The SMARTPHONE of the future; packed with more features than you can shake a stick at!! (Nokia 6600)

Member Name: c013310

Product:	Nokia 6600
Date:	08/07/05 (786 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Packed with exciting features including bluetooth/infrared, camera & video, email & games!

Disadvantages: Bit on the bulky side and no in built Mp3 player

Having had a nokia 3310 for nearly two years i decided that i needed a change of scenery from the dull, black & white phone that had i been using for to long. I wanted a camera phone which would enable me to access some of today's hottest features in phones including infrared and bluetooth technology. The choice was between this phone the nokia 6600 or the nokia 7600. Having compared specs on each i came to the easy conclusion that this phone would be right for me. Want to know why, well read on...

First the price. The price of this phone has come done considerably since i brought mine. I think the price was in the £300-£400 bracket so i decided to buy mine from Ebay new. I got it for a brilliant £170! That was defintely value for money but a year on from when i got it, the price has come down to about £170 anyway so theres no worry there!

Now thats out of the way i'll try to explain some of the best features the phone has to offer in as much detail as i can.

Firstly, the phone is a bit bulky compared to other similar phones like the nokia 6230 and 7610. However, it is still a decent size to fit in your pocket and carry around comfortably. The weight of the phone is 125g and the dimensions are 108.6 x 58.2 x 23.7mm .The screen is the biggest thing to talk about on the face of the phone. The screen has 65,536 colors, and is 176 x 208 pixels. The screen takes up nearly two thirds of the face of the phone which enables games, pictures and video to be seen very easily. The phone obviously has a colour screen and has very good contrast.
The black joystick situated under the screen is used to navigate the menus of the phone. I could see this getting worn out very easily but it is very sterdy and is still functioning well a year on. The buttons under this are kind of squashed as close together as they could be due to the size of the screen. They took a while to get used to them in texting but once you've used them a few times like every phone, you'll get used to them.

Turning the phone over you'll see the camera which i'll talk about later. At this moment i'll explain whats in view when you take the back of phone off to reveal the battery and memory card. The battery is first and is a 3.7v BL-5C battery if anyones interested. Once you take this out you come to the memory card. The phone has only 6 mb of internal storage so this phone comes with a 32 mb memory card. This is also quite small but can be upgraded quite easily at any phone shop. Then there is a slot for your sim card to slot in. So theres the outside of the phone, lets look at the features waiting for you when you turn it on!

When you turn the phone your greeted with the trademark nokia sign of the two hands coming together. Then if you choose you can have a picture appear before you come to the center of the phone. On this homepage, you can set a picture as your wallpaper, it has the clock time,date and shortcuts of your choice. Lets first start with my first shortcut, the delightful camera.

The camera resolution is 640 x 480 pixels which gives extremely clear pictures when taken. There are three modes which you can take photos in. These are standard mode, portrait mode and night mode which is extremely handy in the dark. These modes a are pretty self explanatory. You point your phone at the desired area, press the joystick in and there you have your picture. As it is revelant, i'll talk about the video recorder. This video recorder can record quite good video quality but can only record roughly 10 seconds of footage no matter how much space you have on your phone. This can be a pain but i downloaded a video recorder which allows you to record limitless amount of footage. I'll talk about this later as well.

The other shortcut i have is to the gallery. This is where all your images, graphics, sound clips and video clips are stored. You can make sub folders as you wish to organise the data and everything is easy to find. You can also choose whether to transfer some of the data to the memory card to relieve the pressure of the internal storage capacity.

Next is messaging. The options you have are to write a new message(text,multimedia or email),inbox,my folders,email,drafts,sent,outbox and reports. As you can see there's lots of features here to mess around with but also take advantage of. Text messages can be sent normally like any average phone and you can send multimedia messages containing images or video. Just make sure the person your sending it to has a phone capable of playing or showing the data.

You can store hundreds of contacts, arrange them how you like and set specfic ringtones for specific people. That way you know whos phoning you before you answer the phone or even look at it. Theres the ever handy calender for keeping dates and there is also a real player function. Real player is often a well used program on computers for playing media files like songs and video clips. It performs the same functions but on the phone instead. Very handy to have such a well known program already installed on the phone.

Then there is the profile and themes menus. The profiles allow you to set ringontes, volume and other settings. The themes menu allow you to change the style of background on your phone. Mine came with three pre installed themes but you can also download more from the internet.

Now the two special features which i use a lot. Firstly, bluetooth is the perfect way to send anything free if the person you want to send it to is about 10 metres or closer. You pair up with the other phone using a password chosen and then can choose the file to send via bluetooth, choose the phone paired and then it sends. This is a very quick, and cost free method of sending music and video files round your mates house.
The other one is infrared. This is similar to bluetooth in the fact that it dosen't cost anything however, you have to line up both infrared ports on both phones and keep them there while the message or file is sending. Still a quick method when your in clos proxmity with someone.

The extras folder contains notes, calculator, converter, voice recorder, clock, memory card details, and a wallet.

The notes can be used to store reminders of important dates or things you need to do soon. The voice recorder is self explantory and is good quality. The best thing here though is the wallet. this is a special feature which allows you to choose a special password to allow you access to the place where you can store all kinds of private information like credit card details and other info. This can be very handy if your phone is stolen as the thief won't be able to find anything useful unless they know the password!

The games folder only had two games when i brought my phone. They were snake ex and mix pix . These are ok games but not enough so i ended up downloading more. I'll tell you how i done this in a moment. There was also a try and buy folder on my phone which i think was on the memory card. This contains many different helpful programs and games which you can use three times until you have to pay for them or delete them from your phone. This folder did contain some great stuff like lemonade tycoon, world mate and photographer.

Finally, i'll discuss how i connect my phone to the computer. The phone comes with nokia pc suite software which is a program which allows you to transfer any kind of data from your phone to the computer or vice versa. However, you cannont connect your phone to the computer via USB which was slightly irritating so i brought a USB bluetooth dongle. this is a small dongle which plugs into my computers usb port. This connects with my phones bluetooth and allowed me to pair my phone with my pc. Once this was done, i used the software to transfer games and songs i had downloaded from my pc to the phone. I can also transer pics and videos onto my computer from the phone so i can get them processed online.

The phone does not have Mp3 playback but you can download an excellent program called UltraMp3 which allows the Nokia 6600 to play Mp3 files. Now i can listen to mp3's on my phone which are very good quality. Like i said i also downloaded many games and a new video recorder so i could record for limitless time. This made the phone nearly perfect.

Conclusion
The menus are easy to navigate, the features are endless and the screen is massive. All this and more can be found with the Nokia 6600 so if you need a realtively cheap phone with all the features needed in todays competitive society than this is the phone for you. It will not dissapoint!!

Thanks for reading this long review!

Summary: Brilliant, modern and useful phone. So many features to mention & not enough space!!

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