Summer 2007
The Luna is Nokia's high-end fashion phone. The materials are top notch. Everything about this phone is elegant and refined, though there are some definite missteps in its design.
First, Rich and Eric disagreed about the quality of the top surface of the Luna. The screen and keypad guard are both made of glass. Eric felt the glass was especially smooth and felt great. Rich said he couldn't tell the different between feeling the glass of the Luna and feeling the plastic screens of other phones. This point aside, the Luna is solid. We both felt that the metal finish on the back was smooth, as are the rounded edges of the phone. The glass front and metal casing on the back make for a heavy phone, despite its smaller size. It is not as thin as the 6500 Classic, and is only a hair thinner than the 6500 Slide. The top is where you'll find the power key and MircoUSB slot for charging and data transfer.
With the phone is closed and the screen is inactive, the keypad "pulses" underneath the smoky glass covering. It is sort of like the way the power light on an Apple computer pulses when asleep. The pulsing takes place about once every 10 seconds or so (see video below). It only does this for about five minutes after each use, so as not to cut into battery life.
Opening and closing the Luna was similar to the 6500 Slide. The sprint-assisted sliding mechanism is very solid and well built. There was no side to side play or looseness to the sliding mechanism at all. It also produced a solid "thunk" when opening it or closing it. Unlike the 6500 Slide or 5300, the Luna is not two separate halves that slide apart. Rather, the phone simply elongates when the slide is opened.
One foible of the Luna is the way the function keys are laid out relative to the sliding mechanism. With the phone closed, there is an opening of sorts to let your thumb reach the function keys. There is a ridge outlining this opening, and the ridge is fairly high, especially at the top. Because the function keys are smaller and tightly spaced right next to this ridge, using them with the phone closed was difficult. We had to resort to using our thumbnails to reach most of the keys. Similarly, when opened, the top and bottom rows of keys are difficult to use (see video). The keys themselves all produced good feedback, though.
With the Luna, the camera is hidden under a sleeve on the back when closed, so the phone must be opened in order to use it. This protects the lens from scratches. The Luna has a 2 Megapixel camera, and also uses the standard Series 40 user interface. As with the 6500 Classic and Slide, the Luna is held horizontally for picture taking.
The screen on the Luna was very impressive. The brightness, sharpness and overall quality were high. The menus looked good, and images shot with the Luna showed a good degree of color accuracy.
The Luna may be fashionable, but its price is fashionably high, approximately $900 dollars. That's a lot of money for a quad-band GSM/EDGE phone with only a 2 Megapixel camera.
One footnote about the Luna's unique design: On both sides near the top, there's a long grille that looks like a speaker. Curiously, they don't seem to be speakers, but air vents. Because of the phone's unique design, an air cavity is created inside the phone each time you open it. If it weren't vented, air being forced through paper-thin gaps in the phone would make it difficult to open. When it's open, you can actually see straight through from one vent to the other:
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