Review: Nokia 6680

Score:
81%

Author: Nokia

Before launching into too much description of the smartphone itself, I should perhaps give some idea of where I'm coming from. Whereas the average smartphone user will probably pick the device up on the High Street, usually with a monthly contract, and will probably never use all of the potential of this Symbian OS device, I'm coming at the 6680 from the perspective of someone who's been using Symbian-powered devices for many years, including the keyboard-equipped uber-communicators, the Nokia 9210 and 9500. In other words, rather than thinking of the 6680 as a super-phone, I'm expecting it to replace a traditional PDA/Communicator (and camera and music player). It doesn't quite achieve this but it did manage to impress me along the way.

In terms of previous Series 60 experience, despite my Communicator background, I've used the Sendo X and Nokia N-Gage extensively and have played at length with the Nokia 6600 and 7610. There's always a bit of anxiety when seeing a Nokia Series 60 smartphone for the first time, but the 6680 is huge relief in that there are no designer swirls, bulges or odd layouts. It's as big as it needs to be, with a metal chassis and ridged chrome inserts. The inserts on the sides both help it look pretty and aid grip, although like any chromed objects they quickly acquire greasy fingerprints.Still, the design is a classic, with the only real weakpoint being the sliding plastic cover over the rear camera. General build quality was pretty good, with backlit keypad, a responsive navigator key and clear and bright display.

Talking of cameras, you'll have noticed that there's one on the front of the 6680 as well. This is a bone fide '3G' phone and, SIM contract permitting, you'll be able to make genuine video calls. The front camera is VGA, which is all that's needed, while the rear one is 1.3 Megapixels and high enough in quality to use as your main digital camera. Sliding open the rear cover reveals this camera and launches the application of the same name. With practice, this can be done with one hand but it's usually easier with two. Within the Camera application, there's a new menu option, to switch to the 'other' camera. The rear camera has an LED flash, but don't expect much from this.

Working my way round the sides of the 6680, the top has a long, thin speaker aperture and a point for attaching a lanyard. The speaker is of surprisingly high quality and it's sometimes nice to leave music playing without having to use a stereo headset.

The left side of the smartphone sports a button for voice activated commands. The system works well enough, though I didn't like the way every command was played back before being actioned. Mind you, I'm not convinced by the practicality of voice-driven software in general, except in specific circumstances (e.g. while driving).

Like other recent Nokia smartphones, there's a full Pop-Port connector on the bottom, with both USB connection cable and stereo HDS-3 headset included in the box (well done). Plus the ubiquitous Nokia charging socket, of course.

Finally, up the right side are the power button and a chrome-plated hatch. Opening this with a fingernail activates a microswitch and triggers the OS to close all open applications, with a warning message shown on screen. Although I have my doubts that data could be corrupted (in a well written OS) by having a disk hot-swapped, I suppose it's better safe than sorry. The expansion card is Dual voltage RS-MMC, as seems to be the current Nokia trend, but cards aren't now too far behind the mainstream MMC and the only real nuisance is having to buy new media. Cards are popped out and then back in again in standard fashion; after the hassle of having to power devices down in the past, Nokia are finally starting to get this side of things right. The internal flash disk is a meagre 10MB, you would have thought that on a device of this class (especially with the multimedia focus) that Nokia would have stumped up a few extra dollars for some more memory (e.g. the Nokia 9500 has 80MB!)

The same applies to the internal RAM (i.e. the dynamic memory used for running programs). On my review unit, there was less than 8MB available after booting and I often found running programs got closed because of lack of RAM, with occasional 'Low memory' errors from the demanding applications. Again, a bit of a false economy from Nokia, in my opinion.

In terms of Operating System, the 6680 uses Symbian OS 8.0a and Series 60 v2.6. Like the 6630 before it, the 6680 supports 'Themes', skinning the entire user interface in just a couple of seconds, which is great fun and doesn't seem to slow anything down. Although on the face of it, Series 60 doesn't seem to have changed much over the last three years, it's a salutary experience going back and playing with an early model such as the Nokia 7650, the 2001 equivalent of the 6680. A good proportion of the things we're now taking for granted on modern smartphones simply aren't there on the earlier version. Nokia don't make a song and dance about the bits they've added, but they're very obvious to anyone playing with a unit for more than a few minutes (active Standby screen, wrap-around menus, 'Go to', 'Transfer' 'Connection manager' and now 'File manager' come to mind).

