Reg Review For a number of years now, I've carried my personal information - contact details, diary appointments and the like - around on a Palm. And for a similar period of time I've carried a sub-set of that information on my mobile phone. That's always struck me as daft. Surely I should to be able to carry one set of data, on a single device?

Such devices do exist. But wireless PDAs, while proving a good screen size have, to a device, failed to match mobiles for telephony easy of use. To date, regular mobiles have generally provided insufficient memory and too small a screen to display anything but a name and a single phone number.

Smartphones have seemed the obvious solution, providing a suitable display for laying out detailed contact information, appointments and so on. However, much as I've liked, say, the Sony Ericsson's P900 hardware, its unattractive user interface has always put me off. More to the point, having been, by inertia as much as anything, a consistent Nokia customer, I'm used to the way the Finnish company's handsets work. It would take something really special to make me shift.

PalmOne representatives will at this point start waving their Treo 600s in the air, and indeed it's a good choice. But this a Nokia 6600 review, not a Handspring article, so I have to consider that machine in the light of my requirements.

The quality of Nokia's Series 60 UI was first revealed to me when I spent some time with the N-Gage (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/71/34371.html). While that game console-cum-handset is hopeless as a mobile phone, its reasonably sized colour 176 x 208 screen proved almost perfect for displaying personal information quickly and clearly. Even if it was a bit small for games.

With the 6600, Nokia has essentially built a more traditionally shaped handset around the same screen, underlying operating system - Symbian - and Series 60 UI. The upshot is a handset that's stubbier than the likes of the 6310i, being shorter but thicker and wider than Nokia's older business-oriented phone. The 6600 is chunky but not uncomfortable, whether it's sitting in your pocket or in you hand, held up against your ear.

It's the screen size that dictates the 6600's width, but comfort that governs its height. Alas, that means the taller screen limits the size of the keypad. While Nokia has been able to utilise the 6600's width to pull the make and break call keys out to the side, it's put in a five-way navigation joystick in their place, forcing it to squeeze the size of the numeric keypad.

Here the 6600 user runs into difficulty. As a one-thumb 'typist' I found the handset difficult to use, particularly for texting. The industrial design doesn't help, pushing the keys right up against each other, making impossible to feel your way around the keypad as you do when there's space around each key. The joystick, by contrast, is very easy to use with your thumb, and is a big improvement over cursor keys. While you're making a call, it doubles up as the volume control.

As I said, the screen displays contact and diary information perfectly. It's large enough, for example, to fit an at-a-glance monthly, weekly and daily calendar that views that don't leave you guessing as to what's being shown. A contact's numbers and names (usually) fit each on a single line, allowing you to scroll down to the number or email address you want using the joystick.

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The menu items used in older Nokia handsets have been replicated here as Symbian applets, and while some of them are tucked away in folders, making them less readily accessible than they were on the 6310i, for example, Series 60 does at least allow you to move them onto the main menu screen.

Nokia has loaded the 6600 with a good array of apps too, including the Opera web browser. Opera valiantly struggles with the 6600's screen size, and is usable at a pinch, but serious mobile surfers should seek out a device with a bigger screen. Frankly, though, will that many folk want to surf the web on the move?

Nokia also offers its own Gallery photo album, Real's RealOne media player - which, bizarrely, doesn't support MP3, even though the Palm version does - and even a pair of printing tools, one for transferring images, contact details and so on to a local, Bluetooth connected printer, and the other for sending photos to Kodak.

The latter works with the handset's VGA digicam, which seems superfluous on a business-oriented handset, even with its 2x digital zoom. If you need to record tiny snapshots or short, postage stamp-size video clips, there are better handsets out there.

The digicam is supported by a pair of apps, one for still photography, the other for video. Nokia has also chucked in an app that delivers Financial Times headlines and news to the phone - you see what kind of audience Nokia is hoping to attract - a couple of games and nine demos to try before you buy. Or in my case, delete. Alas you can't, but at least you can hide their folder away at the bottom of the menu.

Business users are more likely to use the 6600's email facility, incorporated into Nokia's Messaging app, which also handles multimedia and text messaging. Here both the Sony Ericsson's P900's pen input and the PalmOne Treo 600's microkeyboard win out over the 9900's SMS-oriented keypad, which ensures the 6600 remains a device for reading messages rather than writing them. Writing an email using a numeric pad is hard enough, but it's doubly so here thanks to the way Nokia has designed the 6600's keypad, as I mentioned above.

