What's on my Nokia 6680
Posted on Sunday, June 12th, 2005 2:25 PM
Now that I've got a phone I'll be using for a while, I wanted to write an overview of the Symbian Series 60 apps I have on my phone, just like my popular post about the apps on my Nokia 6600 from January 1st, 2004. It's not enough to just point back to my other post and simply do an update, because the 6680 uses a new version of the Symbian OS base (8.0a), and a new version of the Series 60 UI (v2, 2.6), many apps that I used before now don't work and haven't been updated. I know more and more people who have this phone (or the Nokia 6682 which is basically the same phone for the American market) and who are asking me about the phone and which apps to use, so this will be a the post to point to. I really think the Nokia 6680/6681/6682 series could be a breakout Series 60 phone for Nokia, especially here in the U.S. where we really haven't had a Symbian phone that's hit critical mass yet.
To make sure I was current with my list off apps, I spent a few hours going through every mobile software site I could find looking for interesting apps that either I hadn't seen before or hadn't tried, then tested them on the 6680 to see if they worked. Sadly, many of my old favorites like ReadM and WirelessIRC (among others) don't really work at all, which sucks. But wow, even still I've got tons of apps to go over - and these are just the ones that I find useful or interesting - there's many more out there. And because most people are just coming to the Series 60 platform for the first time, I've decided to also go to go over the phone's internal and pre-installed apps that I use as well since I know a lot of people may not know what they already have on their phones.
First thing's first. In order to use your phone to its fullest and install all these apps as well as a decent amount of multimedia files, you'll need a good sized memory card. Remember that the 6680 uses the "Dual Volt Reduced Size MMC" (DV RS-MMC) card, which is different from the non-dual-volt kind and only available online (that I've seen). This used to be a pain, but now there are several sites out there where you can order larger sized cards. I just got my 512MB memory card to replace my 256MB one, both from USA Memory. This isn't as good as the 1GB+ sizes you find in the SD world, but it's better than the 32MB or 64MB that usually comes with new phones. I have to say that these types of MMC cards are a bit twitchy, I had to buy another card reader before my computer would see it, and I've heard of them getting corrupted a bit easily as well. Just so you've been warned. :-)
So I might as well start all this with a quick overview of the Nokia 6680 itself since I haven't had a chance to review that either yet. Whew! Lots to go over, let's go!