Best Nokia Phone Ever - Nokia 6630

Nokia 6630 review: Time to return to the fold

Ever since I got my Motorola A925 in the Spring, I've secretly been longing to go back to a Nokia. And when the 6630 was announced almost six months ago, I knew that was the phone that would take me back to Finnish mobile engineering. The specification read 3G, 1.3 megapixel camera, 1 hour video records, more RAM, smaller size, and lots of other goodies.

Recently, though, my longing for Nokia had grown into despise of my A925. Russel was spot on with Smart Phones Are One Handed Devices. What I wanted was a smartphone, what I had was not:

If you can't use the phone with one hand, it's not a smart phone. Got it? It's pretty simple. It's a PDA Phone or a Communicator or something. Whatever it is, it's not a smart phone. It's a relic. An elecronic organizer with an antenna. An anachronism. A soon-to-be market failure. Get the idea?

Let's go over this again: If it doesn't have a keypad? It's not a smart phone. If you have to use a pen? It's not a smart phone...

The Motorola A925 is not a smartphone. It's successor, the A1000 that I tested for the Christmas issue of the Danish 3 Magazine is not a smart phone either. I had to learn that fact over a couple of months. When you have to stand still and use two hands to SMS or when you need either really baggy pants or a bag to carry your phone around, something is just not right.

So that's why I'm incredibly pleased to report that I'm back on the smartphone track with the brand-spanking new Nokia 6630. So what's so great about it? From a casual glance, you'd perhaps think it's pretty much the same as the 3650 I got as my first smartphone. You couldn't be more wrong and right at the same time!

Yes, it's still running S60, so the user interface is instantly familiar if you've had any other S60 device (like the 3650/60, 6600, 7610). But underneath the hood so much has changed in exactly the right direction. A short run-down of the hardware improvements:

• Dimensions: 110x60x21mm that's almost HALF the mass of the A925 and considerably smaller than the 3650. It'll fit in regular pants with no need for funny smiles from strangers.


• CPU: 220mhz ARM9 / RAM: 7MB free that's more than twice the speed of the 3650 (107mhz) and almost three times the amount of RAM available (2.7MB)! You feel the speed instantly when working with the camera or even just using the regular functions.


• Camera: 1.23 megapixel (1280x960) with 3.7mm lens and 6x zoom this takes much, much better pictures than both the 3650 and the A925 (on which shots were really questionable) in daylight. Evening shots are still so-so. And there's almost no lag on the shutter. Click and the picture is taken thanks to the faster CPU.


• Stereo audio and decent headphones it's actually possible to enjoy listening to MP3's on the phone now. I can see how the phones a generation or two away could start to chip into Apples iPod business. For now, I'm happy to carry around my iPod mini along with the phone, though.



• 3G! Nokias first 3G phone was an embaressment. What an awesome comeback to put thier top-of-the-line phone on the 3G network. Downloading with 20 kbs/sec is quite an experience on a phone of this power. Especially because you can use Opera with Small-Screen Rendering instead of being forced to use the watered down (read: crappy!) version bundled with the A925/1000.

All that hardware would do you nothing without great software, though. Thankfully, the S60 platform has had plenty of time to breed the best suite in the business. Here's what I got on my phone:

• Opera: With 7MB of free RAM, the days of "out of memory" errors that plagued the 3650 are finally behind us. And finally getting Small-Screen Rendering back is so incredibly cool that browsing the web from your phone is actually a somewhat pleasant experience (3G certainly helps with that). I can't believe that Motorola/3 axed SSR from the A925/1000 version of Opera. And worse, ensured that you couldn't install the full Opera even if you wanted to. Braindead and hugely damaging to an otherwise nice set of PDA-phones.



• Agile Messenger 3: From the "I can't believe it's free!" department comes this superb instant messaging client from Agile Mobile that goes on all the major networks (I use it for AIM and MSN). The latest version is incredibly good looking and capable of running in the background and showing notifications on the top of any other app when new messages arrive.


• ProfiMail: Even though the email client in the 6630 has improved (with intervalled checking of mail, most importantly), this alternative from Lonely Cat is still very nice. If you do a serious amount of emailing from your phone it's definitely recommended. Russell had a nice review of it a while back as well.


• Clicker: I use this Mac remote primarily to control the music broadcasting from my Powerbook in the home office to the stero in the living room over Airport Express. This means that you can hide your computer away for a party, but still have all your digital music at your fingertips. Very sexy. And surprisingly non-geeky too. Mary got it instantly.


• Putty: Controlling your servers over SSH through your phone? Oh, yeah. That is quite sexy. And with the 3G connection there's virtually no lag. Runs very well and allows me to check up on the Basecamp servers away from the computer.



• Goboy: Play all Gameboy and Gameboy Color games on your phone! You can take your J2ME games and shove 'em, I got all the games I would ever care for in the GB/C library including the best version of Tetris ever made. And with the 7MB of RAM available, you can play even 16 MBit games like Mario Golf and Micro Machines v3 (versions 1.3 and forward doesn't currently work, you need the 1.2 version) of course you need the original catridges to rightfully play these games (read: don't email me about pirate games).


• Repligo: Convert PDFs and read them on your phone. I've read all of the Pragmatic Starter Kit books like this along with a bunch of Manning books. Very comfortable.

With all this glamour and gold, there had to be one drawback about the phone and there is! From Nokia 7610 and forward, synchronization is now done through SyncML instead of the old mRouter. iSync doesn't grok SyncML yet and probably won't until Tiger (they hired a guy from Symbian to work on it, so it is getting done). So no address book or iCal synching. Sad but true.

But despite the lack of synching, I'd still like to declare the Nokia 6630 as:

Best. Phone. Ever.

It's that good. No really. It's that good!