Nokia 6680 - a year of disappointment…

The annual mobile phone upgrade ritual in recent years has become as exciting as waiting to open my Christmas presents. Every year I’m eager to get my hands on a new phone, and every year I love it the moment I unwrap it. Last year was no different. I took the plunge of changing networks to ‘3‘, which at the time I was told was risky. Turns out it was one of the best decisions I made - a great network, great service, great coverage - way better than Orange and o2 who I had been with in previous years.. The sure bet at upgrade time though, a decision that couldn’t possibly be wrong, was to go for a Nokia. How wrong could I be? I went for the 6680, and as ever when receiving a new phone, I was delighted by the bells and whistles and all the fun that could be had. This wore off quicker than any “new phone effect” I’ve ever had and now, nearly one year on I think I’m well qualified to say this phone is a huge disappointment in so many ways.

I don’t know what it is about Nokia. No matter what they try the phones still seem old. There’s a clumsy feeling about them, a feeling like you should be pulling levers and throwing switches to get it to work. The 6680 has this feel in a big way. Firstly, the phone is slow. Start up is slow, navigating menus is slow, reading new SMS is slow. The only thing reasonably quick is making calls, and it has to be said this is where it does work. Calls, call quality etc and all elements of using a phone to talk, are good. But oddly, that’s the last thing I do with a phone these days and all other areas of this phone are poor. SMS is what I do the most and going by the stats recently (3.19Bn messages were sent in the UK in March alone this year) Im not the only one. So why does this phone do it so badly? Why is writing a text a chore, after you’ve eventually waited an age for the screens to all appears? Why is selecting a name you want to send to so many keypresses away? Why, when you receive a text, does it take an age to display it? Whether that’s to do with a very full inbox or not is irrelevant. If I choose to save 10 or 1000 old texts, the phone should still perform well. The 6680 doesn’t.

And then there’s the memory problem. How many times have I gone to quickly snap a picture with the phone, only to be told ‘out of memory’ and the picture is not saved, even when there is space on the memory card and in the phone. When I take a look at running applications, all that is shown is the telephone. There has been inadequate memory allocation to ensure the camera works no matter what! Surely this stuff is basic in making a phone work.. how could it be so wrong?

Bluetooth as well is about as ‘hit and miss’ as I ever experienced. Sometimes it likes connecting, sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes it will just reboot. Basic stuff you’d have thought?

The phone itself too, is “plasticy”. It feels cheap, it looks big, cheap and clumsy, and it falls apart cheaply. The sliding camera cover on the back wobbles and creaks. The fascia chips with great ease and the buttons are so tightly packed even the thinnest thumb would have trouble texting.

I mean I know I’m going on here but for the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile telephones (as of June 2006), with a global market share of approximately 33% in 2006, to produce a phone that fails so miserably is surely lazy and unproductive in the long term. Perhaps they will have improved it in the last year. Perhaps the newer phones are dramatically better - but my experience in the last year, and the experience of friends with the same phone as well as other Nokia models, tells me to stay away from Nokia at the next upgrade. They seem to be relying on the reputation their early phones built up. But times have changed. They need to blow away the dust and freshen up.