Nokia 6820
Nokia's 6820 might seem an odd choice for review here because it isn't
a fully-featured smartphone.
Although Nokia is promoting it aggressively in Europe as a business phone with RIM's Blackberry Connect email software (as the 6810), we typically look at phones that match or exceed PDA functionality, that run Palm, Microsoft or Symbian operating systems and are open to third party applications. Forget about multitasking, or running Opera or Salling Clicker on this device: it's limited to 64 kb Java applets.
The user interface is the current evolution of Nokia's NaviKey, which is used on hundreds of millions of handsets. Nokia's fold-out messaging phoneNo, the Nokia 6820 is here because of one characteristic, its keyboard. Nokia first debuted this ingenious design a year ago in the 6800 model, and it transforms the phone into something that's at the same time a little more useful and a little less capable than a PDA. The phone looks like a traditional candy bar handset, only the front flips up to reveal a full 51-key QWERTY layout with the phone rotated 90 degrees.
It promises to solve one of the dilemmas of a mobile device: they make for reasonably good devices for viewing material in some circumstances, but are lousy for entering text. Attempts to improve keyboards inevitably compromise the size. At one end of the market, Nokia's Communicator series has proved that a demand exists for mobile devices with full-sized keyboard that dominated the market in the first half of the 1990s, such as the Psion Series 3,5 and Revo, Sharp's Zaurus ZR and HP's Palmtop range. On the other hand, this is very much a niche market, and the Communicator remains more expensive and bulky than most users are prepared to carry. The 6820 is designed to encourage text entry but without the dweebish stigma of a posh smartphone.
The phone is less obtrusive than its predecessor, the 6800, which featured an FM radio but no Bluetooth or camera. (At 100g, the 6820 is 18 per cent lighter, and a centimeter shorter and narrower). As a consequence, the QWERTY keys are a little smaller too. However the addition of a joystick makes for a dramatic improv ement in usability. John C Dvorak recently wrote a scathing smartphone summary concentrating on the Nokia 6600 and concluding that the UI was designed by someone who liked pressing buttons far more than a normal person should. He has a point: for almost every practical purpose, the Nokia 6820 was easier to use than the Series 60 models we have tried, PalmOne's Treo, and Sony Ericsson's P800 and P900. To a large extent this is because functionality is limited: there are fewer things to do and fewer ways of doing them.
Like the Treo, the 6820's keys are small and unforgiving: more travel and a little spring would make typing much easier. Danger's Hiptop keyboard can also be concealed, uses less space, but feels considerably more comfortable. Like its rivals, the 6820 can only really be worked with your thumbs. However it was a relief to find a full keyboard, with two space bars, and the ampersand and dashes exactly where they should be. (Well, for a European user anyway.) So unlike the RIM (33 keys) and the Treo (35 keys) you don't need to memorize function key combinations. The 6820 adopts phone conventions for shifting between lower and upper case, which makes it familiar to regular texters, and it uses a lazy shift key which means that the modifier doesn't have to be held down along with the target key. An extra key brings up a list of characters that you won't find on the keyboard, such as the forward slash, square brackets and curly braces.
Perhaps the most telling impression of the 6820 is that we returned to Nokia's 6600 with some frustration. Although this is a very limited device compared to more fully featured smartphones, there's much than it accomplish as both phone and PDA with greater ease than its rivals. Nokia has succeeded in putting a full QWERTY keyboard in a tiny and unobtrusive device. Like Danger, it deserves to be rewarded for this innovation. I'd like to see this format allied to a Series 60 device, which would really unleash the power of the of the platform.
Although Nokia is promoting it aggressively in Europe as a business phone with RIM's Blackberry Connect email software (as the 6810), we typically look at phones that match or exceed PDA functionality, that run Palm, Microsoft or Symbian operating systems and are open to third party applications. Forget about multitasking, or running Opera or Salling Clicker on this device: it's limited to 64 kb Java applets.
The user interface is the current evolution of Nokia's NaviKey, which is used on hundreds of millions of handsets. Nokia's fold-out messaging phoneNo, the Nokia 6820 is here because of one characteristic, its keyboard. Nokia first debuted this ingenious design a year ago in the 6800 model, and it transforms the phone into something that's at the same time a little more useful and a little less capable than a PDA. The phone looks like a traditional candy bar handset, only the front flips up to reveal a full 51-key QWERTY layout with the phone rotated 90 degrees.
It promises to solve one of the dilemmas of a mobile device: they make for reasonably good devices for viewing material in some circumstances, but are lousy for entering text. Attempts to improve keyboards inevitably compromise the size. At one end of the market, Nokia's Communicator series has proved that a demand exists for mobile devices with full-sized keyboard that dominated the market in the first half of the 1990s, such as the Psion Series 3,5 and Revo, Sharp's Zaurus ZR and HP's Palmtop range. On the other hand, this is very much a niche market, and the Communicator remains more expensive and bulky than most users are prepared to carry. The 6820 is designed to encourage text entry but without the dweebish stigma of a posh smartphone.
The phone is less obtrusive than its predecessor, the 6800, which featured an FM radio but no Bluetooth or camera. (At 100g, the 6820 is 18 per cent lighter, and a centimeter shorter and narrower). As a consequence, the QWERTY keys are a little smaller too. However the addition of a joystick makes for a dramatic improv ement in usability. John C Dvorak recently wrote a scathing smartphone summary concentrating on the Nokia 6600 and concluding that the UI was designed by someone who liked pressing buttons far more than a normal person should. He has a point: for almost every practical purpose, the Nokia 6820 was easier to use than the Series 60 models we have tried, PalmOne's Treo, and Sony Ericsson's P800 and P900. To a large extent this is because functionality is limited: there are fewer things to do and fewer ways of doing them.
Like the Treo, the 6820's keys are small and unforgiving: more travel and a little spring would make typing much easier. Danger's Hiptop keyboard can also be concealed, uses less space, but feels considerably more comfortable. Like its rivals, the 6820 can only really be worked with your thumbs. However it was a relief to find a full keyboard, with two space bars, and the ampersand and dashes exactly where they should be. (Well, for a European user anyway.) So unlike the RIM (33 keys) and the Treo (35 keys) you don't need to memorize function key combinations. The 6820 adopts phone conventions for shifting between lower and upper case, which makes it familiar to regular texters, and it uses a lazy shift key which means that the modifier doesn't have to be held down along with the target key. An extra key brings up a list of characters that you won't find on the keyboard, such as the forward slash, square brackets and curly braces.
Perhaps the most telling impression of the 6820 is that we returned to Nokia's 6600 with some frustration. Although this is a very limited device compared to more fully featured smartphones, there's much than it accomplish as both phone and PDA with greater ease than its rivals. Nokia has succeeded in putting a full QWERTY keyboard in a tiny and unobtrusive device. Like Danger, it deserves to be rewarded for this innovation. I'd like to see this format allied to a Series 60 device, which would really unleash the power of the of the platform.
