Before I start, I must say that this is my second phone with AT&T wireless. My first phone (with AT&T wireless) was the Nokia 6200. I really wish that I could review this phone, but unfortunately, at the moment, Eopinions.com does not have this available to be reviewed. If it does happen to become available to review, you can bet that I will DEFINITELY review it!!!

I must say: I love this phone!!! There are a few problems with it, but with me being a very "gadget loving" person, I can easily overlook them.

Ahhh, there are several things that you'll notice about this phone when you first hold it in your hands. The first is that there is a square joystick, instead of an up/down/left/right button. This is somewhat appreciated, yet there is a little concern here.

What I mean by concern can be seen by looking at the picture of the phone above. Take a very careful and close look at the "Talk" and "End" keys, and the two soft keys above them (actually, since the phone is flipped open, the "Talk", "End", and soft keys are to the right of the screen. Click on the picture to see an enlarged view).

You will see that the soft keys are connected to each other. Technically, it is one big button which lies across the top of the joystick that "see-saws" to each side. The "Talk" and "End" buttons are the same, just lying along the bottom of the joystick. The problem with this is that the joystick can bump into the buttons on top or bottom. This has never really caused any problems with scrolling through the menus, I just thought that I would make note of this.

The joystick is pretty responsive, but there is another problem with it. The joystick is closer to the bottom buttons than it is to the side or top. It does a nice short, hard click which is very responsive. However, it feels like you have to push the joystick further and harder to move the cursor up or to the left or right. Due to this, it feels like the joystick is getting looser. It wiggles up, and feels like I have to press it up harder now.

The other thing that you will notice is that the keypad can flip open. Now, if you are buying this phone, then I would hope the you knew that there was a full flip out keyboard. However, if you give it to someone who doesn’t know about this phone, make sure that they know how to open it so they don’t see the flipping keypad and force it open and break it.

The keypad catches at the bottom of the phone. This is how the keypad “locks” closed. When the keypad is closed, if you look close, you can see little gold contacts which connect to the “screen” part of the phone. This is how the phone determines if the keypad is open or closed. There are gold contacts at the top of the screen section to sense when to enable the full keyboard.

The keyboard feels very stable, unlike some flip phones, whose flip feels very loose and unstable. Even with lots of switching back and forth between keypad and keyboard, I don’t think you’ll break this flip off.

One of the most difficult things to get used to, is how a few buttons are re-mapped on the phone face when you open the keyboard up. The screen rotates 90 degrees clockwise when you open the keypad. If you look at the picture carefully, you can see directly to the left of the word “Options”, there is a button. Well, when the keyboard is closed, this button is the power/profile button. When the keyboard is exposed, this becomes the left softkey. The original left softkey becomes the right softkey, and the right softkey is now the power/profiles button. The Talk and End keys stay the same though. The joystick’s functions are also spun clockwise, like the screen. Right is now up, down is now right, left is now down, and up is now left. Interesting and cool, but way confusing, until you get practice!

When you have the keypad closed, the number pad lights up each time you press a button. When you open the keypad and enable the keyboard, the keypad becomes disabled. In addition, if you have “predictive text” activated, then it will be automatically turned off (it will be reactivated when you close the keyboard). The keyboard has basically all of the buttons, symbols and everything that you would expect to find on a normal keyboard. One small note to mention (very insignificant to most people, but I noticed) is that the “Shift” symbol above the ׀” key and the “Apostrophe” key (the “@” symbol and the “Double Quote Marks” symbol, respectively) are switched. The “Double Quote Marks” is activated when you “Shift Press” the ׀” key, and the “@” symbol is activated when you “Shift Press” the “Apostrophe” key.

This keyboard is awesome! You have “Backspace” and “Shift” buttons, and number buttons. In addition, you have IMMEDIATE access to capitalize any letters you want right away. You can also access the symbol you want in as much time as it takes you to find it on the keyboard.

