My 6260 Review..

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I feel especially qualified to review this phone because it's the second Nokia
Series 60 / Symbian phone I've owned. This review is not about the Series 60
in general though, you should know by now it's completely awesome and the best
OS any small device has ever run, period, including phones, PDA's and anything
else.  

I previously owned a 3650, one of the earlier Series 60 phones, the one with
the weird round dial keypad, which I came to rather like after getting used to
it. Further background: buying 6260 was only necessitated by my old one
getting nicked. :-(

Summary / conclusion:
If I hadn't lost my 3650 then 6260 would NOT have been worth the upgrade.
However, if you don't currently own a Symbian smartphone, it's worth
considering because it's currently the most affordable one of the recent
models, and looks cool. (Still, Symbian-phone people don't require "cool" as
the OS and apps/games themselves are already plenty cool enough  

Some good points:

* Looks cool, nice bright display, clam-shell/swivel design

Improvements over earlier Series 60 phones:

More memory, more colours & brighter display. Better Bluetooth implementation,
Skins & themes, minor user interface tweaks, yada yada.. Email now has SSL
support meaning you get to read Google GMail through POP3 which works
incredible. This because GMail auto-archives your mail after you open it
through POP3). This saves a lot of deleting and filing of old messages.

Some flaws:
* Build quality. Hello, is this a Nokia? Doesn't feel like one, but by all
means try it yourself. Anyway, with 2 years warranty, this may become Nokia's
problem rather than mine.

* It doesn't feel faster than my old 3650!? That one was adequate though, so
is this one. Still you're waiting almost 2 seconds before your contacts show
up after pressing the button. You'd think it would be instant with a more
recent phone. No complaints about other things, such as T9 text entry is
plenty fast.

* Ring tone 'euphoniousness' (is that a word?) is not improved. Adequate, but
not concert hall like some Samsungs. (Again, Symbian poeple aren't Nancy's who
buy phones for their cute looks & sounds. If you want something that looks
and sounds cute, go get a puppy.)

* Camera application automatically starts when you swivel the display. Why?
Have to exit the app every time you swivel the display! Nokia apparently
still thinks of a camera as a core use of this thing. Also the resolution is
not as good as other recent Nokia phones, but having established that phone
cameras are toys anyway and that 6260 is affordable, I don't see this as a
minus.

* Full camera resolution is ONLY available with the display flat against the
base, with the display pointing at the sky for 'landscape' shots, or sideways
(away from you) for standing-up 'portrait' shots. Any other display position
will result in something like 480x320, not 640x480. Why? (The only thing I
could think of may be that the smaller image size may be more usable when sent
to other phones that have smaller displays.. Still.. why not make this user
configurable. For shooting at maximum resolution you now have to look straight
down at the screen, holding the phone horizontally. My grandfather used to
own one of those cameras with the viewfinder pointing at the sky so you had to
look straight down into it. It's exactly like that!

* Awkward placement of the pencil button.
This is the button that even many reviewers don't understand what it does
anyway, but it's used to SELECT TEXT for copying and pasting between
applications, AND to select multiple items, messages, emails, pictures so they
can all be sent or deleted all at the same time. So an ESSENTIAL thing for a
smartphone. With the button so close to the joy-pad, holding the button and
dragging/selecting text to the left becomes VERY difficult.

* Battery life has not improved... You'll be charging it every other day, or
every day if you play around with it a lot. Then again, this is fair due to
the Series 60's overall awesomeness.  

Comments, rants and flames are gladly received.