The 6682 arrives
Posted by marshall Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:51:00 GMT
Looks like the order went through after all. Apparently it was submitted to the warehouse Thursday afternoon when I ordered it, processed on Friday, submitted to FedEx on Saturday, and actually shipped on Sunday, arriving yesterday afternoon. Strangely, FedEx left no door tag; if I hadn't been tracking it on-line, I wouldn't have known they had attempted to deliver it.
The box included the Nokia 6682 itself, a new SIM card (already installed in the phone), a 64 MB MMCmobile card pre-loaded with some extra software like Opera and QuickOffice, a power adapter, a USB cable for connecting it to a computer, and several manuals. The USB cable was surprising -- that's been an extra cost on most of the phones I've owned (the Treo being the only exception, but Palm devices have historically included cables for synchronizing).
So far I'm liking it. I stayed up way too late installing a Nintendo emulator, an SSH client, a Bust-a-Move style game called Frozen Bubble, and several other applications. The Nintendo emulator was all that I hoped it would be: I can finally jump in Double Dragon, and several games that didn't work on the Treo (including Tetris, Dr. Mario, and Excitebike) work perfectly well on the 6682.
The camera is certainly the nicest I've had so far in a phone. While it's still quite grainy for indoor shots, pictures outside come out fairly well. Here's a photo of the intersection by the Redlands Carl's Jr (slightly color-tweaked and sharpened in Photoshop):
I'm most of the way back now to the Bluetooth functionality I had on my Sony Ericsson T610. The T610 would inform my Mac of incoming calls and text messages, complete with looking up the Caller ID in my address book, and I could forward calls to voicemail or respond to text messages using the computer. The computer could also detect when the T610 came in range and do things when I left the computer and/or came back, it could pause iTunes when I was on the phone, and I could select people from my computer's Address Book and click "Dial" to dial them on the cell phone. The Treo could do none of these. The 6682 can do almost all: about the only thing it's missing is that it doesn't notify me of incoming text messages and let me reply. I can send outgoing text messages from the computer, I just don't receive them.
There are, however, some phone-computer things that the 6682 can do that neither the Treo nor the T610 could. After synchronizing the phone with the computer, I found that my phone contacts included the pictures I'd set up in the Mac Address Book, so now I have photo Caller ID without having to do anything special. The contacts include both work and home addresses, as well as the Notes field. The Treo could only sync one address and didn't sync the notes or the photo. I also get the album art of the currently playing track in iTunes on the phone with Salling Clicker, which may have worked on the Treo, but Salling Clicker was so limited and unstable on it that I never really used it.
The best part about the synchronization, though, is that I didn't have to install any software to do it. I just clicked "Set up new device" in the Mac OS X Bluetooth preferences and followed the prompts, and now iSync has a 6682 icon in it (looks just like it, too). No abandoned Palm software, no quirky Missing Sync, just out-of-the-box pain-free integration. Technology is so wonderful when it works.
Update: I should clarify that the whole photos and notes sync thing with the Treo is a limitation of the Mac sync software, not the device itself. Given decent software, the Treo could have synchronized those. I'm told that Outlook for Windows, for example, synchronizes both of these fields. So that complaint is more directed at Palm's virtually nonexistant support for OS X.