One of the coolest features on the keyboard (you’ll only appreciate this if you text from dark places, like at night, or in the movie theatre) is a “key backlight” button. It is located in the upper left-most of the keyboard. One press of this key will immediately cause all of the keys to be lit up immediately. This makes the keyboard much easier on the eyes (in the dark). Obviously, when you close the keyboard, the backlight is turned off.

On the right side of the phone, there is a opaque black plastic thing (for lack of a better word). It doesn’t stick out or anything. I just can’t figure out what to call it. If you don’t know, not all IR port are “glass” shiny and smooth. If a friend hadn’t shown me that his Nokia phone had this kind of IR port, I might have passed over it at first. You can send a lot of stuff through the IR port. You can beam your business cards (anyone and everyone in your contact list), notes, messages, and more to and from your phone. It helped me save alot of wear and tear on my keypad’s buttons. I just activated the IR port (you must activate it before you start using it), and then beamed my SONY Clie's address book onto my phone with ease! Ah, the benefits of IR.

The only problem I had with the IR port is that several times, when using it, I had to reactivate it. It seemed to lose connection with my SONY Clie for some reason. Other than that, it's great!!!

Right above the IR port is the speakerphone. The second best thing about Nokia’s is the strength of their microphone and speaker (The first being their awesome reception despite them not having a visible antennae). The microphone can pick up your voice from about three feet when you speak in a normal tone. The speaker is extremely loud and clear. There is a volume button on the mirror side of the IR port. The volume button will only adjust the speaker and the earpiece’s volume. I used to think that if I put the volume all the way down, the phone’s ringer wouldn’t sound. Not true.

That’s about all that I have to say about the physical make up of the phone. The internal menu is typical Nokia; in other words, difficult to navigate until you’ve been through it a couple of times. There is the basic text and multi-media messaging options, and there are the call log (which shows your recent calling history, including how long you’ve talked), the profiles menu (read my Nokia 3585i evaluation to learn about profiles), the settings menu, the organizer (a calendar, alarm clock and to-do list), a notepad included exclusively for this phone (more on this below), a radio (which must have a headset to be activated), a gallery option to view your wallpaper and ringtones, games and applications, an extras box with a calculator, a voice recorder, voice commands, a countdown timer and a stopwatch. There is also a connectivity option and a services option. More on these below.

The notepad option is only included on this phone model. It allows you take notes using either the keypad or the keyboard (of course, the keyboard is the reason this option is in here). It lets you take notes up to 3000 characters about anything. You can use this to take down your homework assignment if you can’t write it down. Make a quick shopping list, or start composing ideas for your English composition. You can then send the note as a text message or a multimedia message. There is an option to send the note through the IR port, but I am unsure how to. I checked the instruction manual, but it doesn’t give any details on how or where I can send the note via IR. I tried sending it to my SONY Clie, but was unsuccessful getting it into my memo pad. I guess the only thing that you can send it to is another Nokia 6800. Don’t know why this is. It’d be awesome if you could send notes between your PDA and phone. This would help alot. That way you could make little notes on your phone, or type up your homework, then transfer it to your PDA. Not sure why Nokia didn’t leave this option open.

The radio function only works with an attached headset, which by the way sucks. The headset itself is good, it’s just that I don’t like the “earbud headsets”, and that’s the one which comes with it. I got an “earboom headset” with the Nokia 6200, which is much better (actually, same quality, just much more comfortable!).

Anyways, the headset must be attached to use to the radio. I really don’t understand this concept. If someone figures it out, PLEASE, e-mail me and tell me why. Why do I say this? Because you must have the headset plugged in at all times for the radio to be on. There is an option to divert the sound to the speakerphone speaker, yet you must keep the headset plugged in. It’s stupid. I mean, if the sound is coming out through the speaker, why must the headset be attached?!?!? Also, why is there only FM? Yeah, that’s the more common band of the radio, but still.

The radio lets you save up to 20 of your favorite channels so you can easily jump to them. It also can automatically tune to the next available channel, or you can manually tune the radio up or down to everything in between.

