First Impressions Count

My first impression of the Nokia 6680 was "swish ". But I then paused and thought what exactly do I mean. Yes it looks "swish" but I ain't blown away.

My second thought was I think Nokia may need to do a makeover on this phone and it could be a whole heap better.

Of course, even taking the above into account this is a great handset, although I personally think this pale greyblue colour scheme doesn't hit the mark.

But. Don't despair :)

Some nice touches are the matching blue keypad backlight, the cheap looking five-way navipad works extremely well, the chrome finish on the phone e.g for the hot-swappable RS-MMC slot makes for an experience like when all good cars had chrome - albeit in this model its plastic chrome.

OK more good news. This is the first Nokia 3G phone to have 2 on-board video cameras allowing us to make true video conferencing calls without the need for a damn stand like in the Nokia 6630.

The Nokia 6680 is a tri-band handset as shown on the right and comes loaded with Bluetooth wireless technology v.1.2, WAP 2.0 XHTML/HTML multimode browser, RealPlayer Media Player, Java™ MIDP 2.0, CLDC 1.1 .. more details see right.

Nokia creates a shade of wow factor when you use the slide-down rear cover to activate and expose the rear 1.3 Megapixel camera. The other camera is lower quality and is mounted on top-right of phone front.

On the memory front it comes with comes with 10 MB on-board and has a bundled 64 MB RS-MMC card providing extra memory storage.

It has all the usual Series 60 applications such as PIM and messaging software etc.

On the screen quality side, the 262K colour display with a resolution of 176 x 208 pixels works really well and gives a good experience. There is a light sensor ( ambient setting ) to automatically adjust brightness levels when the phone is not in use.

Is It The Bomb ?

This is a "swish" looking handset yet it aint the bomb. My own personal thought was that it needs an immediate makeover. Just like the Sanyo S750 had shortly after it was released.

The Nokia 6680 has one area where it is superior over its predecessor ( Nokia 6630 ) and that is that it has 2 video cameras for that true video calling experience. No need to lug a video stand around with you.

For the above reason I would without any doubt choose the 6680 over the 6630 yet I have a doubt in my mind about its looks.

However, I don't feel Nokia would consider a makeover or be able to fit such a design change into their schedule so I feel its looks will stay.

All said and done this is another cool looking handset from Nokia and yes, of course, it will sell well. I am happy to score this handset at 89%.

Its handsets like these that make you feel that we have entered a new phase where a 3G handset like this is the norm, yet 12 months ago we would have blown away by it.

Kevin Thomas scores the Nokia 6680

This is a review of the Nokia 6680 handset and was undertaken in May, 2005 by Kevin Thomas of 3G.co.uk. This review covers the phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network.