The N6600 is a phone for people who know how to make the best use out of the Symbian OS. It belongs to Symbian OS V2.0. It also has built in support for Java MIDP 2. The OS runs on a 104 MHz processor and has 1403 KB RAM and 6 MB internal memory. The recent firmware is 5.23. The main difference b/w a symbian phone and an ordinary one is that a symbian will always keep you busy fiddling with it. The phone has full support for themes and u can customize most part of the UI. The phone has full theme support and there are some of the best looking themes out there in the web like themes from dakkustudios. You can create your own fonts from .ttf files and experiment with them. One can even have two fonts installed together - one for the titles and menus, another for the icons. After using nearly 100s of fonts, I am currently using my own fonts - "Nokia Sans" and "Square" combination. It offers great readability and professional look. I have posted a few screenshots at https://deepakjulien.wordpress.com. The symbian applications and games offer superior user experince and graphics when compared to the java appsngames.
Though one can get a 6630 with better hardware shelling out a few more thousands, that doesn’t make a 6600 worse anyday - afterall its the best seller mobile for Nokia. Again if people complain that the phone is slow, its just because they don’t use it in the optimal way. It has a resonable speed. Certain themes are found to be the culprit that slows down the phone due to poor graphics. The "crystallised" theme is one of the best I have seen so far that has fantastic graphics, icons as well as speed. There are certain ways to make it a bit faster - like setting the log to 10 days instead of 30, installing apps to mmc and keeping phone memory free, not running memory hungry apps in the background unless needed.
Most of the negative aspects of the phone can be waded off using symbian support. It can be made to play mp3s (mono), run a web server using an ALWAYS ON GPRS connection, it can be made to send midi files as MMS using "MMS-IT" (Nokia has purposefully prevented it due to copyrights), it can be made to take unlimited video, it can be made to use mp3 as ringtones, it can be made to store 20 mp3 songs in 64 MB MMC( format it the right way using 512bytes as the allocation size using a card reader, and using 40kbps at 16 KHz- by the way thats the optimum specs that the phone can handle), it can be made to use your PC’s net connection, ringtones can be made to play twice louder by amplifying it using any sound editor in the PC, etc just to name a few. There are few more tricks that I can hardly reemember now.
The phone is rock solid and it can easily withstand day to day use. If you are on a tight budget then go for it, or else shell out a few more bucks and get the 6630 which is a 6600 + EDGE support + better hardware and stereo. I think I have covered most of the points one may think as drawbacks of the N6600. If u are yet to buy a color phone, my advice is check the phone for bad pixels (can be found out using a full screen black background or just watch carefully while the built in snake game starts), because it may be annoying if u plan to use your phone for sheer fun. The fake pieces sold in bazaars usually have one or two bad pixels. I have seen a couple of showroom pieces without any bad pixels - maybe the are of first quality, go for them if u can afford it. Otherwise it is a minor defect which can be traded off. But one thing is sure- Once smartphone, be it symbian or windows or linux, smartphone forever. Thats is folks. Hope you are enjoying your 6600 to its full performance, just like me.