Worse, its email app is quirky in a way that, as a hardcore email user, irritated me. When I delete a message, I expect it to vanish from my Inbox. If it ends up in a Trash folder, fine, but that's not how Nokia's Messaging app does it. It leaves the message where it was, signifying its status as a deleted message with a tiny icon. Even telling it to purge the offending epistle from the server fails to shift it there and then.

Folks behind a server-level junk mail and anti-virus filter may not find this trait to annoying, but having to scroll through hundreds of penis enlargement ads to get to messages that matter is annoying, doubly so if ones you've deleted won't go away.

By contrast, the phone's Bluetooth support is a joy to use. I used it to synchronise the 6600 with Mac OS X's Address Book and iCal apps, via iSync, though Nokia supplies software to link the handset to a range of Windows-based PIM apps. Using it as a mobile modem also caused us no problems, particularly after consulting Ross Barkman's excellent GPRS-on-a-Mac web site (http://www.taniwha.org.uk/).

I liked the 6600's speakerphone, too, which was loud enough for me to record telephone interviews on a separate cassette recorder without distortion. And as a tri-band handset, I was able to use it while travelling.

So, is the 6600 good enough to replace my PalmOne Tungsten T and Nokia 6310i? Almost. I certainly enjoyed using the 6600 as a phone and as a PIM-oriented PDA, and if mobile email isn't a requirement, the handset has much to recommend it.

But its ability to perform both these rolls falls down in two important respects. First, it's very slow. Once an app is running, switching to it is reasonably smooth (ish), but launching it for the first time is painful, particularly if you've got someone standing next to you waiting to know whether you're free for a meeting next week. It certainly felt less responsive than the N-Gage, for instance. The 6600 takes over 30 seconds to startup, compare to 12 seconds with the 6310i - and that includes the time it takes to enter the SIM's PIN number!

Now, you can eliminate that problem, to an extent, by leaving apps running - primarily by not turning the handset off, or pressing each app's Exit key. But the latter is easy to do by accident, and the former is almost essential if you want to avoid charging the phone up every day.

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Yes, the 6600's second major flaw is its poor battery life. The colour screen's backlight gobbles up power, as does Bluetooth and the handset's processor. The backlight quickly fades to save power, but sometimes does so too quickly, usually, forcing you to keep pressing buttons in order to see whether all your email has downloaded yet, for example. Nokia should make the fade time user-definable.

With everything turned off, and keeping my calls brief, we managed to get two working days' worth of charge out the battery. By contrast, my old Nokia 6310i goes seems to go on forever and the screen is clear even when the backlight's off. The P900 ran for a lot longer, I found.

I've seen better results quoted for the 6600's 850mAh power supply, and it has to be said that the review model I tried had at least one previous user who may not have performed the obligatory 16-hour first charge. Even taking that into account, the handset doesn't strike us as a long runner. Nokia quotes two to four hours' talk time and 150-250 hours on standby.

The 6600 ships with a reasonable 6MB of on-board memory, backed by a memory card slot containing a 32MB card - an old-style MMC job, you'll note, not an SD. Fortunately, the 6MB proved sufficient for our hefty contacts book, which was just as well since 19MB of the memory card were used up already. Much of that is held in a hidden System directory, which holds many of the phone's apps - the very ones you can't delete. Popping the card into my Palm allowed me to remove them, freeing up memory card space and ridding the 6600 of all those unwanted demo apps.

Verdict

The Nokia 6600 is one of the best attempts I've seen to bring together the ease of use of a mobile phone with the display and memory requirements of a PDA. It's comfortable to use as a handset, yet provides enough screen real estate to operate as a mobile personal data carrier. The screen itself looks great, and once again shows how good Nokia's Series 60 UI is.

For some, all that might be recommendation enough. For others, the design of the keypad along with that type of input device's inherent unsuitability for email work will count against it. For us, the relatively poor battery life was the barrier. If Nokia can crack that and the speed issue - though, as I said, the two are intimately related - it will have a winner on its hands. It needs to redesign the keypad too.

Nokia 6600
Rating	75%
Pros	— Big enough screen for email, PIM applications — Comfortable to use as a phone — Five-way joystick navigator
Cons	— Weak battery — It's slow — Keypad fiddly to use
More info	The Nokia 6600 web site (http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,8764,33210,00.html)

Related Reviews

Nokia N-Gage (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/71/34371.html)
Sony Ericsson P900 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/71/34308.html)
PalmOne Treo 600 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/71/33746.html)

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