Nokia 6600 – First Nokia Smartphone and the Basis For the Future

by admin on April 2, 2012

Interestingly enough on the Hall of Fame, we’re covering some of the defining handsets which helped shape the mobile phone markets of today. And we can’t help feeling all nostalgic when we think about the older Nokia handsets. We’re probably not 100% correct in that the Nokia 6600 was not the very first Nokia smartphone but certainly in the form that it was the first accessible smartphone to users. The phone featured the new Series 60 software (hence the name) and was the most advanced for its time. Despite many of the features being used in the innovative Nokia 7650 handset (which was sold a year earlier), the phone never took off into the mainstream markets, perhaps because of the ungainly size. The 6600 went some ways to correct this:

The handset did away with the slide of the 7650 and therefore saved some space, although this was at the expense of a smaller screen. That said, larger resolutions on screen now allowed a further range of options to be used. The phone featured:

Series 60:  The smartphone OS by Nokia, this offered many advantages over the standard Series 40 system. Navigation was done by rows of icons as opposed to a scroll menu, in which part influenced all of the navigation menus today. The enhanced resolution allowed more apps to be possible, although these were far more ungainly to install than that of apps today. Joystick navigation – a rare thing for Nokia at the time was included to make selecting options easy.

MMC Card Slot:  In what was becoming a trend, the phone featured a MultiMedia Card (MMC) slot. One of the forebearers to today’s standard microSD, the cards nevertheless were not that large, and later versions could feature high capacities. Combined with the media player onboard (which many of the Series 40 sets lacked at the time) the phone could genuinely be used as a portable media player.

Camera:  The major selling point of the Nokia 7650 came to the Nokia 6600 in spectacular form. Recessed into the centre of the rear housing, there was little bulk added to the phone handset. The camera was not improved over the previous phones with a 640 x 480 VGA standard but also allowed video recording albeit at a low frame rate.

Connectivity: In an age before Wi-Fi, the phone came connected as it could be. Dual functioning Bluetooth and irDA functions meant that any kind of data was easily transferred, even media files to other Bluetooth handsets. This gave the phone a real business edge, and combined with the phones extra apps made this a good competitor and all-round handset to the more business related phones of the time.

What Happened To IT?  It could be argued that the handset was one of the most successful of the era, and unlike the Nokia 7650, this handset spurned several later iterations which all took influences from its design. Due to the amount produced (the handset was not discontinued until 2007), there are still several available today cheaply. Despite this, Nokia chose to re-use the phone name in some variants that bore no relation to the original, called the 6600 Fold and 6600 Slide.

Buy Nokia 6600 on Amazon – Click Here!

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Nokia 6210 Original – The Classic Design Which Still Lives On

by admin on March 30, 2012

Not to be confused with the Navigator version of the phone which was released much later, the older Nokia 6210 has been around since the year 2000. And there aren’t too many phones from this era which you can look back and say, yes, this passed the test of time. It’s arguable that the marketing for mobile phone segmentation was a lot easier back then; in 2000 we basically had the Nokia 8210 (for high-end users), the Nokia 3210 (fashion and lower-end users), and the Nokia 6210 (for business users). That was it. Compare that to today and these markets have been further redefined. The 6210 was definitely a business phone:

Available in several colours, although a key difference was that housings for the Nokia 6210 were not that easily interchangeable, requiring a Torx T6 screwdriver to remove the existing one. But there’s no doubt this became one of the most used phones for light business use. Key features at the time included:

1050mAH Battery: Sounds small by today’s standards, but then again, it had to power a lot less, with only a monochrome screen and few battery draining apps. This gave the 6210 a huge standby and talktime performance even by today’s standards, making it wholly suitable for business users who may have required a little more.

Large Mono Screen: 96 x 60 doesn’t sound a lot, but the scfreen was large compared to models such as the 8210 which featured a smaller screen size inside a smaller package. The larger screen size meant that more information was  able to be put on the screen, for example in text messages.

Nokia Series 40: Truth be told, there was not that much distinguishing the UI from that of the Nokia 3210 or any other Nokia model of this era, unlike later Nokia business phones which would make a slight departure from this. This allowed the universal appeal of what was a market-leading UI at the time. And in fact, this suited the phone perfectly, as the apps on-board were suited to the capability of the phone – and that included the most important stuff such as the games.

Infrared Port: In this age before bluetooth and on-board e-mail, the infrared port was the choice to send data. Although featuring a slow data-transfer rate, the IR port only transmitted very small files such as business cards so posed no problem. With the majority of laptops around this era also featuring IR receivers, this was a very efficient way for work to be carried over, with no data cable needed.

What happened to it: The phone was very successful, even among non-business users, with its round curves at the top giving this a smaller footprint than the alternative Nokia 3210. Highly reliable and with great talk-time, it was no wonder that it picked up a good following among business users. The  phone was then superceded by the Nokia 6310 model, which kept the vast majority of its core features. However, you can still pick up older models of this phone on the second hand market relatively cheaply.

Buy Nokia 6210 on Amazon – Click here!

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