Review of the Nokia 6555
Introduction
The Nokia 6555, which was released in August 2007, has a clamshell design and seems to have been designed to fit in with the high end Nokia smartphones but at the same time hold its own ground. This phone comes in looking sleek and has a slim design that fits in the palm comfortably. The phone is designed with several features with a little bit of everything, yet not everything it has offers high performance ratings.
The phone is great to carry around as it is lightweight and of good size. The Nokia 6555 is great for music and entertainment as it has the battery capacity and memory capacity to accommodate listening to music on the go.
Let us jump right in and take a look at what the Nokia 6555 has to offer starting off with the design.
Design (3 out of 5)
The Nokia 6555 measures 99.6 x 44.3 x 19.6 mm and weighs in at 97 grams. This relatively lightweight phone comes in four colors namely Black, Red, Silver and Beige.
On the front panel when the Nokia 6555 is closed there is a secondary monochrome display and above it there is the 1.23MP camera lens.
Turning the phone over to the back you will find it quite plain as that space is reserved for the battery compartment. Inside the battery compartment you will find the SIM card slot.
Open the flip of the Nokia 6555, there is another TFT display on the top half of the phone which acts as the primary display. This display measures in at 2.0 inches. There is also the ear piece situated on this half of the Nokia 6555. The bottom half is reserved for the numeric keypad and the softkey panel. The softkey panel houses five buttons. The call begin and call end buttons, the two softkey control buttons and the five-way scroll keypad.
The left side of the Nokia 6555 has got the camera access hardware button and below it there are the volume up and volume down buttons.
User Interface (5 out of 5)
You can navigate the user interface of the Nokia 6555 primarily using the five-way keypad. The other other option you have to interact with the Nokia 6555 is by using the numeric keypad. From the home screen you can access the menu system which is a grid layout of icons. You can select the program you want by pressing the center button of the five-way scroll keypad. To move from one menu item to another you can user the remaining four buttons to navigate up, down, left and right.
Making calls is as simple as just pressing the green call begin key and selecting the number you want from a list or going into the address book to pick a contact from there to call. Unknown numbers can simply be keyed in using the numeric keypad.
Text can be input into the Nokia 6555 using the numeric keypad in shift mode. You can either type in words in full or use the T9 feature which provides an auto-complete feature to assist your typing.
Features (4 out of 5)
For those that would like some form of entertainment, the Nokia 6555 comes with a music player and a video player. With this phone you can also download games and applications over the internet or through other sources. Music can be listened to using the built-in external speaker or using a headset through the 2.5 mm audio jack.
For inter-device connectivity the Nokia 6555 provides a microUSB 2.0 interface and a Bluetooth 2.0 interface. For connecting to the cellular networks, the Nokia 6555 supports GSM and 3G through UMTS protocols. In addition to 3G there is also the slower connections with GPRS and EDGE. Internet can be accessed using the preinstalled WAP 2.0/xHTML web browser.
There is a camera with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels that also supports video recording at 15 FPS.
There is internal memory of up to 30MB. Additional memory is available through an external microSD card which is supported up to a maximum of 8GB. Even with the additional memory the phone book is limited to 1,000 entries.
The Nokia 6555 comes with a TFT display that is capable of showing 16 million colors at a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. The external secondary display shows up to 256K colors at a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels.
Performance (4 out of 5)
With about 300 hours of standby time and talk time of about 6 and a half hours this is a phone well suited to long trips.
There is good connectivity on the data networks through 3G. The connectivity speed does not completely measure up to other high end devices but is adequate for the needs of this phone.
Voice call quality is very good on the Nokia 6555. This phone is not in the habit of dropping calls. It is therefore ideal for using on the go when you have to get through pockets of low signal quality. The audio sound quality is awesome but unfortunately I cannot say the same for the video quality on the Nokia 6555.
The camera quality is also poor as it produces grainy photographs. The body of the Nokia 6555 is quite sturdy and can take a few knocks and bumps without falling apart.
Verdict (4 out of 5)
The Nokia 6555 is a phone that rates above average with strengths being in the entertainment features. With enough memory to store all your music files and the battery life to go with it, this phone is ideal for travel and you can take it on flights with the flight mode settings activated. The phone looks good and comes with four colors to chose from for different personality types. You can get yourself your very own Nokia 6555 for about US$210 and there I would not hesitate to say that this is a phone worth buying.
