Hi There,
I bought my Nokia 6681 some time ago, and have given it enough time to sink into my life and also to generate material for this review.
External Apperence:
Good. Available in Siver and Blue Colour. The phone casing is made of plastic but sturdy. It has two buttons on the outside: Voice Command and Power, and Has a slot for RS-MMC card. All buttons and casings are steel.
Screen is pretty big, enough to make out SMS/MMS etc well, also, big enough to read text well.
Keypad is slightly small, with small keys, sometimes even an expert user presses two keys at a time ! Soft keys are huge and well placed.
Phone is off-course bulky, a handful. May not suite girls I guess.
Camera:
Set has a 1.3 Mega Pixel camera, good enough for still photographs. You can generate good postcard photographs. Don’t blow it up beyond postcard, image clarity is not that good. Video is CIF quality as usual.
Memory:
Nokia provides a 64-MB RS-MMC card. Good enough for the first few months atleast. You have an option of using RS-MMC for Inbox and Video Recording. This is good feature as it allows you huge downloads (via bluetooth) limited by your MMC card, and also long duration video recording. Card is hot-swappable, but we don’t swap cards everyday right ?
Ram is 10 MB good enough. We hardly use this if we set default inbox and video recording to MMC. Only used for apps I guess.
Charging Time & Usage time [I’m not that good at this]:
Charging time is pretty good I must say. Phone completely charges within an hour or so (don’t know exact time as I never measured.)
I extensively use the blue-tooth, multimedia play and phone features. It gives me a good usage time per charging. I am used to charging my phone every morning, so I don’t have good reviews on this subject.
Connectivity:
Phone has mainly two connectivity features with PC. USB-Cable and Bluetooth. I never used U.S.B cable. Bluetooth capability of the phone is good, gives you a typical 20-30kbps transfer rate. I never faced any problem with connectivity on this phone. Connectivity is one if its plus points.
Bluetooth PC Dongle: Bangalore folks can buy this dongle from S.P road near K.R. market. Don’t pay more than 350-400 for this. You will also get a OEM BlueSoleil software with the dongle. This is a Must-have for this phone.
I had no issues connecting this phone via bluetooth to other Nokia phones and also Sony, L.G., Motorola, etc.
Processor
Has a ARM core running at 220 MHz. Good enough to run doom smoothly.
OS and Apps
Supports the Open Architecture Symbian operating system. The version is 8.0a, has a new standby-screen shortcuts. Something like your Windows desktop Shortcuts.
Menu Speed and App startup speed have improved vastly as compared to a 6600 and 3230. Phone has got a good software revamp.
You can download the Nokia 6681 SDK (Software Development Kit) for Symbian 0.8a Series 60 Feature Release 2 from Nokia Developer’s Forum. forum.nokia.com and develop applications for this phone. The SDK comes bundled with compiler, debugger and a CLI make environment and is pretty easy to use. I could get the helloworldbasic to run in 15 minutes on my 6681.
Best part is you can download Series 60 Applications from a wide range of providers on the net. You have millions of Seris 60 application freeware on the internet. Just search for Series 60 software on your search engine (yahoo search, etc)
Some of the software is unbelievably good.
Games
Don’t look for fundoo games. However, good ones are avilable for
Voice Commands
Standard feature nowadays, works well.
Difference From 6680
I read in a Nokia Site that the major differences between 6681 and 6680 is the U.M.T.S and Video-Conferencing. Both these feature removed from 6680 gives 6681. Both these feature make not much sense in India.
Software I Could Run (and Must Have ?)
AutoKeyLock -> Phone is no auto-keypad lock, you need to download and run this software.
FExplorer -> Amazing software just like Windows Explorer.
Task Spy -> top-ish
C2Doom -> Though unstable on my 6681, this is a cool port of Doom on Series 60 platform.
Nokia Sensor -> Man, why didn’t nokia bundle it along ?
Volume
I felt volume is slightly less loud for Indian situations. As compared to a L.G. M4410, volume loudness is a let down.
Price:
INR 17500 (around)
I bought it from Sangeetha on J.C. road (near Minerva Circle) in Bangalore.
I like my Nokia 6681, It’s a good phone, buy it.
[Sound Reception, etc in Review details.]