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review: nokia 6600

snoop doggy daw-aw-awawa-awg snoop doggy daw-aw-awawa-awg yeah, that's right, me and snoop D-O-double-G hangin' with our new nokia 6600s. fashizze

over the holidays here in the US, nokia launched a huge ad campaign connected with their sponsorship of college football and the Sugar Bowl, culminating with a full length music video featuring Snoop Dogg himself at halftime working hard on a game of EA Sports NCAA Football for the N-Gage, and ending the serial ad saga that had gone on for too long in the weeks before. as if you had any doubts about S-N-double-O-P selling out to the masses before, this was almost laughable and the most flagrant of throwing some marketing dollars around i've seen in a long time.

simultaneous with this amazing throwing down of dollars, nokia was trying hard to bring one of the words recommended to die with 2003 into 2004 (god i hope "metrosexual" stays in that time capsule forever) with the website nokiaultimatebling.com, which incidentally was throwing me server errors during the halftime show when the prime ad dollars had just been spent, and now seems to be gone. someone caught hell for that!

all another way of saying, nokia is trying hard to keep their lead as the largest manufacturer of mobile phones in this doggy dogg world, and currently their flagship phone for the crossover enterprise bling-bling market is the nokia 6600, a tri-band GSM phone that utilizes the nokia developed user interface to Symbian, series 60 - and it's soon to be released successor for the US, the 6620 which will be EDGE capable and have some minor upgrades. (forum nokia list here)

no atkins diet for this guy

the phone itself more resembles dr. dre than mr. dogg. the 6600 is a fatty. a little shorter and stouter than it's predecessor, the 3650. the 6600 likes it's big mac with the bun, thank you. the rubberized sizebars feel good in your hands, though, and as a phone for talking, it feels about right. the screen is bright and vibrant, and seems to be equally visible indoors and outdoors. the speaker provides plenty of volume, and the reception in hard to reach areas seems above average. nokia's attennas (antennae?) always seem to be a little better than their competitors. or maybe their indicators always show 4 or 5 bars to make us think that. who knows, but it works. i'm sticking with my story that nokia phones have better antennas.

gin and juice

battery life on the 6600 seems to work about the same as most other nokia phones. the battery lasts a long time if you don't use the phone, but with heavy bluetooth and gprs use, one can run out the battery pretty fast. that said, it does pass the "can go a day" without charging it test, which is about what i'd expect for a phone and screen with this kind of processor. i would have liked to see nokia put a more powerful battery in the 6600, like sony ericsson did when they upgraded the P800 to the P900, especially since the 3650 is so heavily criticized for its short battery life.

this is for the Gz

if you're looking to have fun with the 6600, there's plenty of ways to do that, both legit and illegit. the built in camera can act as both a still camera and a video camera, although they are currently two different applications (they will become one application similar to that on the Sony Ericsson P900 in the North American 6620 version of this phone). The camera can be digitally zoomed to 2X pretty easily by pressing the joystick up or down, and you can switch between full size, portrait or night mode by pressing the joystick left or right. The video camera takes decent videos as far as these cameras go, but as far as i can tell you are limited to about 10 seconds of video, even if you have plenty of room on the memory card. This is in sharp contrast to the P900 that is only limited by storage memory size.

In general this camera is really good, but is limited to 640x480, state of the art outside of japan. i have heard from a few credible sources that a 1 megapixel version is coming soon, but no official word on that yet.

some sample pics (click to see full size):

and some sample videos (quicktime required):

cable car

takeoff 1

takeoff 2

as a game player, the 6600 does a pretty good job, and if you search hard enough, you can find cracks for how to run n-gage games on the 6600, as well as some semi cracked ROMs to run on the totally legal ROM emulators such as EMame or GoBoy. Both seem to run fine on the 6600, and work pretty well with the joystick and keypad, abeit not quite as well as they do on the N-Gage. I highly recommend centipede or zaxxon on EMame. they work just like they did in the 80s!

J2ME games are hit or miss on the 6600, depending on how much the developer had portability in mind when coding the games. although my legal copy of Jamdat Football worked great, my legal copy of Marcel Deisally Football, which was originally coded for the 3650, totally freaked out when dealing with graphics on the 6600. None of this is the fault of the game developers - they couldn't have been expected to make games 100% compatible with phones and phone platforms that didn't exist yet, but it is fair to know if you are upgrading from something like a 3650, don't expect all of your apps and games to just work, especially if they are J2me.

for more on how the 6600 handles J2ME - see my feature on first semester grades for J2ME MIDP 2.0 and some of the references to this piece.

and this is for the hustlas

the 6600 also provides a pretty good platform for the business user by providing address book and calendar sync with outlook on the PC, however as of this writing, syncing with a Mac requires a hack. apple has been pretty speedy about adding support for new phones as they come out, so i'll expect this soon.

the phone offers a great speakerphone, and bluetooth and wired connectivity for a headset.

email access is present, but i have never found nokia's email application to be terribly useful. accounts don't seem to work well in POP3 mode (no auto fetch) and i can't seem to find the setting to have their IMAP client bring down anything but the message headers. i like my email messages to download in the background and be there when i want to read them, not to have to fetch message bodies on demand - but then again, my main phone is a t-mobile plan with all-you-can-eat data, so if you are paying by the K, i can see why you would want to conserve. also, my SMTP server of choice requires authentication, which again the nokia client doesn't seem to support.

the messaging side of things is classic series 60, with this phone being able to accept MMS messages up to 100K. if you take a look at the UAProf for this phone you can see all the characteristics of what the phone accepts - i'll leave UAProfs for another lesson coming soon.

there also seems to be some problems with the bluetooth implementation of the handsfree profile on this phone. it doesn't seem to pass control from the phone to the headset in firmware version 3.42.1.

is this phone tha shiznit?

i like this phone a lot as a phone with some mobile office capabilities of scheduling and getting at your contact list, and especially the open platform for developers to create applications you as the end user can install on the phone. i wouldn't buy a phone anymore where you couldn't add your own applications via some manner.

the version i have is the first release for the indonesian/malaysian market, which has a few glitches methinks with the firmware version 3.42.1 - and nokia isn't very forthcoming about how to get the firmware upgraded on their phones....you pretty much have to know someone.

so if you are in north america, i wouldn't seek out the 6600 from grey market importers just yet, G. i would definitely wait for the 6600 to be released by T-Mobile US (only if it has updated firmware), or the 6620 version that will be offered by ATT Wireless and Cingular, who will probably be in the works of merging by then, you know what i'm sayin'?

ratings
phone: 8
texting: 8
mms: 8
email: 7
browser: 9 (opera)
pda features: 7
camera: 9
battery: 5
usability: 8
durability: 8
stability: 9
gameplay potential: 8
third party apps: 9
fashion: 8
out-of-box accessories: 5

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Posted by Steve at January 23, 2004 08:55 AM | TrackBack