Nokia 6555 Review

Interface:

The 6555 runs on Series 40 software with active standby. All of the regular information, signal strength, time, data, battery life, and carrier, is found at the top bar of the home screen. Options, menu and music are all found at the bottom and accessed by the left and right soft touch key and the center button. The shortcuts associated with the D-pad can be displayed on the home screen and they manage not clutter up the screen when activated.

All the icons in the main menu are arranged in a 3x4 grid and they even have little animations. In case a grid isn’t in your taste, you have the option to change it to a grid with details or a tabbed view. To further suit your needs, each option can be moved to a desired place. The menu itself is very well laid out as are the options found within the categories no guessing on where something is and apart from the games and applications, there is no delay in when selecting something.

Phonebook:

The phonebook is actually quite an ordinary one. There’s really nothing special about it but Nokia does have a different layout to it where instead of just having all of your information listed, details such as address or job title can be added to your liking. Our only gripe with this is that each detail has to be added separately just adding to the amount of time it takes to complete the entry.



There are a total of 1000 contacts that can be saved to the phone and the search function doesn’t just show the person that is being search but instead only shows the entries with the exact match to what’s been typed into it.

Organizer:

The organizer consists of the following: alarm clock, calendar, to-do list, notes, calculator, timer, stopwatch, converter, and world clock.
The alarm clock is a pretty basic one and only allows you to add one alarm. At least there are enough fields to get you up and ready for the day: alarm time, repeat, alarm tone, and snooze time.



Within the calendar, a reminder, meeting, call birthday, or memo can be made. Sadly, there is only a month and week few and it would be nice to see an agenda or day listing.

The calculator offers some scientific functions which are rare to see on phones within its class. Still, if you need to do a lot of calculating, it’s best to carry around a real calculator.

Normally, the conversion portion would be skipped but what’s special here is that your own conversion can be set so that if there’s a trip to another country that’s not listed, the rate can be added and there’s no need to stress.

The rest of the items are very basic and will not be discussed.

Messaging:

Messaging can be done by SMS, MMS, email, and audio messages. T9 is there to help you text much faster and is pretty reliable. There are plenty of emails clients already preloaded, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, AIM, Windows Live Mail, AT&T Yahoo!, BellSouth, Comcast, Earthlink, Juno, Mindspring, and NetZero, with the 6555 to help get you on and check your email.



Connectivity:

The 6555 is a quad-band (850/900/1800/1900) headset with dual-band UMTS (850/1900) 3G support and this allows you to take it on your travels all over the world but don’t expect the same internet speeds outside of the US as 3G won’t be offered by AT&T there. Well, it seems that almost every phone out there nowadays has Bluetooth and there is no exception here.

It has Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP so that you can listen to music in stereo and if you don’t own a PC with Bluetooth or a dongle for one, just use a microUSB cable to connect to the PC.

Internet:

Surfing the internet is possible thanks to the WAP 2.0/xHTML browser but it won’t get you to all of your sites. For us, we were able to view sites as www.phonearena.com and www.youtube.com in WAP but when checking out www.myspace.com, the browser refused. With sites that we were able to visit, there were spots where the text happened to overlap and no fix could be found for this.



Camera:

A 1.3 megapixel camera is supplied here and while it’s and entry level device, photo quality was adequate, and some of them came out very nice for the resolution, just don’t expect marvelous results. Night photos came out very grainy but at least the day photos are much nicer. It only took about 1½ seconds for the camera to load once the button was pressed and it was even quick at taking pictures. The display shows you the number of picture that can be taken, mode, resolution, zoom level and quality. The camera resolution ranges all the way from 120 x 160 to 1024 x 1280 and can have a quality of basic, normal, or high.




Multimedia:

What handset nowadays would be complete without even a basic media player? The one found here is just that, a basic media player which allows the playback of MP3, AAC, eACC+, and WMA audio as well as 3GPP, H.263 and MPEG-4 video formats. There is an equalizer but don’t expect a Bose type experience when it’s changed.

We weren’t supplied with any headphones but we were able to test the loudspeaker and let us tell you that it does not disappoint. There was distortion when the volume was turned up all the way. On the lowest volume, it still manages to be very loud so if you’re in a crowded place, make sure to grab some headphones.

Software:

The 6555 support Java MIDP 2.0 so you can download plenty of applications if you are not pleased with the preloaded ones, which are a few games that are mostly just trials.