Review: Nokia Surge
The Surge is fairly adept at messaging, though S60 is definitely beginning to show its age. Email, SMS, MMS, audio messages, IM are all present and accounted for. If you need to send someone a message, the Surge is one device that can get it done.
First, email. The Surge's set-up wizard will walk you through the process to set up a new email account. has a dedicated email key on the front. This includes push email from your company (via Exchange), or IMAP or POP3 email from other types of accounts. You can also set up the dock in Active Standby mode to jump directly into your inbox, or initiate a new email. You can email to bulk addresses, add attachments, and address messages to your contacts directly from the mail application. The email application itself, however, is ancient and pales in comparison to what's offered by Apple, Google, RIM and Palm. On top of that, here is another blown opportunity for Nokia to recruit users for its Ovi Mail service. Ovi is nowhere to be found on the Surge. Instead, it's all about AT&T and AT&T's services.
SMS and MMS are similar to email, though stripped down to 160 character limits. One thing we wish Nokia would get on board with is threaded SMS conversations. The iPhone does it. Android devices do it. Most Palm devices — including the Pre — do it. Threaded messaging has been around for years, and is an absolute must for a messaging device. Quite a shame that Nokia hasn't been able to work this issue out. Nokia's beta labs offers a test version of a threaded SMS application that is free to download, but it is not a built-in app for S60. In fact, rather than part of the messaging applications, Nokia's "Conversations" is an add-on to the Contacts application. It does give users a threaded SMS option, but not a very good one.
New messages will show up on the Surge's screen in a little bubble along the bottom. Scrolling over that bubble will open a dialog box and you can scan the contents of whatever messages are in your inbox without having to fully open your inbox. This is useful if you're in a hurry and want to determine if the message is important enough to open all the way.
Looking for social networking apps? Better look online. Native apps aren't on board, at least not out of the box. For messaging phones, at least some sort of access to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc., needs to be present. The Surge fails in this respect.
A Facebook app is available for the N97, but you'll have to go through the browser to get to Facebook on the Surge. The Surge will run Gravity (for Twitter), but again, it needs to be downloaded by users.
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Nokia Surge 6790
