The phone comes with four Java applications installed, two games and two management apps. The phone has the ability to download more applications, and comes with bookmarks to Club Nokia and Software Market, although others can be added.
The two games are Bounce -- where you guide a bouncing ball through a series of challenges -- and Triple Pop, which is one of those games where you connect three balls of the same colour and they disappear. The games aren't particularly enthralling, but they have good images and respond well to commands, giving a promising indication of what the phone can handle.
The two applications likewise give an indication of what can be achieved with some clever coding. Portfolio II allows you to manage your share portfolio by entering your stock details, including purchase price. You can then go back and enter the current price to see how your stock is faring. This feature would be a lot more useful with a feed from the stock exchange.
The other included application, Converter II, allows you to convert temperature, currency, weight, length, area and volume. The program includes pretty much any unit you can think of (for instance, you can convert carats to grams in the 'weight' section) and allows you to input your own, or update the conversion rates. Obviously, the update feature is most useful for converting currency.
The phone has 4 Mb of memory with 3.3 Mb of that memory free to fill with whatever you wish.
The Nokia 6800 also includes a radio, and is compatible with Nokia's DT-1 speaker stand. You use the joystick to adjust the tuning either manually (one frequency at a time) or automatically (which seems to jump between three preset frequencies). The radio works well, and sounds good through the headset. You can play it through the loudspeaker, but the headset must still be plugged in -- we can only surmise it is used as an aerial. In fact, the headset must be plugged in to even open the radio menu folder, which we found a little restrictive.
The mobile is readily customisable, allowing you to change wallpaper, colour scheme and ringtones. It has space for nine speed dials, as well as call waiting, call hold, call divert, call timer and a fixed dialling capability which allows calls only to predefined numbers. From a connectivity point of view the phone is dual-band GSM 900/1800 and has GPRS, infrared and cable support.
The other menu options include:
- Gallery, which contains a Graphics and a Tones folder, with the ability to create extra folders,
- Extra, which includes a calculator, countdown time, stopwatch, synchronisation either with a PC or a remote server over GPRS and wallet, which is used in m-commerce
- Connectivity, which contains the settings for GPRS and Infrared, and
- Services, which contains all the settings used for surfing the Internet.
The battery life is advertised as 3-7 hours of talktime and 7-15 days of standby time, which is more than reasonable for this grade of phone.
All in all, the Nokia 6800 is a good mobile phone. It lacks a camera, which removes it from the 'next gen' category of phones, but it does everything else very well, and is the best mobile-with-a-keyboard we've come across.
Nokia 6800
Company: Nokia
Price: AU$749
Distributor: Nokia
Phone: 1300 366 733
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