Nokia 6720 classic review: Up a notch

Phonebook with Ovi integration

Symbian handsets have an excellent phonebook with enviable capabilities. There is storage space for a practically unlimited number of contacts and fields with all the available memory potentially usable for the purpose. Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name and can naturally be searched by gradual typing of any of the names.

Contacts list • searching by gradual typing • viewing contact details

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like. You can also create new fields if you happen to be able to think of one. We personally find it quite a challenge to think of something Nokia has missed here - there's everything from the contact's nickname to their assistant's name and phone number.

Personal ringtones and videos can also be assigned to a contact. If you prefer you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

An enormous variety of fields is available to assign to a contact

Synchronization is also nice and easy although you do need the Nokia PC suite (or Ovi Suite as of lately) for things to go smoothly. Sending and receiving contacts via SMS or Bluetooth is also a piece of cake.

Ovi Contacts come preinstalled on the Nokia 6720 classic but it's of course compatible with most other Nokia smartphones. Ovi contacts integrates tightly with the Contacts list as a new tab and offers an IM client with a twist. You can search for people already registered with Ovi or send an invitation to anybody using Gmail since Ovi contacts supports G-Talk, Google's own IM, as well.

Ovi Contacts is a very capable IM client

Thanks to this service you will be able to chat real time with all your Ovi/Google Talk-connected contacts, change your status messages and mood, and all that stuff.

In addition you can even go as far as sharing your GPS location so your friends can instantly track you using Ovi Maps. Or, you can share the name and the artist of the track you are currently playing.

What can we say - it all works exactly as advertized. Your contacts need not have an Ovi-connected phone, they can chat with you just fine over Google Talk.

Symbian messaging

Texting with Nokia 6720 is spot on. With a comfortable keypad and great software support your messaging is almost as good as it gets on a handheld. And we only say "almost" as there's no full QWERTY keyboard.

The Nokia 6720 classic supports all common message types - SMS, MMS and email. The SMS and MMS share an editor. It is the well known intuitive application from previous Symbian S60 smartphones. It has a counter of characters left up to a limit of 160. There is also an indicator in brackets showing the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending.

Turning an SMS into MMS is as simple as adding any multimedia content

It goes without saying that you can activate a delivery report for messages. The reports pop up on the standby screen and are subsequently saved in a dedicated folder in the messaging sub-menu. If you exit the message editor without having sent the message, the editor prompts you to either save it to the Drafts folder or discard it.

All it takes to convert a common SMS into an MMS is inserting some multimedia content. A nice feature allows resizing pictures automatically for sending via MMS.

The Nokia 6720 also features a dedicated audio message editor. Although technically a type of MMS, the audio messages have their own separate editor. You can either record the message on the spot or use a previously recorded sound clip.

The audio message editor interface

The email client is also very similar to what previous Symbian powered phones have offered. If you are using any public email service (it has to be among the over 1000 supported providers), all you have to do is enter your email address and password to start sending and receiving emails. The Nokia 6720 takes care of downloading all the relevant settings to get you going in no time.

The client can download headers only or entire messages, and can be set to automatically check mail at a given interval. There is also support for attachments, signatures and basically most of the emailing functionality you're used to. Thanks to QuickOffice, viewing attached Microsoft Office files is a breeze.

The email client

There's also the option to have the email read out to you - the Message reader app comes with one language and two voices preinstalled (one male and one female) and the option to download more. The application handles this quite nicely and while the voice didn't sound too natural, it didn't trip over difficult words and even managed to read URLs.

Playing back an email • speech settings