Nokia 6820 Mobile Phone: The good, the bad and the not-so ugly

I just returned from a trip to Ireland and put a new Nokia 6820 through the Road Warrior grind. My Treo 300 finally bit the dust and I've given up on conflict resolution for Palm. I'm a PocketPC convert now. No more PocketMirror duplicates.

The 6820 is advertised as a "made for messaging" mobile phone and that is dead on. I sent 182 messages while on this four-day trip and received 238. The secret: the 6820 has a killer compact keyboard. You can message until your thumbs bleed.

While it costs $0.25/SMS for international, I probably saved hundreds of dollars by facilitating communications via SMS instead of the $1.00/minute voice charges. When I landed in Dublin it fired up and immediately connected to Vodafone. Within 60 seconds about 20 SMS beeped in. You can read more about that experience here.

The Good:

• The five-way joystick rocks. Every device should have this.
• The speakerphone is suprisingly good. Spent a lot of time in a hotel room on an international conference call and it worked great.
• Bluetooth is sweet. Made getting contacts and data into the phone a snap.
• It's small and tough. I beat the crap out of my phones and Nokias always seem to take the punishment. I must've dropped it a dozen times already and it's no worse for wear.

The Bad:

• The Camera sucks. 352x288 just is not enough resolution.
• It takes too linear in its back-out-of-it navigation. Closing out of an SMS send and going back to another is too many clicks.
• The EDGE Web browser is SLOW.

I suspect I'll be attached to this phone for quite some time.

---