The Nokia 6620 manages, impressively, to master a fair number of functions in a small package. But is there a cost to being the jack-of-all-trades of smartphones?

The physical design and hardware interface are well thought out and it features a very easy to use "joy stick," a little nubbin above the number keys that you manipulate with the end of your index finger to navigate menus and scroll pages. You can lever it up, down, left or right, and push it in to select an item.

The Bluetooth-enabled GSM/EDGE/GPRS smartphone works on 850, 1800 and 1900 MHz GSM networks. It has a sticker price of $500. But AT&T Wireless sells the 6620 with two-year airtime deals starting at $250 (with rebate). Cingular has it starting at $350 with a two-year plan.

The other keys are necessarily tiny but I was able to adjust to them, even with my fat fingers. There are two soft keys—buttons that change function according to what's shown on the screen—flanking the joy stick, and slender Talk and Hang-up buttons on either side of the screen.

The camera lens is on the back of the unit, flush to the surface. It means you're always smudging its glass cover with your fingers when using the phone for other functions, but there really isn't anywhere else to put it.

For pictures and video and Web browsing, you need a good LCD. The 6620 features a bright, clear, but small 176x208-pixel and 65,536-color screen. It's quite a bit smaller than the biggest PDA screens, but this didn't seem to be a huge drawback except when viewing non-WAP Web pages.

And keeping the screen small obviously allows Nokia to keep the whole phone marvelously tiny. It measures 4.28 x 2.29 x .93 inches and weighs only 4.37 ounces.

While it's the multimedia capabilities—especially imaging, including video—that will catch your attention, this unit worked very well as a plain ordinary cell phone in our testing, showing good signal strength even in fringe areas and excellent voice quality. We used an AT&T-registered unit on the Canadian network of AT&T roaming partner Rogers Communications.

Battery life for the included 850 mAh Li-Ion Battery is rated at four hours digital talk time, eight days digital standby. The 6620 also includes the latest voice bells and whistles—voice dialing and command and control of PDA functions (which worked reasonably well, though not perfectly, in our tests) and integrated hands-free speaker phone. It even lets you record conversations, voice memos and sound clips and send them via e-mail or multimedia messaging.

The 6620 also works well as a basic PDA. It uses the Symbian Operating System 7.0 and Nokia's own Series 60 interface, which delivers PDA applets that include contacts, calendar, and to-do.

They are less functional and more awkward to use than Palm or Pocket PC PDA applets—mainly because of the data entry method, as there is now touchscreen. As with most smartphones, you have to press number keys multiple times to enter letters, and hit a function key to access the menu of special characters.

Still, if you're mostly reading rather than entering PDA data by using your PC to type in calendar, contact and to-do items and then synchronizing them to the phone using the supplied USB data cable and Nokia PC Suite 6 software, then the 6620 applets are perfectly adequate.

The 6620 provides access to the Web via AT&T's mMode WAP2 (Wireless Application Protocol 2) premium content service. It's mostly a vehicle for selling you things you don't need, such as pictures of scantily clad women and goofy ring tones, but it does include some free news, weather and sports in WAP format and access to the public Web.

When you connect over an EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for Global Evolution) network, Nokia claims data speeds to 118 Kbps. In our tests on the Rogers network, access times for WAP pages was acceptable, sometimes similar to dial up, more often noticeably peppier.

Access to standard graphics-laden Web pages is naturally much slower. The small screen can't display standard pages adequately anyway, though, so you probably won't want to use it to access the Web very often. As with all the shortcomings of this platform, you have to keep expectations reasonable.

After a Blackberry, using any other mobile device for e-mail is a let-down. The 6620 is no exception. I used the AWS MMS (Multimedia Messaging) service to connect to my POP e-mail account. It downloads message headers first, then the message itself when you click on the header. In my testing, if I took more than a couple of minutes to find a message I wanted to open, the unit had dropped the connection and I had to re-connect first. A couple of times it froze in the middle of downloading a message.

Beyond these basic smartphone capabilities, the 6620 is a multimedia powerhouse. You can use the USB cable to connect it to a computer and download MP3 music files. The cable software installation program loads four or five different drivers, but when it's finally set up, you can simply use Windows Explorer on your PC to drag and drop music files from a hard drive to the phone.

