Nokia's first mass-market 3G smartphone is good-looking, capable and no larger than its 2G siblings: Editor-in-Chief Jørgen Sundgot goes high-speed with the 6630.
Review summary of the Nokia 6630:
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Pros: Admirable ergonomics; quality connectivity; great camera
Cons: Potential RS-MMC issues; battery life expectedly so-so
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Full Nokia 6630 Review:
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Once a rare sight, smartphones have grown nearely ubiquitous thanks to Nokia - despite the maker not placing an emphasis on the brains of such devices. It's quite another matter with their latest smartphone to hit shelves, though, as the 3G-enabled Nokia 6630 finally enables proper use of some of the smarter functions such as blazingly quick e-mail and data downloads, video streaming, web browsing and more. In fact, it might just be the perfect combination of brain and brawn.
Is that a pear in your pocket?
With pear-shaped curves, the 6630 is most of all reminiscent of Nokia's second-ever smartphone, the 3650. Quite a different beast, however, the 6630 is a superbly solid device with excellent build quality and above-par ergonomics. In sleek grey and charcoal, the 6630 boasts a high-brigthness TFT display with the standard Series 60 resolution of 176 x 208 pixels which offers a suitably large amount of screen estate with all of its 65,536 colours coming across clear and crisp. As an added bonus, users can themselves adjust brightness to the preferred level, ranging from bleak to glaring.
Its keypad is as pleasing in use as its chassis is on the eyes: tactile feedback is excellent and all buttons are placed in a logical manner - quite a feat, considering Nokia's knack for quirky keypads. Apart from the required Series 60 keys, the left and right sides respectively harbour voice dialing and power/profile selection buttons, whilst the right side also holds a hinged plastic flip-protected RS-MMC expansion slot.
Moving onto the back of the device, we find the super-size lens for the 1.23 Megapixel camera of the phone, which performs with the clarity and aplomb we've come to expect from Nokia. The only situation in which the camera doesn't take comparably great pictures is under quite poor indoor lighting, and so it should come as no surprise that Nokia's continuing ommission of a photo flash continues to befuddle us. On the upside, video recording appears vastly improved, and the 6630 can now record up to one hour at a time - although the resolution remains 176 x 144 pixels, also known as QCIF.
With 10 MB of user available RAM and a bundled 64 MB RS-MMC card, there's a generous amount of space available to store photos - but the 6630 hides a dirty little secret: its RS-MMC slot only accepts 1.8 Volt cards, meaning users run the quite tangible risk of having previously purchased RS-MMC cards not be compatible with the 6630. In a word: D'oh! It's a good thing Nokia decided to mitigate this by making memory cards truly hot-swappable.
Connectivity charisma
The 6630 also has another issue: it's not as fast as recent Windows Mobile smartphones, nor even the Series 60-powered Sendo X. Still, it's sufficiently snappy, and includes a range of attractive hardware features, among which we find a sensible selection of Bluetooth profiles - including the HID profile to enable input accessories such as keyboards - and a Pop-Port connector which provides USB connectivity. Thankfully, Nokia has omitted support for Infrared, a choice we find quite acceptable given the recent proliferance of Bluetooth.
Connectivity support is all-encompassing with tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz, HSCSD, GPRS, EDGE and WCDMA 2100 MHz, and - as could be expected from Nokia - the 6630 shines in this department with excellent range and reception. Battery life takes something of a dent with extended EDGE abd 3G use, and at times the handset would take its sweet time to switch from WCDMA (3G) to GSM when out of coverage - but apart from these snags, 3G with the Nokia 6630 was an overall quite enjoyable experience.
One oddity remains, however: the 6630, although capable of performing video calls with aplomb, has no front-mounted lens. Thus, a 180-degree flip is required if one wants the other party to get a clear view of ones nostrils - but then again, nobody seems to care much for video calls. Straying towards the topic of battery life, the 6630 performed on par with other recent Series 60 smartphones, with its 900 mAh Lithium Ion battery delivering a standby time of approximately 5 days and talk time in excess of 3 hours.
Software-wise, the 6630 comes with an extensive set of pre-installed applications which primarly focus on personal information management and messaging. Sadly, Nokia has yet to address the problem of PC synchronization being appallingly slow; Notes information remains unsynchronized with Microsoft Outlook; and voice command and dialing 6630 remain speaker-dependent, which is quite incomprehensible.
Fortunately, several nice touches, such as the inclusion of Microsoft Excel and Word document viewers, at least partially remedy these blemishes. Other highlights include the ability to print Messaging, Contacts, Calendar and Notes information, as well as pictures from the Gallery, plus the inclusion of an application dubbed SettingWizard which configures connectivity options based upon detection of ones operator.
Availability
The Nokia 6630 is at the time of writing available in several European markets, selling for approximately $650 USD without subscription.
Price and availability
The Nokia 6630 will start selling for TBA () in November 1999.
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