Nokia 6205

The Nokia 6205, which comes in a Dark Knight edition emblazoned with a Batman logo and preloaded with Bat-related ring tones and wallpapers, is a decent midrange Verizon Wireless phone, but we think that both Bruce Wayne and his alter ego would pick a more exciting device. The black 6205 (there's also an otherwise identical plain old silver version sans the Batman tie-ins) is a skinny, rectangular flip phone (3.62 by 1.77 by 0.72 inches HWD, 3.3 ounces) with a mirrored 1.3 inch, 128 by 128 pixel front screen that's pretty much impossible to see in sunlight.

Flip the 6205 open to find a small but bright 2 inch, 176 by 220 pixel screen and a keypad of large but closely tiled buttons. On the sides of the phone are a conveniently placed microSD memory card slot, a micro USB charging port, a 2.5mm headset jack, and buttons to trigger voice dialing and change the volume. We had no problems with reception on the 6205, which is an average quality voice phone.

The earpiece is extremely loud, but it's almost useless at top volumes because of heavy distortion. At a normal volume voices sound okay, although there's a bit of a background hiss.

The speakerphone is oddly quiet, but it too distorts slightly at top volume, and it doesn't work with the flip closed.

Transmissions through the microphone were good at canceling background noise but sounded a bit weak on the other end. Voice dialing comes via the excellent Nuance VoiceSignal setup. The 6205 has a jack for 2.5mm wired headsets and also works with Bluetooth headsets, but we heard pops and clicks in our Motorola S9 Bluetooth headset. Stereo Bluetooth isn't supported. Ringtones are unusually loud, but also hideously tinny. Battery life was very good, with more than 5 hours of talk time.

The standard Verizon music player is on board, which plays MP3, AAC, and WMA files and syncs with Rhapsody when linked to your PC via a micro USB cable (not included). That the 6205 doesn't work with Nokia's PC Suite, which lets almost every other Nokia phone sync contacts and calendars with a PC. You can't use it as a modem, either, and forget about video playback. The phone's processor wasn't powerful enough to give us decent frame rates on any of our test videos.