Nokia 6682 multimedia phone

published: Mon, 26-Jun-2006   |   updated: Tue, 21-Aug-2018

A couple of weeks ago I was at TechEd in Boston, as part of the Developer Express team there. We had a great conference, showing off our products to great acclaim, etc, but speaking personally it sucked: I lost my Nokia cell phone on the Monday (it was in my pocket when we left the hotel in the taxi, but must have slipped out during the ride). After trying to call it pretty much continually for a good couple of hours, hoping someone would hear it ringing, I gave up and suspended the service (I'd activated international dialling on it for starters: didn't want that to get in the hands of some nefarious phone fence). Last Saturday, I went to buy myself a replacement, a Nokia 6682. Wow, what a lovely phone.

The reason I left it so long to get a replacement phone was that last week I was travelling again, this time to Microsoft in Redmond to learn all about writing controls in WPF, with Atlas, and what MS are going to do in that space.

Anyway, back to my new phone. My old one was a Nokia 6230, which I enjoyed very much. A candy bar (but then again I don't like flip phones), and with Bluetooth, memory card support, an OK camera, and it was small and light. So my replacement had to have at least that as a baseline.

I'm with Cingular, and I have to say their choice of phones is not that good. I did dither a bit about getting the Cingular 2125 phone (it's a Windows SmartPhone), and then the Sony Ericsson W600i, but then decided that the Nokia 6682 was the one for me.

To be honest, I didn't particularly want a Windows SmartPhone. I use and program in Windows all the time and just wanted a change. Heck, my PDA is a Sony Clie NX70V running Palm OS 5.0. The Sony Ericsson had no memory card support although it did come with 256Mb of on-board memory. In the end, it was my familiarity with the Nokia UI and the features of the 6682 that made me select the phone.

Features that I like: candybar form factor, quad-band so I can use it abroad, extensible memory (using RS-MMC cards), 1.3 megapixel camera with flash, Bluetooth, great synchronization with Outlook (using said Bluetooth), MP3 player, and the way the camera app starts up when the slider covering the camera lens is slid down. Features that I'm not fond of especially: the bloody silly pop-port connection for headphones. I mean to say, what's wrong with a normal audio jack? For then I can use whichever headphones I like (including my Sony noise-cancelling ones). Features I absolutely detest: Nokia seem to be suffering from the PC world disease that Dell and HP have popularized of adding garbage trial applications to the basic OS. The apps I started all seem have two trials as well: you lose one of them just going "what's Lemonade then?" At least I can delete them, so bye bye Hard Rock Casino I never knew thee.

The phone is about as thick and as tall as my previous one, but it is slightly wider. The fit and finish is extremely good: it feels smooth and solid and not flimsy in the slightest. It weighs slightly more than the 6230 (at just over 4.5 oz) but not so you'd notice.

I spent last night downloading the various tools and SDKs for the phone from Nokia. Yep, I'm going to play around programming the phone in Java (it's either that or programming direct to the Symbian OS using C++, and to be frank I'm not that interested). So I downloaded Eclipse 3.1 as well: the Nokia tools and emulators plug-in directly. At least with Eclipse I can play around with the supplied refactorings and still call it "work"!