You Can't Beat A Nokia (Nokia 6630)

Member Name: reposter78

Product:	Nokia 6630
Date:	09/09/06 (519 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Smashing online capabilities

Disadvantages: Bit bulky

I brought my Nokia 6630 back in december 05 from The Link on Orange pay & go. It cost me £150 at the time, although I do believe it can be brought much cheaper now. I chose Orange because me being a total WAP head (back then), they offered unlimted browsing for £1 a day which no other network offers and plus its a great deal. So I pay £31 pounds a month for practically broadband instead of the £40 a week that I was paying with other networks.

At first I must admit that I wasn't all that impressed by the phone, that was until I bumped into some techno geeks online and started to learn what this phone was capable of. As a phone by itself there is nothing special about it but when it comes to the technical side of things like video editing, POP3 email, Applications, MP3 player and online ability it is simply amazing.

PACKAGING & CONTENTS

As I said before I brought this phone effectively from Orange and all their boxes are pretty much the same in design. They are black with the Orange logo on the front and also have the make and model of the phone you have just brought. On the side is written all the contents of the box. These are as follows.

The Nokia 6630 Smart Phone Itself
64MB Reduced Size Multi-Media Card (MMC)
Adapter for MMC
Nokia Stereo Headset
Nokia Battery
Nokia Travel Charger
Nokia Connectivity Cable (USB)
CD-ROM containing software and guides

DESIGN

The design of the phone is somewhat different to most phones as it has a rounded bottom. Many people tell me that they don't like the design but I find it quirky and very original. It sits nicely in the palm of my hand and the buttons are a decent size making usage easy. It has all the normal numbered keys, 2 soft keys, a menu button, navigational keypad, a clear text button, call and end call buttons plus my favourite which is a button with a pencil on. I had no idea what this was for in the begining but someone then told me it was for copy and paste which is another great feature this phone has.

SIZE & WEIGHT

The phone weighs 127g which is quite heavy for a mobile phone but I like that as it gives you a sense of quality when being held in the palm of your hand. The phone on the whole is big and bulky being 11cm long by 6cm wide and around 1.5cm thick. Again I like that fact cause with other smaller mobiles I have had, I have often wondered if it was still in my pocket, at least with this phone you know it's there. The screen takes up most of the front of this phone and measures 4.8cm long by 3.8cm wide.

DURABILITY

Nokia never disappoints when it comes to building strong and robust phones. They have done it again with this model even though it is a heavy phone. I have dropped mine on a few occasions and despite a few little scratches it still works well. Not sure how well it would handle falling from a great height though.

MEMORY

This is the only disappointment with this phone as the main drive (C:) only has 10mb which is simply not enough. However, it does come with a 64mb memory card which is nice amount of space but you are much better of buying a 1gb memory card (MMC).

I must stress that when downloading anything, applictions included, that you store them to the memory card. Having spoken to quite a few other Symbian users they have explained to me that it is possible to fill up the phones normal memory but only to find that the thing not only runs a lot slower but it can also eventually get to a point where if your phone turns off it will not be able to start up again.

BATTERY

The battery life of this model can normally last for max 2 or 3 days max, although saying that if you are a heavy user of the phone you will find it doesn't last very long. After having it since December I am finding that I am constantly having to keep on charge. I must admit that I didn't properly charge the battery up when I first brought the phone so I am sure it would last longer if I had.

NAVIGATION

As with most Nokia phones navigation is simple compared to other mobiles. The menu button, which is situated to the left bottom corner of the phone, will probably be the most used (I know it is for me). You can access everything here, although you can set up shortcuts to make your life easier. I personally have found no need to do this as it is simply laid out as it is. One of the other great features on this phone is the side bar menu which if you like is the quick access to the main features of the phone. I have listed the main menu from the top reading left to right below.

LOG: This leads you into 2 other sub menus. The first menu contains Recent Calls, this is where you can see your missed calls, received calls and dialled numbers. Call Duration lists your last call time, your dialled numbers call time, received call time and total call time. Packet Data is also where you can see the amount of sent and received GPRS data. The second menu is accessed by pressing left on the navigational keypad. This lists everything that you have sent or recieved.

CONTACTS: This is where you can store all your contacts, you can also make calls from here by clicking on the desired contact by pushing down on the navigational keypad. Another great thing about this phone is the amount of data you can store about a person, like their email address, home address and their username if it is someone you have met online. You can also edit labels on your contacts so you know exactly what number/network etc. you are phoning on that particular contact.

TOOLS: There are many tools on this phone but basically here you can set up your whole phone. This is actually a folder and contains the following tools. Settings, Profiles, Themes, Voicemail, Voice Command, Speed Dial, Application Manager, Active Keys, Transfer, Device Manager and About which tells you about the phone.

CAMERA: This takes you to the camera on the phone. I wont go much in to detail here as I will do later in the review but you can choose whether you want to take a still photo or video.

MESSAGING: Here you can access everything to do with messaging, again I wont go into to much detail as I want to talk about it seperately as it this is just another smashing feature on this phone.

WEB: Here you can access the internet and is where I spend most of my time. Unless you have brought the phone complete with network and set up already this can be complicated to actually set up unless the network is willing to send you the settings but I know from previous experience that they say they will and never do. I will also talk about this a bit later on.

MEDIA: Here you can access all your media tools that are already installed on the phone. They are Video Editor, Movie Maker, Image Manager, Voice Recorder and Real Player. These are also some of the many great feaures of this phone although some are a bit tricky to use.

GALLERY: This is standard on most phones these days and includes Images, Video Clips, Mp3 Tracks, Sound Clips and Links which is where you place links to download sites.

