Nokia 6630

On 16th March I upgraded my mobile phone from a Nokia 7250 to a Nokia 6630. I was looking for a phone with a good camera and figured that if I stayed with Nokia then copying addresses across would be much easier.

Initial observations

• The phone takes a long time to become ready, I guess it has an operating system to boot up.
• It plays a welcome tune when you switch it on. Annoyingly, it cannot be disabled.
• The software supplied for your PC installs OK but takes forever and does nothing to reassure that everything is going OK.
• The manual is woefully inadequate.
• The synchronisation software works well. It manages changes on the phone and in your PC address book well. The only trouble is, every email address in my address book gets uploaded. So my phone gets full of addresses that I will never use on my phone (eg, Amazon Customer Support or a Yahoo mailing list). I’ve got round this problem by using the Microsoft address book as my ‘phone’ address book and keeping all other addresses in my Thunderbird address book. The Thunderbird address book then is a superset of the Microsoft one. Not an ideal solution.
• I naively assumed it had a radio, it doesn’t. Thats a nuisance. I guess network providers want people to download (and therefore pay call charges on) music onto the phone and play that through the built in MP3 player. I won’t. It’s easier to download via the internet and copy to the phone via a PC or use my current MP3 player.

A week later….

Phone annoyances

• Finding the spell checker/word matches is non-intuitive and not documented in the paper user guide (its in the phone’s guide though). You activate the spell checker/word matches by pressing ‘*’ at the end of the word and it scrolls through the list of possible words.
• It is not possible to add a contact to your address book if they contact you by text message.
• Adding contacts via the phone is difficult anyway unless they happen to have a name that is in the dictionary. The workaround is to disable the dictionary if you want to add a contact (easier to do it via the PC and then synchronise).
• Many other (cheaper) Nokia models have the feature that an alrm can be set to repeat for every weekday. This is useful but the 6630 doesnt have it. It’s just possible to achieve the same feature using the Organizer but its a lot of hassle.
• The Nokia Text Editor software (to compose and send messages from the PC via the phone) doesn’t seem to work.
• The Nokia Audio Manager software works well enough for uploading MP3 files to the phone. Sometimes it hangs for no obvious reason but the interface is intuitive. A nice feature would be able to make the default folder for the MP3s to be the correct folder on the memory card (E) rather than in the phone itself (C). The (C) memory simply isn’t big enough.

Nice features

• The camera works well enough and the zoom is useful
• I like the size and shape of the phone

Phone links

Nokia 6630
Nokia 6630 reviews