A few weeks ago i posted my first impressions of the new Nokia 6630 and now that i've had a few weeks to use the phone my impressions have changed a little.
I have to say, the 6630 is sticking with me as a main sidearm - which is pretty much a continual game of king of the mountain.
First, the lack of memory is less of an issue than i had previously feared. My usage patterns have changed a little to running fewer applications concurrently, but for some reason i really am no longer getting out of memory dialogs as often. Perhaps this is just learned behavior before taking pictures.
Second, they have fixed enough things in the OS itself that certainly makes this an easier phone to use than even the immediate predecessor, the 6620. The handling of the hot swappable memory card is done very well, and the more i use the phone, the more of these subtle differences i see.
I still have a few caveats with this handset however, which to be fair are some reasonable trade-offs.
The processor on the phone is markedly faster than other Series 60 devices - this makes a lot of other things faster such bandwidth downloading, xHTML rendering, and Java applications. The cost is a very short battery life. Between the processor itself and my simply using more network aware applications that use the EDGE connection in the background, I am often getting only 12 hours of battery life.
if i close all running applications before pocketing the device, the battery life is similar to other Series 60 devices, but i'd argue that they need to provide a stronger battery to reap all the benefits of the 6630.
The second caveat is the camera. Although better than the 7610 and able to shoot at a higher resolutions at 1.3 Megapixels, I don't think the quality of the pictures even gets anywhere close to the Sony Ericsson S700/S710. Pictures are just a little grainier and the colors are not as sharp.
Perhaps an updated cameraphone shootout is in order?
This is still a shortcoming, but it doesn't render the phone "useless" as i might have indicated before.