CALENDAR: Again this is pretty much standard on most mobiles. It allows you to set dates, appointments etc. along with an alarm to remind you of anything important.

ORANISER: This is a folder which consists of tools to help you organise your phone. These include the following, File Manager, Memory, To Do List, Calculater, Notes, Converter, Help, Wallet, Go To Options and Instant Messanger.

CONNECTIVITY: Another place that might be of interest as this area contains Bluetooth, Syncrinization and Connection Manager. All you need for helping you set up important stuff on the phone.

CLOCK: One of the things I love about this phone is the clock. Ok, so you can do the normal stuff like set up the time and date but not only that you can also enter cities in the world and it will give you the time and date there. Very handy if you are thinking about calling someone abroad but don't know the time there.

Having gone through the menu I will now talk about the previous features that I mentioned in order of the list.

CAMERA

This is by far the best feature of the phone. The 1.3 megapixel camera produces good quality photos which is suprising as they are not exactly print quality when it comes to printing. Still, although I have not printed any yet I have moved them on to my PC and the quality is still extremely good.

The camera also has a night mode for taking pictures in the dark and believe me it does make a major difference to the picture quality when taking pictures indoors or outside when it is dark.

Not only does the phone take still pictures it also records 3gp videos. These are also of good quality and unlike most mobile phones that only let you record something silly like 20 or 30 seconds of film this one, as long as you set it to the memory card, will record an hour. I've not done this and i'm not even sure the battery would hold out that long but that is a good amount of time if you are out and want to record something of importance.

MESSAGING

You maybe wondering why I wanted to talk about this seperately, well like most modern phones you can still send and receive multimedia/text messages which is great but this phone can also send and receive email. Most modern phones will send email but POP3 email means you can access your email without keep having to go to the email site you signed up with. You simply put the settings in, click on retrieve email and they will be sent direct to your phone. I must admit I did have some trouble setting it up but still, it is a great feature for any mobile phone.

Another thing this phone has is Instant Messanger, unfortunately I have not set this up or even tried but like the email you put in all the correct settings then as long as you stay connected to the internet you can receive instant messages fom your friends. I should imagine it works very similar to MSN and saying that I do know that they can privide you with their settings for you to use.

WEB/ONLINE USAGE

This is another great feature to this phone. As I have mentioned before, I spend a lot of time online and my old phone the Nokia 3100 was good but it was very limited to where I could go and what I could do online. The Nokia 6630's online capabilities are fantastic as not only can you access WAP pages but you can also access full WEB pages, although some sites may not work with the phones normal browser but that is soon fixed by downloading Opera.

Another great thing is the fact that if you have a picture or video you want to upload somewhere then you can with this phone as it uses drives similar to that of a PC. In fact I uploaded my picture on this site from my 6630.

OTHER FEATURES

This phone does have far to many features to go through each one in detail. However I have listed below the main key features of this phone below.

Bluetooth enabled
JAVA Games
Symbian Technology
RealPlayer Supported Formats: 3gp and .mp4 file formats, MPEG-4 video, H.263 video and AMR audio, RealMedia (Real Video and Real Audio), MP3 and AAC
Video Recorder: Resolution = 174 x 144 pixels or 128 x 96 pixels
3G video calling

NOKIA PC SUITE

This phone comes with a CD-ROM that allows you to get more out of your phone. It is simple to set up, you just put the CD-ROM in to your PC and let the wizard set it up for you.

This allows you to drag and drop pictures, MP3's and anything else you can think of really as long as you have installed the software on to your phone to let it read that type of file.

You may be quite suprise by this but as you know I used to use my phone to come on here and type reviews, I then brought a PC but had no internet connection, or did I? Well yes I did, I had my mobile phone which I am currently using as a modem while I type this review. It runs at 460.8kbps to which I understand is only around 100kbps slower than broadband and all this is brought to you by using the nokia PC suite to connect and my trusty Nokia 6630.

WHAT IS SYMBIAN?

As many of you may have guessed the Nokia 6630 is not only 3G and smart it is also a Symbian as opposed to Java. I have included this section to help you understand what Symbian is.

Symbian is a company formed in the late 90s by Psion, Nokia, Esricsson and Motorola to develop an operating system to allow compatibility between different handset manufacturers. It has produced the Symbian OS6, 7, 8 & 9 platforms which have been included in 75 million Smartphones sold worldwide to date. This has proved good ground for a wealth of quality 3rd party applications, good flexibility (especially with multimedia) and smart user interface. All of which are an achievement in themselves.

Although Windows Mobile is very popular in the USA probably due to Microsofts hold on the American market. Symbian has reacted by developing an application for Windows Mobile which allows the porting of most Symbian applications to the Windows Mobile platform. My personal opinion is that Symbian kicks arse and its only a matter of time before the large and slow American market comes round to the acceptability of the Symbian operating system.

MY OVERALL VIEW

I must admit I still don't know my whole phone and I do find the video editor very tricky to use but 1.3 mega pixel camera produces quality pictures and amount of video time available is excellent.

I have downloaded well over 2gb in mp3's which are stored on memory cards and they go everywhere with me. The loud speaker is not the best for sound quality but who really wants to hear my sad tracks, anyway? The headphones that came with the phone produce a better quality of sound.

With my phone I've managed to build a wapsite and can view most of the larger web pages around plus it can be used as a modem for you PC

However you don't really need a PC if you have this phone as it is more than capable of doing everything a PC does.

This phone is definately one of my best purchases to date and I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to have a gadget that does almost everything and anything.

Summary: A great all round phone with extra bits added

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