Nokia 6600 fold review: Flip and the city

Gallery is disappointing

If you have been keeping track, you'd know that we aren't really in love with the looks of the S40 gallery. The fact that it is an inherent part of the file manager is probably the main cause of disappointment.

There are three different views for the gallery: list with details, list and grid. Once you pick a picture you can zoom on it to see more detail. Zooming itself is not the fastest (especially for larger pictures) and only goes a short distance, so it is practically of no use.

The available gallery vire modes

Pictures can be also viewed fullscreen and can be edited with the built-in picture editor. The latter offers a number of options, but we doubt it Nokia 6600 fold users are likely to consider photo editing on the handset seriously.

Looking at a single picture • zooming in

The final touches to the gallery are the available Slideshow and Search option, the latter being quite convenient for finding a specific file in overfed folders.

Below par 2 megapixel camera

While we're at it, let's have a look at the imaging capabilities of Nokia 6600 fold. The handset packs a 2 megapixel camera with image resolution of up to 1600 x 1200 pixels. Fixed focus is sure to doom any attempts at close-ups but the LED flash gives some hope of producing a usable picture in the dark now and then. The flash is still rather weak, usable with close range objects only.

The available camera settings are rather limited but this is understandable given the low-end shooter. The available settings include white balance, three quality levels going form basic to high, and various effects. Sequence shots and shooting in both portrait and landscape mode are also among the available options.

Camera user interface

The lack of a dedicated camera button is the real downer when it comes to operating the camera. Using the confirm button of the D-pad, especially when shooting in landscape mode, is definitely not our preferred handling.

Image quality is poor. Colors are rather precise but pictures lack detail even in very favorable lighting. The main problem is the extremely aggressive noise-reduction gives photos a distinct oil-painted look. In addition the obviously low quality lens reduces the amount of detail even further towards the corners. Given the absence of autofocus, you'd rather not take a picture of a closely situated object or text, as they will surely be blurred. The positive thing we can say about the camera is that the photos look great on the vivid OLED display.

Nokia 6600 fold camera samples

Finally, we feel a warning is due about camera speed. This one is surely on the slower side of phones we have managed to test. It will take about 4-5 seconds to save a picture at the highest (2MP) resolution setting and that stretches the shot-to-shot time beyond tolerable.

As far as video recording is concerned, Nokia 6600 fold manages the sweet VGA resolution but only at 15 fps. The resolution is perfectly OK for hand-held use but the frame rate takes away a great deal of the pleasure. The videos are recorded in 3GP format and their length is only limited by the memory available.

Here is a sample video(3.9MB) for you to check out.

As a whole, the imaging capabilities of Nokia 6600 fold aren't what you would expect in a phone in this price range. Looks definitely come first and that's that.