This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Simon Brown. Original Post: First experiences with a Nokia 6600 and Mac OS X Feed Title: Simon Brown's weblog Feed URL: http://www.simongbrown.com/blog/feed.xml?flavor=rss20&category=java Feed Description: My thoughts on Java, software development and technology. Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Simon Brown Latest Posts From Simon Brown's weblog

I decided that it was time to upgrade my mobile phone a couple of days ago and went for one of the new Nokia 6600 smartphones. I've been holding back on buying one of these because they've been expensive on my current network provider and I thought that I would find it too bulky. Thankfully this isn't the case. This is my first experience with the Symbian platform and it's got to be said that this is one cool device.

I must admit that I've never been a great fan of mobile phones with integrated PDA facilities but my experiences over the past couple of days have changed all that. So, why did I buy a Nokia 6600?

Well, first of all I've been after a camera-phone for a while now because there's been a few occasions when I've thought to myself, "I wish I had a camera on me". Sure, the quality isn't going to win any photography awards but the VGA output is certainly good enough for posting to websites, like a blog for example. In addition to photos, the Nokia 6600 also allows you to record short video clips. Not sure I'm going to use this to be honest, particularly since you can't do that much with a 10 second clip. More importantly though, the phone is GPRS and Bluetooth compatible - useful for several reasons, especially since I have Bluetooth support in my Apple PowerBook.

• I can surf the Internet from my phone with Opera for Smartphones
• I can check my e-mail on the move
• I can send files between my phone and my Mac
• I can sync up my contacts between my phone and my Mac using iSync
• I can use the phone as a modem, surfing the web from my Mac

Having my contacts synced up between devices is very neat. You do get a whole load of software with the phone for managing your contacts but it's for Windows only. I do have a Windows box but I don't use it often enough to want my contact data on there. Thankfully this is all supported out-of-the-box with Apple's iSync via Bluetooth. My phone did crash the first time I tried to sync but it's behaved itself ever since. After a bit of playing around, I now have a replicated list of contacts containing addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. At last - no more maintaining different lists!

Being able to dial-up to the Internet from my Mac via Bluetooth is amazing though. It's actually not that slow and you only pay for the bandwidth that you use. I was chatting to a friend on iChat the other night on the train - how cool is that!

The final thing is that the phone supports J2ME so I no longer have an excuse to not learn about it, particularly since I can transfer files from my Mac to the phone via Bluetooth. Shame most of the J2ME development tools are Windows only. Speaking of apps (Russell has a great list of apps here), I have got to get a copy of PhotoBlog for Series 60. I have no excuses not to implement the Atom API in Pebble now.