With a full QWERTY keyboard and messaging apps, the Nokia Surge is a great starter smartphone for teenagers or social networking addicts. It is incredibly pocketable, measuring 3.8 by 2.2 by 0.6 inches, but it isn't exactly eye-catching--the phone's dull, all-black body is almost completely plastic except for the metal trim around the keyboard. The Surge also has one very annoying design quirk: It has no separate numeric keypad, which means you can access the numbers only from the slide-out keyboard. This means that you must have the keyboard open every time you dial a number.
The Surge's strongest selling point is that its browser supports Flash Lite. On the Surge, viewing pages with heavy Flash content, such as CNN.com, Hulu, and YouTube, is no problem--unlike on the iPhone.
