Why You Can Trust CNET Nokia 6682 (Unlocked) review: Nokia 6682 (Unlocked)
Nokia 6682 (Unlocked)
With the EDGE-enabled Nokia 6682, the folks in Finland have unleashed one of their most stylish and powerful smart phones to date. Armed with a 1.3-megapixel camera, full Bluetooth capabilities, and a sweet music player, the Nokia 6682 will have phone fanatics and on-the-go shutterbugs green-eyed with envy. That said, this tempting handset suffers from Nokia's characteristically bulky design, a tough-on-the-fingers keypad, and a camera that's a tad shy of state of the art. This Cingular phone comes with a steep $550 price tag, but it should be cheaper with service. The Nokia 6682 is typically big and bulky for a Nokia candy-bar-style phone. Measuring 4.2 by 2.2 by 0.9 inches and weighing 4.6 ounces, the hefty handset is slightly smaller than its jumbo-size predecessor, the Nokia 6600, although it still makes for a tight fit in a jeans pocket. That said, the silver and ice-white design is sleek; if there were an Apple iTunes phone in our future, it should look something like this.
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Nokia 6682's 2-inch, 176x208-pixel display looks great. Images and snapshots boast rich color and plenty of detail on the phone's 262,000-color LCD, compared with those on the 6600's meager 65,000-color screen, although we had a hard time reading the display in direct sunlight. The 6682's colorful menus are easy to navigate. That said, the phone sports Symbian Series 60 OS, and it's beginning to show its age.
The phone's backlit, silver and gray keypad looks great, and we especially like the easy-to-use five-way mouse, the jumbo-size soft keys, and the dedicated text-entry key that lets you toggle between predictive text, symbol, and alpha modes. Still, we have a bone to pick with the numeric keys, which are way too small for our fingers and have a shimlike design that makes for tough tapping. It's too bad Nokia didn't shrink the large soft keys to make more room for the digits.
The Nokia 6682 also suffers from a dearth of dedicated controls: There's no volume rocker on the edge of the phone, which is a major inconvenience if you need to tweak the volume during a call. Plus, there's no speakerphone button and not even a dedicated shutter release for the camera, which is a standard feature for camera phones. All you get is a voice-command button on the left edge of the phone, as well as a power control on the right. On a positive note, Nokia has added an easy-access slot for the 6682's Reduced Size MultiMediaCard (RS-MMC)--far better than its earlier practice of hiding the card behind the phone's battery.
The back of the phone is practically featureless, save for a small Nokia logo and a discrete sliding cover. Open the cover, and you'll find the 4.5mm camera lens and an LED flash; the phone automatically switches to camera mode when you open the lens cover. It's a sleek setup, but there's no mirror for self-portraits, and those who like camera phones that actually look like a camera from behind will be disappointed.
Also in the box, you'll find a nicely designed, earbud-style headset that hangs from your neck like a lanyard; we especially like the thick, tangle-resistant cord, although the headset uses a proprietary connector rather than a standard 2.5mm headset plug. You also get a data cable and syncing software for your PC.
The handset's Bluetooth capabilities were fully (and refreshingly) enabled, which meant we could transmit images and files to and from the device, sync contacts and events, and connect wireless Bluetooth headsets easily. The phone even allows you to connect to a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard, perfect for typing long messages without making your fingertips bleed. We like the business-minded extras, including Info Print, which prints your messages, contacts, events, and notes; a PDF reader; and Quickoffice, which opens and edits Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Another great addition is the offline mode, which allows you to use the nonphone functions without a SIM card.
The Nokia 6682's 1.3-megapixel camera comes with solid, if not top-notch features, including burst and night modes; a self-timer, which has 10-, 20-, and 30-second settings; plenty of brightness; contrast and white-balance settings; four color modes (Normal, Sepia, Black and White, and Negative); and a 6X digital zoom. Unfortunately, you can snap pictures at only two resolution settings--1,280x960 or 640x480--which doesn't leave you with a lot of options if, say, you're looking to take small, low-quality thumbnail pictures for your contact book. We also wish there were an autofocus feature, a tool that we're seeing on more and more camera phones. On the bright side, however, is the 6682's stellar photo-editing app, which lets you crop, rotate, and enhance images; add a graphic frame, of which nine rather avant-garde choices are available; insert text; and even turn a photo into a greeting card. Done snapping pictures? You can send them to friends via e-mail, MMS, or Bluetooth, or you can print them out directly to a USB-enabled photo printer using Nokia's XpressPrint feature.
The camera doubles as a video recorder, which captures movies up to an hour long at resolutions ranging from 128x96 to 176x144. The recorder has most of the same settings as the still camera, including a night mode. Even better, though, is the phone's video editor, which lets you cut your clips, edit one clip into another, add a sound bite or slow-motion effect to your movie, or turn your color clip into black and white. There's also a Movie Director tool that takes your clips, then turns them into cool, MMS-ready videos, complete with funky music, fast edits, graphic frames, and titles--very nice.
The Nokia 6682's snazzy music player supports both MP3 and unlocked AAC files. Once you transfer your tunes via the USB cable or Bluetooth, the player sorts your music according to album and artist, making for easy browsing. The slick player interface displays artists and track info, along with a progress bar and a time elapsed/total time, and you can create multiple playlists or shuffle/repeat your tunes to your heart's content. You can play music in the background while you use the phone's other functions, but there's no main-menu shortcut or dedicated keys to pause your tunes in a pinch. We also wish there were an equalizer to tweak the sound quality.
Personalization options on the Nokia 6682 are good, with customizable ringer profiles--such as Normal, Silent, Meeting, Outdoor, Pager, and Offline--as well as polyphonic ring tones and three themes but no screensavers. You can also set your photos as wallpaper and assign individual ring tones and photos to your contacts. The handset doesn't come with much in the way of games--all you get are demos for Lemonade Tycoon (yawn), Hard Rock Casino, and the aggravating, low-res Snake EX, which is pretty weak, considering the 3D games we're starting to see on the latest smart phones.
We tested the Nokia 6682 (GSM 850/1800/1900; GPRS; class 10 EDGE) in New York City, and we had no trouble with our calls; our fellow chatters reported that we sounded loud and clear. We also tested the phone in our living room with a TV, a wireless network, and a microwave oven whirring away, and we noticed no extra interference or signal loss. Calls made over the speakerphone were somewhat diminished in quality, but that's to be expected.The Nokia 6682's photos look quite vivid and detailed for snapshots taken with a camera phone, although they can't match the picture quality of the latest 2-megapixel handsets. While we experienced little in the way of lens distortion on the edges of our pictures, we did notice some video noise creeping into our images, even in bright, day-lit shots. The movies we shot with the 6682's video recorder looked predictably murky. Our MP3s sounded pretty good with the Nokia 6682's earbud-style headset, although we wish we had been able to crank the volume a little louder. Plus, some bass- and treble-boosting EQ controls wouldn't hurt.
During battery tests, we beat the rated talk time of 4 hours by an extra hour. The promised standby time is 11 days; we got 9 days on a single charge in our tests. According to FCC radiation tests, the Nokia 6682 has a digital SAR rating of 0.82 watts per kilogram.