More than five years ago Nokia released the amazing 5140. It was rugged, had a small flashlight and was built to handle the hard knocks. Even today people swear by it.
Leap forward to 2009 and the outdoor phone market is more than ready for an upgrade. Well there is a new player on the scene, but be prepared to be disappointed.
Samsung’s B2100 is both dust and shock resistant, contains a flashlight, has good noise cancellation, and is submersible up to 1 m for 30 minutes. So it ticks all the correct boxes for outdoor usage, but what else?
Well not much unfortunately, not even GPS. At least the old Nokia had a digital compass, a small spirit level, thermometer and a sound meter, and that was 5 years ago. The Samsung contains none of these nifty little features. In its defence it does have an excellent battery life, an MP3 player with good external speakers (although no 3.5mm jack for your own earphones), a microSD card expansion slot, and voice recorder. The 1.3 megapixel camera is nothing to write home about, and that doubles for the small, pixelated TFT screen.
If we were given a choice between the five year old Nokia 5140 and the new Samsung B2100, we might just stick with the Nokia. That said the B2100 does exactly what is was designed to do.
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