Walter Mossberg Wall Street Journal

May 13, 2003

One of the great dilemmas in the design of today's wireless phones is how to improve the entering of text, especially for longer items like e-mail messages and notes.

The phone keypad is only good enough for tapping out short text messages, laden with abbreviations and limited to 160 characters. Handwriting recognition and on-screen virtual keyboards are prone to error and tedious to use.

The best solution is to incorporate a small thumb-operated keyboard into the device. But fitting in such a keyboard requires the phone to be larger than many people find stylish or comfortable. The Handspring Treo, which I've praised as the best combination phone and e-mail device on the market, works for me. But some people shun it because it looks more like a PDA than a phone.

Now, Nokia has come up with an ingenious new phone that incorporates a very usable keyboard, yet retains the look, feel and dimensions of a standard wireless phone. It's the Nokia 6800. It was introduced this week in the United States by Cingular Wireless for $250 when you sign a two-year service contract.

When you first glance at the Nokia 6800, it looks unremarkable. It seems like a very typical phone, with an average-size color screen, a few buttons below the screen and a normal phone-dialing keypad below that. But if you swing the keypad up over the screen, you discover a roomy text keyboard. This keyboard flanks the screen, with one half on either side of it. It's meant to be used with the phone in a horizontal position, so the screen automatically switches to a horizontal view from a vertical view whenever the keyboard is opened.

The design is clever. Nokia built half the keyboard onto the underside of the flip-up keypad and the other half onto the part of the phone's body that lies hidden under the keypad. This keyboard is roomier than those on the Treo or on the BlackBerry from Research in Motion, but it stays out of sight when not needed, which permits the 6800 to retain a phone's shape and size.

In fact, at 4.67 inches long, 2.15 inches wide, 0.91 inches thick and 4.3 ounces in weight, the Nokia 6800 is lighter and narrower than the Treo, albeit a tad thicker and longer.

The keyboard seems awkward at first, especially because it's divided by the screen. But in my tests over the past few days, I quickly got used to it. Holding one side in each palm and using my thumbs to type, I was able to work as speedily and accurately as I do on a Treo or BlackBerry.

You can still make and take phone calls while the 6800 is in the horizontal position with the keyboard open. The phone automatically switches into speaker-phone mode, because it's hard to hold it up to your ear with the keyboard open. You can opt for a headset instead of the speaker phone.

In a really smart touch, you can read and scroll through things on the screen while you're talking. You can even take notes while on a phone call, though each key press sends an audible beep, which is annoying unless you turn all the keypad sounds off.

When you're finished using the keyboard, just fold it back up and you have a regular phone, with all the features of today's better phones, including short-text messaging. There's a bonus, too: an FM radio that sounds amazingly good.

So, Nokia deserves great credit from mobile e-mail users for this keyboard design. Nothing else in a traditional phone comes close. But there's a big catch: While the hardware is very cool, the software is very weak.

The built-in e-mail program can handle standard Internet e-mail accounts, but not nonstandard ones such as AOL, most corporate e- mail or Web-based e-mail like Hotmail. In my tests, it sent and received e-mail well. But it takes five steps to launch, and opens slowly. And once you get it open, you have to scroll through lots of menus and commands to do simple things.

Also, the small screen can't show many e-mail headers at once, and the e-mail program doesn't access the phone's contact list when you address an e-mail so you have to type it in manually. In fact, it takes extra steps to even enter an e-mail address in the contact list.

Another problem: Unlike on the Treo and the BlackBerry, the keyboard functionality is dumb. It knows enough to capitalize the next letter after a period. But it doesn't automatically add the apostrophe if you type in words like "cant" or "didnt," as the others do.

Nokia has announced what might be a fix for all this. Later this year, it plans to equip the 6800 with RIM BlackBerry e-mail capabilities and new software to operate it. If that software comes anywhere close to what's on a real BlackBerry, the 6800 could become a very nice e-mail machine--the only one that really looks and works like a phone.

Wall Street Journal

(C) 2003 Chicago Sun-Times. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved

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