Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Two days ago, a well used and well liked Nokia 6680 changed owners and became a thing of mine. It already feels like as much of a friend as a mobile phone can (in a healthy relationship anyway. I want to take this moment to assure you that most of my friends have completely healthy relationships with their phones. Easily more than half of them.). My previous phone was an also well-liked Sony Ericsson K700i, which is set to multimedia-enrich another person's life in the near future. (That means I will be able to send the person strange MMS-messages whenever I feel like it.)
Since we all realise I already like this phone over my last one I'd like to write this in a slightly unusual order. So, what negatives have I come up with this far?
Last night there was a section here saying the phone chatted with base stations (causing noise in my headphones). It also took a long time to charge, and the battery was flat when I woke up this morning. Well, I think I've found the reason for all that. Taking a good hard look at the display, the text showing what network it's connected to seemed to be gone much of the time. Turned out it was. The 6680 is a 3G phone, and can be set to automatically switch between GSM and 3G networks. It was set to do this, but my SIM card and/or service plan doesn't support 3G. The phone was happy to ignore this and tried to switch to 3G very soon after finding the GSM network. Result: connection lost. Reconnect. Look, a 3G network! Let's connect to that. Repeat. Apparently takes a bit of battery, doing that all the time. And it was also rather hard to get in touch with me. Not so anymore, now I'm restricting it to GSM and everyone has calmed down.
Then there's the feeling that everything's further away than they were on my old phone. This no doubt has a lot to do with habits, after all I've only had two days so far. But it also has something to do with the fact that this phone is much more computer-like and can do more than my old one. The 6680 runs Symbian, has a proper web browser, apps that read Office files and so on. It's also multitasking, so I can have multiple applications running if I like. If I start making use of that I suspect I'll never be able to live without it. This means there are plenty of folders to navigate through and different applications to run. Plus you can apparently move things and folders around as you like. Which is all well, and something I look forward to getting into, but the downside is that I feel more lost at first. It's much the same feeling as sitting down in front of a Mac without Quicksilver and needing to get to something that's not in the dock. It just feels far away, like you have to do more work than you should need to get there. There's an "active stand-by" mode that puts (and lets you configure) five shortcuts plus the day's events and the number of to-dos on the start screen.
Which is sort of like having the dock.
The dictionary system for writing text also feels a little bit harder to learn. To balance, it's probably more convenient once you've learned it, and it's faster too. My main problem with it is that when you start writing a word and pause a little bit, you don't get to see the suggested words. You press * to browse suggestions for the current word length and can go through a menu to see all suggestions. On the K700 the suggestions popped up in a little menu when you paused, and included longer words if there were few enough hits. So there's the feeling of things being further away again.
Bonus nitpick: the K700 could add spaces and new lines in text if you moved right of or below the last word. On the 6680 you apparently have to insert it as a special character, and the bottom-right-most one in the list to boot.
Another nice thing the K700 had was the ability to pick menu options in most menus by pressing a number key. (I often wondered why it wasn't precisely all menus. Perhaps it would have made the world too good a place ...) The topmost option got 1 and so on. Very nice when you were doing things you'd done before, just hit the right number right away and be off. That doesn't seem to work here in Nokia-land, but maybe there's some other way to quick-browse menus. It's not like I've read the manual yet ... (Numbers do seem to work in the main menu, always something.)
Enough bickering about things I'll get used to in a few more days?
Okay, how about this:
Syncing with my iMac is so nice that I almost felt cheated. You know, when you get a new gadget you expect to spend some time setting it up. Playing with syncing options, cleaning up contact lists and so on. This time? When I added the 6680 as a device in iSync, iSync sent synchronisation software over to the phone, synced, and that was it. Contacts, complete with images where I'd added them.
Where's the challenge in that?
With my first Nokia I have also, finally, got the ability to make any sound my SMS/message signal. Sweet, sweet ... sweetness.
It also takes much better pictures than both my old phone and my Palm. I can see my Palm usage settling down to zero again, especially when you factor in that the Palm syncs so poorly.
I can now, finally, use either phone memory or space on the memory card to store sent and received messages. For some reason, I have to set a numerical limit for messages stored, but 999 should last me a while in any case.
Oh yes, and it accepts memory cards.
This all written in Write Room, which I think I'll come back to more often from now on.