I’ve been needing a new cell phone for quite a while. Partially to switch my number to the Springfield area and partially just because I’m a gadget freak and my Siemens phone was getting old (almost 2 years). My criteria for a phone has been: Cingular, bluetooth, and Flash. Which basically means I needed a Series 60 smartphone. I’ve been waiting for the Nokia 6682 to ship and it arrived on Monday. You can get this phone from Amazon for $99 with a new service agreement.
The Series 60 platform is outstanding, I’m loving this phone after less than a week with it. The camera takes decent pictures and the bundled lifeblog application easily uploads them to Flickr. It syncs smoothly with iSync on my Powerbook. Best of all with the EDGE connectivity I’m able to use it as a modem for the notebook. This post is being written/posted from the passenger seat of my car on I-44 between Springfield and Lebanon. The unlimited data plan from Cingular costs an additional $19.99/month, but after having used 25mb of data in a week it’s a lot better than the metered approach.
There is a wealth of software available for this phone. I haven’t installed the Macromedia Flash Lite player yet, but plan to shortly. So far I’ve installed:
- AgileMessenger — AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber instant messaging from the phone. This is actually more useful than I thought it would be and I was happy to pay the $23 after just one day using it.
- ProfiMail — POP3 and IMAP email client. If you want email on a Series 60 device, profimail is the way to go. It does violate the standard S60 UI rules to expand screen space, but I think this is a wise decision. The current version supports SSL and T9 for text input making email easy, quick, and secure.
- eeMame — Multi Arcade Machine Emulator. Why play a crappy java game on your phone when you could be playing Frogger or Ms. PacMan.
- GoBoy — GameBoy color emulator. Allows you to play GB roms on your phone.
- JJkeylock — I looked at a lot of auto keylock applications and I think this is the best.
- Oggplay — Music player for all built in file types and Ogg files. I’m mostly using m4a files from iTunes. I’m still looking for a good way to sync files.
- Opera — This came bundled with the phone, but I’ve since installed the free version 8 upgrade.
- Putty — a great SSH client which is very useful.
- s60Zip — allows you to open zip files.
- Torch — a simple application that lets you use the large, bright screen of the phone as a flash light.
As I said earlier I still want to install FlashLite and I’m looking for a good file sync tool for the Mac. Overall this phone fits every need I have for a PDA: connected to the web, email, IM, and synchronization with my address book and calendar. The only thing I would really want is a Blackberry style thumb keypad. I will probably need to get an MMC card bigger than the 64mb one that ships with the phone, but for now I’ve got about 20mb free.