The 6500 Slide is one half of a pair of slimline siblings released by Nokia, the other being the 6500 Classic. You'd be forgiven for thinking that bar the obvious difference being that – you've guessed it – one's a slider and the other is a more classic candybar type, the features and functions of both the handsets are would be more or less identical. Whilst they are indeed very similar, they are not sliding and non-slider versions of the other. The 6500 Slide is slightly more specced-up than its Classic counterpart, but is slightly more pricey and nowhere near as slim.

Both of the handsets deliver on the premise of being straight-up mid range mid priced handsets which are designed to appeal to the more luddite-leaning demographic of the mobile market who want their phone to make calls and send texts primarily, and aren't really bothered if their handset doesn't play music, shoot DVD quality footage or toast waffles.

That said, the 6500 Slide comes with a 3.2 Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics (the same technology used for the N95's camera), autofocus and flash – a fair few notches above the standard 2MPs usually designated for phones of this type – so capturing pics is a simple matter of pointing and shooting, no matter the lighting conditions of the location. The phone also comes with a two-way camera allowing for videocalls to be made.

The video recording feature comes with a 4 x zoom and can record footage in VGA, MPEG4 and QCIF formats – VGA recordings can recording at 15 frames per second & the QCIF can capture DVD-like footage at 30 frames per second. The TV out feature means that users can watch image slideshows and video footage taken on the 6500 Slide and enjoy TV conferencing and TV video calling. Bluetooth and USB connectivity comes included.

The music player application supports a range of the most common formats (MP3, MP4, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA) and boasts decent sound quality. The 6500 slide comes with 20MB of internal memory for storage. Admittedly this is not great but the slide also has a microSD card slot that is ugradeable up to 8GB. Downloading tracks on the 6500 slide is relatively painless and should you get bored of any of your selections, an FM radio has been included. However, all of these features come at a cost and that comes in the size and form of the 6500 Slide.

It has to be said, that whilst it is rather bulky and brick-like to look at, the polished metal finish and plastic slide-out keypad make the Slide strangely attractive. The menu keys and those on the numerical pad depress nicely and are not laid out in a way which is unergonomic.