Nokia 6600 Fold Review

Clamshell phones are becoming harder to find day by day as companies have shifted focus to other designs. Nokia decided to reverse that trend and launched the Nokia 6600 fold clamshell phone recently. It has an OLED display, magnetic flip and mirror front panel to make it a classic beauty. Nokia 6600 bears the same name as the good old Nokia 6600 which was hugely popular, although I do not see any similarities between the two. Lets find out what this phone is worth for.

Nokia 6600 Fold specifications :

• Dimensions : 87.7 x 44 x 15.9 mm
• Weight : 110 g
• Display : 2.13″ OLED with 240 x 320 resolution
• Connectivity : GPRS, EDGE, 3G, HSCSD
• Bluetooth : Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP
• Camera : 2 MP with flash, VGA video call
• Card slot : microSD upto 8GB
• Radio : FM Radio with RDS
• Nokia Maps
• Approx. price : $399

The Nokia 6600 fold has gorgeous looks and also has one touch flip which makes it perfect for girls! The front flap has a mirror finish which is super shiny and extra smooth. A double tap on the hidden front screen shows the clock and missed events. Overall it has drop-dead looks which will turn a few heads when you take it out of your pocket.

Design and Display

The phone has rather small dimensions at has a thickness of under 16mm. The extra weight gives the phone a good grip in the hands. With the phone closed, is has a seamless design with color gradation. A display is hidden beneath this beauty and is revealed by a double tap.

Shockingly, Nokia has provided an uncovered microUSB port which will become a dust bowl after a few days of usage. The phone has a flip key which unfolds the flap with a single press. The unfolding is smooth and not jerky.

Inside, you can find a secondary video call camera above the display. There is also an ambient light sensor just adjacent to the video call camera. At the back, you find the 2 MP camera with dual LED flash. Fingerprints can be seen after a fair bit of usage though. The phone can be used single-handed very easily.

The design is one of the best you will find in a clamshell and enough has been already spoken about it.

The display is a 2.13″ OLED display with QVGA resolution. Supporting 16M colors, the display has great picture quality to say the least. Colors are displayed accurately with high contrast levels. The sunlight visibility is low and makes outdoor use of phone a bit difficult.The front display is also an OLED with 128 x 160 resolution and does it job perfectly.

Keypad and User Interface

The keypad is also an asset of the phone. It has a unique design which works very well for typing fast and accurately. The middle section of keys have been separated from the other two columns and have been submerged with the D-pad. The D-pad though has a small center making navigation difficult. The backlighting on the keypad is nice and even.

The user interface is the old Symbian S40 5th Edition with Feature Pack 1. The interface has Nokia Maps pre-installed, even though the phone does not have GPS inbuilt. The interface is pretty much the same with an active standby screen and intuitive menus and sub-menus. Overall the interface is good except for the lack of symbian applications which are a boon with S60 platform.

Music Player and Camera

The music player on the phone is nothing extraordinary but has almost all the features that you require. It plays major formats such as MP3, AAC, AAC+ and WMA. Songs can be sorted according to genre, artists, album or you can create playlists. A2DP profile is supported for streaming music to your bluetooth headset. There is an extra skin for the music player separately which comes in purple color, suiting the overall styling of the phone perfectly.

The remote has a 3.5mm jack for connecting your own earphones. Equalisers can be set for better music experience or you can also choose from the four preset ones. FM Radio with RDS will keep you accompanied when you get bored of the music player. The audio quality of the device is good if not great and has good dynamic range.

Camera has a 2 MP sensor with dual LED flash. There is no autofocus on the camera, making it good enough only for long shots. Dual flash is only slightly better than single LED flash and hardly helps improve low light pictures. There aren’t many setting to fiddle around with but just enough to keep you interested.

The image quality isn’t great but just about average compared to some of the better 2 MP camera phones we have seen around. There is no dedicated camera button also on the phone. Detail is missing in most of the pictures although colors turn out accurate. Aggressive noise reduction seems to spoil most of the photos.

Another irritating aspect of the camera is its slow speed. It takes ages to save the captured image on to the phone. Video recording is a bit better at VGA resolution but at only 15 fps. Overall the camera is just about average.

Web Browser and Organiser

The Nokia 6600 fold comes with two inbuilt browsers. One is the standard S40 browser and has only limited features and renders pages a bit slowly. To compensate for it, Nokia has Opera Mini preinstalled on the phone. Opera Mini is the preferred choice for Java phones due to its high functionality and fast page rendering. Opera Mini has its own server which compresses and optimises the pages before sending it to the browser.

The organiser on the phone as expected is top-notch. Calendar is the best application of the lot as in packs in loads of time management features. To-Do manager lets you sort your tasks in three categories which helps you complete the important ones quickly. Text notes application can save short notes upto 3000 words. Alarm, voice recording, stopwatch and calculator make up the rest of the organiser bundle.

Pros :

• Awesome design
• Good keypad
• Excellent display
• Good sound quality
• Good organiser

Cons :

• Poor camera
• No protection for microUSB port
• Fingerprint prone
• Symbian 40
• Bit expensive

Final Thoughts

The Nokia 6600 Fold impresses in the design and looks department. It beats other recent clamshell phones hands down. It has a decent feature set but the poor camera is disappointing. Presence of Symbian 40 OS is also surprising on a phone of its class. Overall an average buy if you are not too concerned about the camera performance.

My Rating : 3/5