Incoming: twist and shout with the Nokia 3250

It's a phone... but no, twist the bottom and it's a camera... but no, twist again and it's an MP3 player. The twist-tastic Nokia 3250 combines the styling and smartphone features of the Nokia 3230 with the rotating camera of the Nokia N90 and adds up to 1GB of storage for MP3, WMA, M4A and AAC music.

To the ever-expanding universe of chocolate-bar, clamshell and slider phones, Nokia now adds the phone that rotates. Spin the bottom section through 180 degrees and the keypad is replaced with rewind, play/pause, stop and fast-forward buttons for the music player. Your tunes are stored on microSD (formerly known as TransFlash) memory cards and the 3250 supports capacities up to 1GB, enabling you to store around 250 songs at a reasonable bit rate, or 750 if you put them through the mangle of maximum compression. It's supplied with a music headset, or you can plug your own headphones into the 3.5mm jack in the headset cable.

Other features include a 2-megapixel camera built in to the twisty bit, enabling you to capture landscape images by rotating the base of the phone through 90 degrees. You can record stills, sequences or video and share them by MMS or Bluetooth.

The 3250 is scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2006 and we'll be salivating until then. -ML

Update: a full review of the Nokia 3250 is now live.

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• Tags:
• Nokia,
• Nokia 3250,
• clamshell,
• music player,
• songs