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View Full Version : Nokia 6680 Part 4: Using Advanced Features



Ben
15th April 2005, 02:31 AM
Using Advanced Features:

A range of viewers come bundled with the 6680 on the included memory card. Remember that when you remove the memory card these programs will no longer be accessible. If you buy a larger memory card, like I did, then I recommend using a memory card reader to copy the contents of the smaller card to the larger one. That way you won’t be swapping cards every five minutes. You must format all memory cards you wish to use in the Nokia 6680 if you wish to avoid any glitches that might arise through formatting elsewhere.

While the phone can open a multitude of formats of files for your viewing, I specifically tried PDF and DOC – the ones you’re most likely to come across. I don’t know about you, but having Power Point presentations sent to my mobile doesn’t happen all too often. I immediately noticed that the Document viewer failed to show any of the embedded Word images, where as the PDF viewer displayed the PDF file perfectly. Ok, there was a lot of horizontal scrolling around the PDF, but it was all there and I was very impressed.

As well as being able to download these attachments from incoming emails, you have the ability to set up email polling. This connects automatically to your mailbox and downloads the headers of any new emails waiting. You then choose which emails to view on the handset – meaning you don’t pay extra for downloading SPAM. Rich text formatted emails are stripped, but hyperlinks remain. I haven’t tried full blown HTML email, but I assume it’s still viewable. There’s a trick to setting up your email, however, which is a little more complicated than I’d have liked. By default, Orange especially have different ‘Access Points’ that you use for each network task you want to perform. For example, your MMS is sent using a different ‘Access Point’ to the one you use for Web Browsing. You can only have one Access Point open at a time, so in order to allow all my applications to work at once I’ve set everything to “Orange Internet” that’ll still work afterwards. This includes email, browsing, Agile Messenger and VRadio (I’ll come to these later). Your MMS will probably have to stay with the correct access point, and some functions on Orange World probably wont work correctly using Orange Internet either – the correct setting if you run into trouble is “Orange GPRS WAP”. A word of warning: If the application you are using is connected via an access point other than the one your Email uses then you will be disconnected every time your email polling kicks in. If you don’t intend to use email polling then you don’t need to worry as much.

The usual comprehensive calendar, to-do, wallet and file manager tools are also available along with many others, but if I covered all of these in this review then I’d be depriving you of some serious alone-time with the instruction manual. So, I’ll let you explore them for yourself. Needless to say, there’s a powerful set of tools, and I doubt you’ll use all of them.

bsrjl1
20th April 2005, 11:25 PM
Couldn't see anything in the review about the Active Desktop feature - the handset I use doesn't have this feature & it's too much hassle to goto the office, find a dongle & update it with Phoenix. How about a few lines & pictures about this?

Ben
21st April 2005, 01:32 AM
Active Desktop feature - are you referring to the new icons on the home screen & displaying any upcoming events? Useful, but by no means essential - they're really nothing to report home on and should have been present all along. It's quite sad to see that Symbian has had to copy Windows Mobile given the head start it had. Having had an iPAQ running Windows Mobile/Pocket PC I guess I didn't even notice it was there! Let me know if that's what you mean and I'll happily tell you some more about it & the options available.

bsrjl1
21st April 2005, 08:02 AM
That's the one, it's just one of the real differences between the 6680 & 6630 but certainly sounds like you're not impressed. I think there's facilities for Operators to push data to the Active Desktop screen, but this wasn't present in the first models released.

Ben
21st April 2005, 11:43 AM
My screen permanently displays "No calendar entries for today" at the moment, so I guess I need to find an excuse to use the calendar! Other than that, the 5 shortcuts are useful in the way that I use the first two: Contacts is selected by default, so pushing in the middle navigation key opens your contacts as you'd expect. Pressing right then centre opens the next icon along - Messaging. So, to remove duplication, I changed the Messaging softkey to Web (I was missing a direct web access key like on the Z1010).

You change the shortcuts in Phone Settings: Standby. Here are the definitions.
Active Standby: To make shortcuts to different applications available on the display when your phone is in standby mode, select On.
Active Standby Apps: To select the shortcuts to applications that you want to appear on the display.

There's also a note that operators may choose to lock these shortcut icons so they cannot be changed. So, if you buy this phone on Vodafone, expect "Vodafone Live!", "Vodafone Live! Again"....

Why the desktop has been called 'standby' I'm not quite sure - perhaps anything else would have encroached on Microsoft territory a little too much. Being my first Symbian phone, it just seems to make sense that they're there. I very much doubt that their absence would make a great deal of difference, but I wont be switching Active Standby off either.

Is it easy to get the software flashed? It sounds like you're able to do yours yourself. Having bought the phone so early I'd imagine it'd be to my advantage to update the software after a while.

bsrjl1
21st April 2005, 09:07 PM
Latest Nokia Phoenix software, update package, PKD1 dongle & a USB cable are all you need. Had to update my 6650 regularly, but one upgrade needed new hardware. But now the person with the dongle has changed offices, so it's a bit more difficult.

I think you can get hold of PKD1 compatible devices...