Next you have the “Gallery”, which holds all of your downloaded wallpapers and ringtones. You can add folders here also, and rename the new (not the original) folders. The phone comes with some preloaded graphics and two animated GIF’s (by the way, with animated GIF’s, on the stand-by screen, the picture does NOT move. It just shows the first frame of animation. You must open the picture through the gallery in order to see the animation.). You get about 500 KB to download graphics and ringtones. However, when it comes to graphics and ringtones, this phone SUCKS!!! Keep in mind that I said this is my wife’s phone. Well, she doesn’t care about electronics or video games as much as me, but she likes TV. Well, I had put alot of ringers onto my Nokia 6200. I expected this to be the same case with her phone (Nokia 6800). However, it was worse on her phone.

If you read my review on the LG 5350 for Sprint, then you will remember that I mentioned two main sites, “PCSpix.com” and “matrixM.com” (if you go to “matrixM.com”, then please put me as the referral). Well, the “PCSpix.com” is indeed geared towards Sprint PCS phones, but it will work for any other phone that can access the web. What I mean is that with my LG 5350, I was able to upload MIDI files that were as big as 70 or 80 KB. However, with my Nokia 6200 phone, I was only able to upload MIDI files that were less than 30 KB, and even then, I had a bunch of files that didn’t work. However, I am proud to say that I have completely used up all memory, save 1 KB, with graphics and music. Well, actually, I wanted more music, but oh well. I can report that there were no problems uploading pictures from “PCSpix.com”, however, I mainly use “matrixM.com” for graphics.

Now, while I noticed this slight decrease in maximum MIDI file size for my Nokia 6200, with the 6800, I cannot load any files larger than about 10 to 15 KB onto the phone. I really don’t know why. The phone has 5.1 MB free. Yes, 5.1 Megabytes, not Kilobytes (It has so much space because of the extra notepad option). It greatly puzzles me. This has been stressful, as I have been unable to get some of her favorite TV shows music onto the phone. I did manage to get her Titanic, I Love Lucy and The Brady Bunch, but was unsuccessful with getting her “Boy Meets World”.

The games and applications options use “Shared Memory” with the Gallery. What this means is that when you save a game, it takes away the memory you have towards ringers and graphics. When you save a ringer, it takes away the memory towards your games. When you save a graphic, you lose space to save a ringer. You can also find games which will work towards this phone at “matrixM.com”. Some of the game say they don’t work, but they do. MikuDrop, for example (which is a Tetris clone) works on this phone, yet says it is incompatible.

In the “Extras Box” there is a basic calculator which does basic math and square roots and squares for you, a voice recorder to record a voice memo, or even a bit of your phone conversation, and voice commands, which I have come to love and treasure. I love using voice commands with my headset, because I can just hold the “Connect/Disconnect” button on the headset and then say my command, all with the phone in my pocket! There are also a countdown timer and a stopwatch in the “Extras Box”.

Wow, that’s alot of stuff!!!

One little secret here. This phone is available exclusively for AT&T US wireless service. After Nokia produces the phone, they send it to AT&T so that AT&T can choose to remove any options from the menu if they want to. All wireless phone companies do this. An example of this is the Nokia 3585i for Sprint PCS. Nokia put a web browser on it and the option to text message from the phone. However, Sprint decided to remove these options.

Anyways, not only do the phone companies remove certain options from the phone, but they also lock the phone to their specific network. In other words, you can't buy an AT&T phone and use it for T-Mobile or Cingular. Until now.

If you want to "unlock" your phone so it can access other networks, go here: "http://nokiafree.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=44". Now, this site is for any DCT4 phone (not just the Nokia 6800), in other words, any next generation phone which takes a SIM card. If you join (for free) and then post your IMEI number (found below the battery), somebody should then reply with your unlock code.

The way you enter your code is you just turn off your phone, remove the battery then the SIM card, replace the battery and power on your phone. Your phone should request that you insert a SIM card. Well, when you get to this screen, enter your code. Your phone will then give you a message that you have unlocked your phone. Now you can place any other service provider's SIM card to use with this or any other phone!!!

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): $173.99
Recommended for: Stylish Trendsetters - Hip and Trendy