To give you an idea what the 6630 looks like I have taken a photo of it alongside my ‘old’ 6600. They are basically the same size except for the rounded lower half or so of the 6630. The 6630 can probably be accurately described as an upgraded merger of the 6600 and the 3600 series phones. You may recall that the 3650 and 3660 (if I am getting the model numbers right) have that rounded bottom and the round keypad.
I think the 6630 looks much sexier than the 6600 though. The big differences are under the hood. My 6600 used to take ages to do anything, whether it be sending a text message or opening an application. The 6630 is much much faster and it is an absolute pleasure to use for this reason alone. I understand that the 6630 is also using a newer version of the Series 60 platform and a newer version of the Symbian OS itself. This has probably contributed to the operating speed of the phone and the much slicker look of the software too.
Another physical difference with this phone is that the memory card in
use is the smaller RS-MMC card. Together with its adaptor, it is
pretty much the same size as a full-size MMC card. Infosync World
described this change as one of the negatives because it does create a
few issues. For one thing you can’t simply take your MMC card from
your 6600 and stick it in and carry on doing what you were doing
before. Mind you, given that many of the apps you can buy for your
Series 60 phone basically only work on your phone because the IMEI
number is often used to generate a key to register the software. So
the main issue would really be transferring your contacts, calendar and
other info from your old phone to your new one. If you have a 6600,
you may have noticed that the software for your desktop is less than
great and backups and synchronisations rarely work properly, if at
all. This baby has a solution for that. It comes with a Data Transfer
app that you transfer to a compatible Series 60 phone by Bluetooth (the
6630 doesn’t have an infrared port) and all your contacts, calendar
info, music and tones as well as your graphics will be transferred to
your new 6630 from your old phone. The one thing that could be added
is the ability to transfer things like your bookmarks and even Wallet
info. As things stand at the moment, you still have to manually
transfer those from your old phone to the 6630.
In the past such data transfers also involved a further challenge in
that you probably only had one SIM card and had to keep both your new
and old phone on to do the transfers. This is not the case with the
6630 which has an Offline mode. What this means is that you can turn
your phone on without your SIM card installed and the phone will run as
an offline PDA. You can enable Bluetooth in this mode. This also
means you can use your phone on an airplane as a PDA. The music player
enables you to listen to mp3s and aac files (strangely enough, music
captured by iTunes seems to be in aac format but is actually in mp4
format so you’d have to convert these to mp3s before you can transfer
them to the phone – unless I am missing something). You also get Quickoffice viewers for Word and Excel files, which is a fantastic addition. Now you can review Word and Excel files on the fly if you get them by mail, for instance.
There is so much more to this phone which I am not going to get into. Here are a couple additional features:
- The screen is the same size as the 6600 but much brighter (you can change the brightness settings). It has an auto dimmer which kicks in after a few seconds so you don’t drain the battery with a bright screen.
- The 6630 is 3G enabled (so it will run on a GPRS, EDGE and 3G network). I am looking forward to the rollout of 3G here in a couple months (at least on my home network).
The 6630 comes with a USB cable and a stereo headset. The USB cable is yet another bonus. No need to fiddle with Bluetooth connections and dodgy Bluetooth adaptors. Data transfers are straightforward and hassle-free. Just one thing, when you have installed your PC Suite software (vast improvement over the software that came with the 6600) and you plug your phone in, let it do its thing for a while. Your PC (I use a Windows XP Pro machine) will pick up a number of drivers and seek to install them all at the same time so be patient with the dozen or so dialogue boxes that pop up. At the end of the process you will have installed a number of file transfer and modem drivers for your phone.
All in all, I am really impressed with this phone. I haven’t had much experience with it but I would say that the 6630 is to the Nokia smartphone what the 6230 is to the normal phone. It is much faster, sleeker and it works well!
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What do you think?