Nokia 6600 Slide 3G mobile phone

Smooth with a capital 'smooth'

The sides of the phone are button-free: the camera is fired up and the volume controlled using navpad shortcuts. This makes the phone smooth to fondle, but we’d have preferred the practicality of side buttons.

Slipping down the slider, the numberpad is compact, but the buttons are sensibly sized, sufficiently defined and with enough movement for hassle-free texting. We had no problems typing at reasonable speed, with the phone well balanced for twin-thumbed tapping.

The slider's well balanced for hassle-free texting

The 6600 Slide’s workhorse S40 user UI presents the familiar Nokia menu system. The main screen has the option of Active Standby, which provides four shortcut icons at the top row of the display, aling with notes and calendar reminders, and status monitoring for the music player and FM radio. Or you can keep the screen clean and use navpad shortcuts for calling up features.

It’s not quite all vanilla S40, though. Nokia has included a tap control that lets you to reject incoming calls and silence alarms with a couple of finger taps on the front or back of the phone. You can pop up a large clock with a quick double-tap action.

You can turn this feature on or off within the phone's sensor settings, but we found it worked fine for us, given a sharp tap, and was particularly welcome for early morning alarm pausing. It’s a gimmick, but you may find it useful for discreet call avoidance.

The main camera on the back of the phone is unprotected by a lens cover and has no fancy Carl Zeiss branding like some Nokias do. It’s equipped with a twin-LED flash for low-light photography, with an autofocus system that lifts it a few notches above basic point-and-shoot fixed focus cameraphones.