crocodile with and then upload the photos so that your mates could
see them. In our view, the Telstra T165i may be the ugliest phone we've seen in 2009, but
we like it!