It's a little bit unusual for two very different format factor phones to be marketed under the same series number, but Nokia has never been a company to stick too firmly to the rules. The new 6500 Classic and 6500 Slide featuring a cornucopia of tasty goodies such as WDCMA dual band 3G for speedy downloads and surfing and quad band GSM so that you can use the phone pretty well anywhere i the world.

The Nokia 6500 classic is a stunning little phone that measures a mere 9.5mm thin. The looks are stylish, and this is down to the anodized aluminum, the phone looks unique and fashionable in any fashion sense. The real special thing about the Nokia 6500 classic has to be that each phone is polished individually and this will mean no 2 mobiles will look the same.

If you thought Nokia and thin simply cannot go together, then it's about time you reconsidered. Nokia 6500 classic is as thin as 9.5mm, which just makes it the slimmest Nokia to date. There are very few handsets from the competition, that can beat it, as well. Well, the sole existence of Samsung U100 is enough to compel humility in any slim handset, but that's another story. Anyway, Nokia 6500 classic is truly adorable for its stunning design and slim body.

Nokia 6500 classic comes in two color versions - black and bronze - and both do the handset justice in our opinion. Both color versions look much better than Nokia 6300 but, as you know, there is nothing more subjective than taste, so everyone should judge for themselves. In any case, the almost completely smooth sides of the handset benefit the design tremendously. There are no controls, and even splits between panels are hardly noticeable. In terms of dimensions, besides the already mentioned inspiring 9.5 mm thickness, the Nokia 6500 measures 109.8 mm in height and 45 mm in width - both falling within the golden mean.

Nokia 6500 slide features the same 2.2'' TFT display as its twin brother, Nokia 6500 classic. The screen supports 16 Million colors and a standard resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. Even if it didn't scored too much on different benchmarks, the screen is simply breathtaking

The 6500 Classic comes with a 2 megapixel camera feature which is situated on the reverse of the handset & allows the user to capture either still photos or active video footage on their phone. The camera comes with a flash which allows the use to capture images in darker & duller environments. The camera comes with camera modes & settings to ensure the user captures the image the way they want to capture it. The photos & video footage can be either stored on the phones memory for a viewing later or sent to other devices using the phones connectivity options or simply sent to other via the messaging services or connectivity options. The user will enjoy having all the fun imaging features on their stylish Nokia 6500 classic.

The battery life is less than average, which isn't surprising for an ultraslim 3G handset. It'll probably need charging every other day.

Standard battery, Li-Ion 830 mAh (BL-6P)
Stand-by Up to 300 h
Talk time Up to 5 h 30 min

The music player is almost identical to the one used in the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic phone and the Nokia 7500 Prism. It is a great player originally reserved for music-oriented Nokia phones and is obviously becoming the standard player for all recent Series 40 devices. Besides managing all the typical functions of a music player, it also sorts songs by artist, album and genre. The player works with MP3, MIDI, AAC, AAC+, and WMA formats. The supported A2DP profile allows listening on Bluetooth wireless earphones. The player is highly customizable through a number of themes that are at your disposal. These were all quite eye pleasing.

Unfortunately there is no FM radio on Nokia 6500 classic, so if you get bored with the music player all you can do is turn the video on. The video player is compatible with 3GP and MP4 formats. Videos can be played in fullscreen mode, as well as fast-forwarded or rewound. The possibility to remove the soft key captions to make better use of the full screen view mode is nice and improves video watching experience greatly.

One of the unusual features of the 6500 Classic is that it has a fixed memory of 1 Gbyte, of which around 920 Mbytes is available to the user. Now this has its good points and bad points. The bad point is that there's no slot for increasing the memory beyond 1 Gbyte. But on the other hand, 920 Mbytes is enough to store 200-300 songs, which is certainly enough for most users, and it means that the memory is all easily accessible in one place, without any hassle of copying data from internal memory to memory card. Given the kind of phone that the 6500 Classic is (i.e. mid-range) we think that this is a perfectly good solution.

Featuring dual band 3G technology for fast and easy downloads and browsing and quad-band GSM for worldwide roaming, the Nokia 6500 classic delivers state-of-the-art connectivity options for the most demanding of customers.

Very sleek and slim
1 GB of internal memory
Great 16M color QVGA display
Snappy user interface
3G network support
Rich preloaded content
Bluetooth with A2DP support