Transfer is much slower than USB 2.0-based transfers to dedicated MP3 players I've tried recently. The PC Suite also includes a music manager component that lets you organize songs and play lists.

Music playback quality isn't quite as good as similarly tiny dedicated digital music players we've heard, but as long as music isn't your main thing, it's probably good enough.

To support all the PDA, sound recording, MP3 and imaging functions, the 6620 obviously needs a fair amount of storage. It comes with 12MB of internal flash memory, plus a postage stamp-size 32MB MMC flash memory card that fits under the battery beside the SIM card. You can upgrade to a 512MB MMC card for as little as $110. That's enough to store several hours of near-CD quality MP3 music, and lots of pictures and video.

The 6620's biggest selling point—or at least the one Nokia is pushing hardest—is its imaging capabilities. The camera takes still pictures at up to 640x480 pixels and highly compressed digital video at up to 176x144 pixels and 65,536 colors.

You can send video or still pictures by e-mail directly from the camera, and also using the phone's multimedia messaging functions. We were not able to test sending video over the multimedia messaging service from end to end.

There are limits, of course, to what you can achieve with a digital camera jammed into a package this small, on top of all the electronics for communicating wirelessly. The lens is fixed focus and fixed focal length, meaning that pictures are never in critically sharp focus and you can't zoom in or out.


Photo Taken with 6620's Camera

There is also no flash. All of this tends to limit its usefulness as a camera. In this, though, it's no different than other camera phones.

The pictures we took in our tests were good enough to send to other camera phone users, which is supposedly one of the big applications. At best quality, you can print them at sizes to about 5x4 inches, though they're by no means "photo quality," tending to be a little fuzzy and washed out. Overall quality is similar to the very earliest dedicated digital cameras, which is to say, not terribly good.


Another Photo Taken with 6620's Camera

Still, it's adequate for applications such as sending headshots of people or product shots from a trade show floor—or wild and crazy snaps of you and your friends at a rave up.

Nokia sent along a whole imaging kit that included the Nokia Image Frame ($400), a 5.1-inch LCD with a modular plastic frame and stand for displaying pictures on your desk. You can send pictures to it from the 6620 very slowly via Infrared.

The Nokia Image Viewer ($100) is a device that you attach to a TV set. You send pictures to it from the 6620—much more quickly using Bluetooth—and the Viewer displays them on the TV.

Nokia even included the Hewlett-Packard 450 ($100), a supposedly portable inkjet printer that measures 13.3 x 3.2 x 6.5 inches and weighs over four pounds. As you might guess, it isn't the greatest printer in the world for printing photographs, for which it was never really intended. It too can receive pictures from the 6620 impressively quickly via Bluetooth.

The video is tiny, pixilated (you can see jaggy edges around moving objects), it's not full motion, the sound doesn't appear to be synchronized with the video and you can only capture ten-second clips. But again, this really isn't meant to be a replacement for a camcorder. You can point the thing at yourself, smile and say, "I love you, baby," and send the clip to your best guy or girl via e-mail or MMS. That's about it.

Well, there's a bit more. The phone comes loaded with the trial version of an application from Ulead Systems that lets you do rudimentary video editing right on the 6620. You could string together a bunch of short clips into a little movie, such as highlights of a trade show or presentation, for example.

Also, the screen, processor and high-speed mobile connection with EDGE are just good enough to make it feasible to stream video over the network. The phone comes loaded with the trial version of Nokia Sports, a service that provides, among other things, game highlight videos from Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.

These are tiny 15- or 20-second clips that took minutes to start streaming in my testing on the Rogers network. You can just make out what's going on, though they break up with fast action. It's another one of those cases where you're so amazed the bear can dance you forgive it for not being able to dance well.

The 6620 is an enormously impressive piece of technology, but you have to ask yourself, to what purpose. How much is it worth to have all these functions combined in one little device? Unless you actually have an application for sending images or video directly from mobile phone, it's as much toy as serious business tool.

A better bet, for my money, would be to invest in a good miniature digital camera, which will take infinitely better pictures. Add a good miniature digital music player, and a good mobile phone. You'll be able to do almost everything the 6620 can do, only better, and still stow the works in jacket pockets, briefcase or purse.