Mobiles Review

Nokia 6600 is the successor of the popular Nokia 7650 and 3650 smartphones. The first one from these three phones, the 7650, appeared more than a year ago. Then it was one of the first phones, equipped with digital camera. But that wasn’t all interesting phone’s features. Nokia 7650 had almost all functions that were available at that time. Later Nokia introduced absolutely new smartphone 3650. Additionally it had such features as MMC card support and new version of WAP browser. Some disadvantages of 7650, for example, incompatibility with Bluetooth headsets, were also removed. But 3650 wasn’t the last Nokia’s smartphone. A few months ago absolutely new and long anticipated smartphone 6600 appeared. This was the first Nokia phone with 65 000 color display. So let’s see what other features there are in the 6600.

Design
Nokia 6600 is smaller, comparing with its predecessors. Its size is 109 x 58 x 24 mm and it weighs 122 grams. So smartphone is quite small. Excluding quite wide body, 6600 doesn’t have some untraditional design elements. Its design is solid, as it is common to all Nokia phones from 6000 series.

Display is absolutely different that in all previous Nokia phones. 6600 is the first Nokia phone with 65 000 colors TFT display. It has a size of 35 x 41 mm and resolution of 176 x 208 (such resolution is common to phones, based on Nokia Series 60 platform). All earlier Nokia phones were equipped with only 4096 color displays. Of course, we can’t say that these displays were bad, but today many new phones from other manufacturers are equipped with 65 000 color displays. So everybody was waiting for Nokia to introduce phone with such display too. This happened and now we hope that most new Nokia phones will have 65 000 color displays.

But not only display is different in 6600. Keyboard’s design is new too. Of course, it isn’t as radical as it was on previous Nokia smartphone 3650 (as you remember, its buttons were placed in a circle). In 6600 buttons for answering and rejecting call were moved to the edges of smartphone. On the left there are buttons for launching main menu and text-editing menu. On the right side there is a “C” button. Two soft-keys are placed above the group of buttons with numbers. Joystick also appeared and is located between the soft-keys. It reacts to moves in 4 directions and also to press. Unfortunately, joystick isn’t as comfortable as we have expected.

On the rear side phone has camera lens and cover for the battery. SIM card and memory card are traditionally placed under the battery.

User’s interface
Nokia 6600 is based on the second version of Nokia Series 60 platform. The first version was used in 7650 and 3650 smartphones. User’s interface didn’t change a lot, but it became even more comfortable. Now it can be compared with user’s interfaces in handsets with OS from Microsoft or Palm.

Pressing the menu button that is located under the button for answering call will open menu. Menu is organized in grid-view, but you can choose the list-view if you like. You can also create folders to organize the icons and arrange the icons as you want. Pressing the button with number will activate menu icon with the same number.

Two soft-keys almost always perform the same actions: right one opens the options list and the left one works for going back in one menu level. 6600 also has one quite interesting button, which opens the text-editing functions menu. But it works not in entire user’s interface, for example, it does nothing in stand-by mode. In stand by mode soft-keys can be assigned to almost any functions. By default left soft-key launches camera and the right soft-key opens Go-To list. This application contains shortcuts to any application you want. In stand-by mode buttons with numbers traditionally work for speed dial. To dial the assigned number you just need to press and hold the button down.

Each menu item in 6600 now has advanced help system, so you won’t need to read the manual if you’ll have some problems using your phone.

Camera
Resolution of photos traditionally is 640 x 480 pixels, but camera has some new features: 2x zoom, timer and night-mode. But unfortunately, we faced a quite serious problem. In the viewfinder mode horizontal lines appear when you move around searching for the shot. After taking a photo everything looks perfect, but those lines are really annoying in the viewfinder mode.

Now camera has ability to record videos with sound. The resolution of videos is 176 x 144 pixels. Videos are stored in 3GPP format. Unfortunately, we faced the same horizontal line problem in video viewfinder mode. But differently from still camera, where the quality of photos was quite high, quality of videos is terrible. And that’s not all disadvantages of video recording. The maximum length of video recording is only 10 seconds and there is no ability to record longer video clips. What’s the point of recording such a short video? To make it small and send via MMS? Why would you need this? Just to show your friend that your phone has ability to record videos? We don’t think that you’ll want to do this more than once or twice. So overall video recorder shouldn???t be used a lot: not many of users will be interested in storing collection of 10 seconds video clips.

Connectivity
Nokia 6600 offers great connectivity capabilities. It only lacks a Pop-Port interface, which is common to most other Nokia phones. But it offers such connectivity features as GPRS, HSCSD, Bluetooth and infrared port. As we have mentioned, phone has an email client and XHTML browser. SSL encryption is also supported. Nokia Wallet application is also here. It allows making mobile transactions and stores personal data in encrypted format.

Opera browser
This application is the best web browser that we have ever seen in mobile phones and it is really worth of its own paragraph in our review. This browser offers almost the same functionality as simple Opera browser (well, it isn’t such functional as Opera browser for PCs, but in our opinion it can be compared with, for example, Internet Explorer). 6600’s Opera browser perfectly opens not only WAP websites and websites, optimized for handhelds, but also simple WWW websites. But that’s not all. Opera browser supports Macromedia Flash! That’s true, you can see Flash in your mobile phone. Of course, it doesn’t look as good as in PC, but for a mobile phone it is really impressive.

Endings
Phone comes with 850 mAh Li-Ion battery. According to official characteristics, it allows up to 4 hours of talk or up to 240 hours in stand-by mode. Practically phone works about 2 days talking about 15 minutes each day. It wouldn’t be enough as for a simple mobile phone, but enough for smartphone. Of course, phone’s work time will decrease a lot if you use such functions as GRPS or Bluetooth.

Overall we really enjoyed Nokia 6600. Of course, it has some disadvantages, like uncomfortable joystick, poor keyboard backlight, only 1 minute of voice record and only 10 seconds of video recording. But it also has a lot of interesting and useful features and those disadvantages become not so important. Besides, 6600 is primary targeted at business users and they pay more attention to connectivity features, not to multimedia. And Nokia 6600 really offers great connectivity capabilities.

In our opinion, 6600’s future is very bright. Some owners of 3650 or especially 7650 smartphones should think about replacing their handset with 6600. This phone should also attract some new business users, because of three reasons: its high functionality, its good looking design and its brand name. That fact that this is Nokia should really boost sales of the 6600.