The 6600 is the latest in a line of Symbian Series 60 phones from Nokia, and in many ways it is the phone the 7650 should have been. If this had been the first Smartphone available, it would have caused much more of an impact. Instead Nokia have had to try and reverse the perception of their Smartphones as somewhat clunky, large devices with not enough memory and no expansion.
The 6600 fixes all those problems in one sweep, while still larger than the current wave of mini flip phones, it fits nicely in your hand or pocket, and looks pretty stylish as well. Given the large screen and standard phone keyboard, it’s hard to see how it could be any smaller, without making it fiddly to use. I like it. It feels solid and well made and looks very professional, in an understated way. I can see this being plonked down on desks in meeting rooms all over the country with out any embarrassment. Try that with a 3660!
The above picture gives an idea of how compact the 6600 is, the phone on the right is an Ericsson T68i, well known for being one of the smaller phone on the market.
Although using the latest version of Symbian series 60 O/S, it’s hard to spot any differences on the outside from the 3660 I reviewed earlier. It’s obviously different internally though, as several third party applications I tried didn’t work on the 6600, so if you want to add anything to your new phone, check before you install that the applications is compatible with the 6600. This shouldn’t be a problem for long, as the Symbian developer’s community reacts very quickly, and I am sure new versions are being prepared as I write this.
All the standard Symbian applications are here: - Calendar, To-do, Contacts, Notes, Camera, Video, Real one E-mail, Etc, (see my review of the 3660 for full details) and do a fine job. One new addition is Themes, which allows you to quickly customise you phones appearance. The most important extra, however, is the inclusion of Opera, a full function Web browser. This is far better than the hopeless Wap browser found on other Symbian phones, although this is still there, and brings the 6600 up to the same browsing ability as phones powered by Microsoft’s Smartphone O/S. There’s still no mp3 player as standard though, but there are plenty of third party ones available.
The camera function has been slightly enhanced by adding a 2x digital zoom, and the pictures do seem to be of a better quality than that from the 3660.
Nokia seem to be a bit cagey about what processor and speed it uses in the 6600 but whatever they use, it gives it a fair turn of speed, there was never any delay waiting for applications to start up. The phone has 6mb of RAM, which is an improvement on other Nokias, but still did cause problems when trying to load lots of extra programs onto the phone.
Once again, Nokia have hidden the memory card under the battery, meaning you need to power down, to change it which I find very annoying, especially as the phone only connects to a PC via Bluetooth or Ir and takes an age to copy large files such as video and music. Expansys have tested the 6600 with cards up to 512mb, so there is plenty of room for your favourite music. Be careful though as it doesn’t support SD cards, they are too thick to fit, they have to be MMC cards.
The latest version of Nokia’s PC Suite ships with the phone and makes synchronising with your desktop fairly painless, and this version supports desktop PIMs other than Outlook, so if you use Lotus Organiser or Notes, you can still sync your diary and contacts, one up for Nokia here, as to do this with Microsoft can cost a fortune.
I really like this phone, okay, it doesn’t have the wow factor of the Motorola Mpx200, but it just gets on with the job without any fuss. It looks good, fits easily in you pocket and has a huge range of third party software ready for it. This is the best Symbian phone I have used and it deserves to do well.