6600 - first thoughts

["White, Peter" <peter.white@xxxxxxx>]

Hi all

I promised a quick update after a couple of days of using it; here goes....

Firstly I should say that I've had Nokias for the last 12 years, so I'm
very
used to their UI, but NOT very used to the Symbian UI, so a lot of the
issues I've experience are mainly due to that.  If you buy Nokia because
you're used to how they work, the 6600 is a bit culture shock.

* The phone is well built, mercifully a lot better that the 7250 that I
briefly owned.  When it vibrates, it does exactly that, rather than rattle
and clatter around.  The 64k screen is very nice. Overall it's about the
right size (volumetrically about the same as my outgoing 6310i, but shorter
and fatter).  It ships with a 32MB card, which I think can go up to 128Mb.
I'm not sure if anyone has testing beyond that yet.
* The o/s takes about 15-20 seconds to boot from power up.  After that,
it's
reasonably quick, but not as quick as the traditional Nokia interface. 
It's
quick enough though.
* Camera quality (not that I really care) seems good.  If nothing else,
having thumbnails appear for callers is quite cool, though getting photo's
of the people in the first place is less easy! (bad hair day, wrong shirt
etc etc)
* Ring tones - thankfully, there are some regular ring-ring tones, but a
lot
of the other funkier tones are suitably subtle for use in the office. 
There
are of course lots of more indiscreet tones for those 'comedy' moments.
* The PC suite is a big change from previous incarnations, and I'm still
not
used to it.  The sync'ing with outlook works well enough for calendar and
contacts.
* I've also got the HS-3W Bluetooth headset, this works fine, although the
quality of the audio is not as good as a wired version (I think this
applies
to all BT headsets though)

I've not been able to test the MMS/GPRS web connectivity (it ships with
Opera) as it's not yet approved by the UK networks (Orange are due to
release on Monday).  As soon as it is then Vodafone & co will provide
the
settings, and I'll be able to try it out.  Contrary to most previous
phones,
MMS is over GPRS, not WAP, hence trying the settings of other phones
doesn't
work.

Overall I think I like this phone a lot.  On the first day I would have
given it 4/10, just because I had to get used to the UI.  Now I'm getting
better with it, it's probably a 9/10, and I've not even had a chance to
load
some other apps and have a play around with the more interesting features.
I did consider swapping it for a P900, but I don't really need a full-blown
PDA phone, so although it would be nice if the 6600 had a touch screen,
overall it achieves more or less the right balance.   I'll be getting the
CK-1W BT carkit installed next week hopefully.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.....

Pete


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