In addition, the 6680 comes with a reasonable software bundle, including 'HP Info Print' (for printing messages, contact details, notes, etc.), the view-only version of Quickoffice (shame it couldn't have been the full version, although it's easy enough to upgrade), the rather splendid port of Adobe Reader (complete with zoom levels and graphical content) and 'Wireless keyboard'. This last knows about the common Bluetooth keyboards available and worked flawlessly with my Think Outside unit. 10 out of 10 for ease of use here.

In addition to the serious software mentioned above, there's a wealth of other titles that have been gradually inserted into the Series 60 experience. This was the first time I'd seen 'Img print' (to any PictBridge-compliant printer), the cool but rather simplistic 'Image manager' and the more useful 'Photo Editor' (with frame effects, cropping, fixing and many other functions). Given the Megapixel camera, I can see Photo Editor getting quite a bit of use for creating serious photos. There's a tie up on the 6680 with Kodak Mobile, where you can save your photos to Kodak's online service and order prints to be delivered to your door.

There's video software too (apart from the ubiquitous RealPlayer), with 'Video editor' and 'Movie' providing basic clipping and soundtracks, although with captured footage only being at 176 by 144 pixels, this is all strictly for fun use. It was in this area that I encountered my first glitch, too, with the phone restarting when I switched the camera into 'Video' mode.

Now to a subject close to my heart. Mobile music. I've long railed against Nokia for excluding the possibility that people might want to experience true convergence and listen to their music on their smartphone, with most previous Nokia smartphones only having mono audio output. With the 6630 and now the 6680 (and siblings and successors), there's full stereo output via the Pop-port connector and quality over the supplied headset was very good. Nokia intend you to listen to your music in MP3 format using RealPlayer, but canny users will want to encode their favourite CDs in Ogg Vorbis format and use the freeware OggPlay instead. This has far superior tag sorting, is skinnable, is more efficient and produces louder output, quite apart from being able to cram twice as much music on your card, thanks to the superior Ogg Vorbis compression. Ok, so your Nokia smartphone many not be an iPod killer, but it comes damn close for many people, with it being quite practical to store a dozen or so hours of music on a single 512MB card, with room to spare for applications and games.

The standard Series 60 PIM suite aren't significantly changed, although there are detailed improvements here and there. The main omissions (no Notes support on Calendar or To-do items, only one To-do list, kludgy viewing of Notes on Contact entries) are still sadly true. As a replacement for a traditional PDA, the Series 60 smartphone still doesn't quite cut it, which is a great shame as there's so much functionality elsewhere in the platform.

Series 60 mobile telephony has certainly moved on apace since I and others wasted hours scrabbling around trying to get the right settings for Internet Access Points for each GPRS network. The 6680 already knows about the major networks across the world, you simply put your SIM card in and.. err... that's it. Access points created and useable. A 'Settings wizard' even claims to put in all the right POP3 or IMAP4 mailbox details as well, but there are only details for a dozen or so ISPs and mine (UK Online) wasn't listed. Still, this ease of use is certainly a major step forward.

General connectivity is almost perfect, with exemplary Bluetooth performance, adequate PC Suite 6.5 integration with your PC data, and support for every telephony standard across the world, from the various GSM bands to full 3G (a.k.a. '2100 MHz WCDMA'), although the usual caveats about being beholden to the mobile data policy of your 3G network provider apply here. The only omission is infrared, for which I still have a soft spot. Every time you come across someone with an older infrared-only PDA you'll wish the 6680 had the same.

Is the Nokia 6680 the best Series 60 smartphone yet created? Quite probably, despite the relative lack of RAM and flash memory, and apart from the PIM application limitations. I've been generally impressed by how much is packed into this unassuming few inches of chrome and silicon. If one can judge the desirability of a smartphone by the jealous shade of green that others assume when you say that you've one in for review, the 6680 is going to be in great demand from all quarters.

Steve Litchfield, June 2005.

Exterior links:
Full 6680 features and specs

3-Lib's 6680 tips

Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at 6:44 UTC, June 1st 2005