The Nokia 6800 is a very stylish phone with the best embedded keyboard we've ever seen in a mobile. Check out our Australian review.
The phone is roughly the size of a standard mobile, if a tad wider, measuring 23 x 55 x 119 mm and weighing in at 122 grams. It has the standard Nokia button layout, although it does look better than most, and includes a volume switch on the side.
The 4096-colour screen is 128x128 pixels, and looks quite good for a mobile phone. It can display pictures in the JPEG, GIF, BMP and PNG formats, which can be transferred to the phone via a WAP service or through the PC Suite. If an image is too big to fit on the screen the 6800 will automatically scale it down, which is a nifty feature.
Without doubt, the standout feature of the 6800 is the keyboard hidden inside. The keypad is hinged, and when opened forms a QWERTY keyboard with the screen in the middle. With the flip open, the screen automatically turns 90 degrees to face the right way, and the power button becomes a soft key. In addition the text style changes from predictive text (when the flip is closed) to keyboard entry (when the flip is opened). This happens seamlessly no matter where you are in the phone menu.
Opening the flip also turns on the 'loudspeaker', which can also be turned on during a call by going through the 'options' menu, which is only available during a call. The loudspeaker is loud and clear, and you actually can have a phone conversation with someone while in this mode. We also found normal call clarity to be particularly good on this phone.
The keyboard makes it fairly easy to write messages and notes. The design of the keyboard means your hands are further apart than when using the keyboard on the NEC e808N, and we found this made it much easier to use. The buttons on both the keyboard and keypad are easy to press.
The keyboard includes numbers across the top, delete and return keys, space and shift keys on both sides of the keyboard and a button which takes you to a symbol menu. As well as $ and £, the phone also includes the â,¬ symbol on the keyboard. Finally, a button allows you to toggle a backlight behind the keys.
The keyboard makes typing messages quite easy, and the phone can join several SMS's together to create one 457 character behemoth, if that's what you wish. Nokia has included a number of SMS pictures which can be inserted into the message.
The phone also supports MMS, but you can only send text messages with a picture included. The 6800 comes with 20 GIFs preinstalled on the phone, and you can send your own once you load them up. Although you can't send ringtones or other sound files, you can receive them, save them and use them as a ringtone yourself. The mobile can handle MMS up to 45 Kb in size. This can simply be 3,000 characters, if you want to send a really long SMS.
The phone includes 40 polyphonic and 10 monophonic ringtones preinstalled, and the polyphonic tones sound pretty good. You'll probably want to play your own though, and the phone allows you to get them via MMS or GPRS.
E-mail can also be sent and received using the 6800. The e-mail client is easy to use, for a mobile phone, and each e-mail can hold up to 5,000 characters. You cannot include attachments with e-mails. Also available are Chat and Voice messaging options.
There are some other useful messaging features, including the ability to make 15 SMS distribution lists, each with 50 contacts. In the MMS section you can choose whether or not you wish to receive adverts (we're not sure how the adverts are identified, but it's good to target mobile spam as early as possible). The phone also has space for many different fields in each contact.
One thing that strikes us as odd about the functioning of the phone is the way it responds to some commands. For example, when you input the address in an e-mail, you are asked to save it, and then the blank address screen briefly pops up again before going to the subject screen. This habit of briefly popping up an inappropriate screen before taking you to the right one happens in many parts of the phone's software.
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