Great Phone - Some Flaws
Written: Nov 14 '04
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Pros: Full QWERTY keyboard and speakerphone.
Cons: Freezes up, reboots and shuts down all by itself (or requires a reboot and shutdown)
The Bottom Line: Would recommend to anyone save for the glitches which I think are very large problems. However, I have never encountered the freezes, reboots or shutdowns during a conversation.
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| g94t's Full Review: Nokia 6800 |
My wife and I went looking at the end of the first quarter of this year for new cell phones. I decided to go with AT&T Wireless this time, mostly since I get a great discount through my company. That's when my son-in-law introduced us to this great little phone while we were visiting my daughter and him before their wedding. At the time he was working for a Cingular dealer. My wife was absolutely fascinated with the phone, while I thought it was simply, at first, different (heck, all I needed really was just a phone for voice communications). The downside was that he didn't have a functional version of the phone at his kiosk. So we headed over to the AT&T Wireless store after we got back from visiting them (Cingular was not in our area then). That's when I took a better look at the phone and tried it out with my wife. We loved the phone. So, I ordered two of them via my company discounts and about two days later this puppies showed up at the door. We wound up getting them for free with a one year contract.
At first, the phones worked great, without flaw. For the most part, they still do, with a few exceptions. I decided to break this review into several sections.
Durability
This phone is the least durable of any Nokia I have ever used. It has been dropped exactly twice, both times getting out of a car, and fell less than 2 feet onto concrete and now it has several scratches all over the casing. Worse, the glass covering the LCD cracked during normal usage of the phone (e.g., less than 1 pound per square inch).
While I love the keyboard, it can be downright frightening to open the keyboard because you have to almost literally pry the the release point open. There should be a release button on that makes it near zero-force to open.
Software
What device these days doesn't have software? It has absolutely the worst software I have ever seen in any consumer electronic device! First, understand that I am software engineer by profession for over 15 years. While sending an e-mail with a CC recipient on it, the phone deterministically shuts down every time. The phone has actually rebooted on me quite a number of times. The keyboard refuses to lock at least once a week (via Menu | * ) and I have to reboot the phone every time. About once every month the entire phone will freeze: the screen is frozen on the last thing it displayed, none of the keys will work, and flipping out the full keyboard does not cause the screen to rotate the 90 degrees like it normally should; it's just 100% non-responsive, plain and simple - reminds me of Windows O/S. The phone always has to be rebooted in these cases too. A few times, the phone will freeze just like I described, but, the phone cannot be shut off using the power button, I have to physically remove the battery, reinstall it, and then power it back on to clear the symptom. There have been occasions where I even after removing the reinserting the battery while the phone was on and frozen that the phone would then not even turn on - I actually had to wait for an hour later for it to finally power on using the power button.
In all honesty, it has been a few years since I last used a Nokia phone prior to this one. The menu system, I swear, has barely changed! While I am an advocate of "if it works, don't fix it." which is clearly what Nokia has done here, I'm also a strong proponent of innovation. Nokia has not done too much in this area with respect to the menu system.
The radio feature is nice I have to say. However, in order to use it, you have to first have the headset plugged in. Once you got the radio going, you can then switch on the loud speaker and remove the headset and listen to the radio that way. What the hell was Nokia thinking of here in the first place!? Did they not ever think that maybe, just maybe, someone might actually want to simply use the radio via the loud speaker and not the headset? Then again, maybe they did - where "they" is some engineer but some brain dead manager clearly failed to grasp this simple concept.
The embedded e-mail client is horrible. It can only check e-mail from one e-mail configuration at a time. Uou can set it up with several e-mail configurations however. You just have to manually switch from one to the next to the next for each e-mail account you wish to check. Composing an e-mail message is simple and straight forward, but, the implementation of it is a laughing stock. What I mean by this is that it is a guided approach to composing an e-mail message, sort of like a wizard on a computer when installing software. I suppose this is fine for most users, myself, I would prefer to have it all in the same place with scroll bars with all the usual e-mail fields. Well, since it is the former and not the latter, the latter would be cleaner though, as you progress from one screen of information to the next while composing the e-mail message (e.g., subject, recipients, message) the phone iterates through all the prior screens for every subsequent screen you complete. This winds up looking like a macro is executing with the screen being refreshed all the while. Very unprofessional. Moreover, this e-mail client could use support for at least IMAP instead of just POP3. I would also like to see VPN support since that is the only way that I can access my company's e-mail when not on-site.
Cut and paste? What cut and paste? That would have been a nice feature for Nokia to have included since this phone is a wonderful text device - thanks to the full QWERTY keyboard which I absolutely love.
The address book is top notch. I have always loved Nokia's address book implementation on their phones. I have yet to find a better implementation in fact. All the other phones that I have had and tried have too many limits on their phone books. The one common limitation they all share is a pathetic number of characters may be used in a phone book entry name - usually something like 16. Nokia goes far beyond that of 16. I like it because I organize the contacts in my address book using the "last name, first name" format and I like to spell out everything as much as possible.
Display
The display is average. Standard LCD screen, nothing to write home about. It is not very vivid. When compared to my Sanyo 8100, the Sanyo 8100 has an absolutely beautiful display, clearly top-notch. Bright. Vivid. Far more bits per pixel than Nokia could muster up. Even the LG phones on the market are far more vivid than this display.
Battery
I must say, the battery does last! I charge this phone about twice a week and have not seen a single drop off in the battery life nor the performance of the unit with respect to the battery. Good job Nokia. This is what I expect from you. I get what Nokia states in the specifications for the battery life during use and stand by. I am very satisfied with this aspect as it is up to par with my expectations from Nokia.
Audio
The speakerphone on this is pretty decent. I have very little trouble understanding the person on the other end of a conversation and I have not received any complaints from them either that the conversation was not clear. In fact, they were surprised to learn that I had them on the speakerphone! However, the volume and clarity when not using the speakerphone leaves quite a bit to be desired. There are many times when I have to ask the other person to repeat what they said. No, this is not an artifact of my service, it is an artifact of the device itself, whether hardware or software or both. The headset alleviates this problem. The cord to the headset could be longer. I hate the headset's connector piece into the phone. It is proprietary which severely limits the choices of headsets one can use. I prefer the standard mini headphone plugs - they are significantly easier to connect as well. Apparently Nokia has not learned that standards are a good thing, at least with respect to this particular item.
Miscellaneous
This phone is missing a camera some would say. I say that is what the accessory is for. I actually prefer phones without an integrated camera because of my job (cameras are off limits at every facility where I work). So, an integrated camera on a phone does me exactly and precisely zilch; moreover, it effectively ensures that I have a "part time" phone. I cannot stand integrated cameras on phones. I like accessory option because it is just that, an option (and nine times out of ten an accessory camera will have better resolution, color and capability than integrated camera).
While the phone is J2ME compliant and runs most Java applications without a hitch, it runs them slowly.
The IRdA on this is pretty good. It has no problems "beaming" information to another Nokia 6800. I also have no problems beaming information to Pocket PC PDA's. Nice job Nokia.
This phone needs an option to be able to transfer all address book data from the phone memory to the SIM card and vica-versa.
Would I recommend this phone? Absolutely - on the condition that Nokia fixes the real problems with the phone: the freezes, the reboots, the shut downs (should be feasible via an OTA update).
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 0.00
Recommended for: Professionals On-the-Go - Internet and Email is a Must!
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Epinions.com ID:
g94t
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Reviews written: 4
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