Nokia 6708: initial review

Well, the short version is: pretty happy so far.

I’ve had the phone a few days now, and I’m pretty happy with it. It won’t win any prizes for looks, that’s for sure; it’s a strictly utilitarian PDA phone. However, the sound quality is good on the calls. The handwriting recognition for writing SMSs is pretty good out of the box; I haven’t tried starting to train it yet. An SMS has to be written using the stylus; it’s not possible to use the buttons. However, this doesn’t really bother me too much – it irritates the hell out of me when people wander around randomly because they’re trying to text as they walk, and it’s something I’ve always tried to avoid doing myself, so this doesn’t involve any major behaviour changes for me. The camera is no great shakes at 1.3 Mb, but the few I’ve taken show that it will be fine for blog pictures, which is really all I wanted. Note-taking is fine, though I haven’t tried the dictaphone yet. Nor have I tried the universal remote feature, though I notice that when I was first setting the phone up out of the box, various aircon units in my apartment turned themselves off and the router rebooted.

One thing I dislike: when composing an SMS, it’s very easy to accidentaly tick someone’s name as a recipient in error. I don’t think I’ve cc’d someone by mistake yet, but it could be easy to do.

The USB connection to my Windows laptop is a bit flaky, but usually works OK. Sometimes it doesn’t, and then I have to reboot both phone and computer. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to transfer mp3 files to the phone, and pictures from it.

I installed the Nokia phone management tools without problem, and the QuickOffice applications (for opening Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc) installed easily, though I haven’t used them yet. The main reason I bought this model, however, was to have a Chinese-English dictionary that I could use with stylus input – as someone who’s learning Chinese, this is a vital tool! In fact, I had a lot of trouble getting this to install from the CD, and I’ve only just managed it. I’ve experimented a bit with it and it seems OK, though all of the menus are in Chinese, which is not much use to me! Still, I am able to translate both ways, and that’s what’s important.

On the whole, it seems so far to meet all of my requirements adequately. It’s definitely a business user’s phone rather than, say, a media person’s creative centre, but that’s OK with me. If I’d paid list price, I would still be thinking that it was pretty expensive for what I got, but since I got it with slightly more than a 20% discount, I’m pretty happy.