Nokia 1600

The Nokia 1600 is a basic no-nonsense low-end phone offered by 7-11 on their Speakout Wireless service. There’s no camera, no MP3 player, and no expansion memory slot, but there’s plenty of features for those looking for just-a-phone. This is one area where the Nokia 1600 really shines. I compared it against the Siemens A56, which is a phone with an excellent reputation for good RF sensitivity. Most phones that I rate highly usually match the performance of the A56, or beat it ever so slightly.


The 1600 however, actually beat the A56 by enough to be quite noticeable.
I ran the tests in a couple of known weak spots for Rogers inside of Square One shopping mall in Mississauga. The first was in the lower level of Sears, which is a great place to test the performance of phones at 850 MHz. I was able to take the 1600 into places on the lower level of Sears and maintain reasonable call quality where the A56 broke up or even dropped the call.


Like tonal balance, the ability of the phone to reproduce the nuances of speech is quite good, but not quite stellar. Part of the problem is a detectable background hiss that seems to change somewhat with the overall sound. In other words, it isn’t just hiss, but a distortion in the sound that takes away from overall clarity. Still, it outranks quite a few more expensive phones on the market, and so given the low-end roll in life, it’s hard to find fault here.



Earpiece Volume: Sadly the earpiece volume is only adequate in many circumstances, and rather faint in others. Not only is the maximum volume of this phone mediocre, but the volume boost feature seems reluctant to kick in when you need it. At first I wasn’t even sure there was a volume boost feature, but I finally found conditions that would trigger it. I personally wish Nokia would just provide more overhead in their volume settings rather than relying on this method of compensating for loud conditions. It can get annoying when the phone constantly raises and lowers the volume.


While this is hardly one of the best Nokias I’ve ever tested, it has very little wrong with it and as a low-end starter phone its tough to beat. It has excellent RF characteristics, reasonable audio quality, a great speakerphone, and reasonably loud ringtones. It’s certainly one of the best phones presently sold by 7-11, and given its mission in life you would be hard pressed to find a better phone for the same money.