Nokia 6720 classic review: Up a notch

New colors for the old engine

Nokia 6720 classic runs on Symbian with Series60 3rd Edition user interface and Feature Pack 2.

The standby screen layout is quite familiar with status icons displayed at the top of the screen and the soft key labels taking the bottom. Quite naturally, the 6720 classic also supports Active standby with two optional layouts.

If you have any experience with Nokia S60 smartphones, you will notice the new look of the menu icons. That styling is no news since the touch-controlled 5800 XpressMusic, N86 8MP and N97 and the S60 3rd edition duly takes advantage as well. The standby theme and the main menu offer no changes in terms of handling.

Nokia 6720 classic runs on Symbian 9.3 OS

The active standby has the three familiar layouts to choose from - a vertical bar, a horizontal bar and basic view, in which you make do with D-pad shortcuts only. Talking theme is also available as an accessibility enhancer.

The active standby screen is a standard Symbian option and is a nice and convenient way of bringing the shortcuts to all favorite applications to your home screen. You can even assign shortcuts to websites of your choice for quicker access.

The screen can be organized in either vertical or horizontal tabs which are scrolled with the D-pad. If active standby is disabled the direction keys of the D-pad can also be assigned shortcuts of your choice.

Active standby or not, you can always change the shortcuts assigned to the two soft keys to best suit your needs.

Nokia 6720 classic can automatically rotate the user interface but there is some other accelerometer-based functionality too. You can silence calls and snooze the alarm by flipping your phone over.

The UI also works in landscpape mode

There are four themes to personalize the look of your handset: we quite liked the Blue Reef one. Anyways, you can download many other themes online - mostly for free..

Four additional themes to choose from

Nokia 6720 classic also features the new and improved task manager that comes with Feature Pack 2. It is also now somewhat better looking and is appearing on top of every pop-up menu. The shortcut used in previous versions of the OS by pressing and holding the menu key still works.

The task manager is really convenient

The Nokia 6720 uses a single ARM 11 600 MHz CPU with no dedicated graphic accelerator. The handset still fares quite well as far as UI responsiveness is concerned. The phone reacts quickly, if not instantly, to most commands across menus.

The Nokia 6720 classic user-available memory extends to a little less than 50MB and the handset comes with a 1GB microSD card in the retail package. While the 1GB card will do the basic job, there are cases when the limited system storage of 50MB will get in your way. For example, when downloading files from the internet, the web browser always saves them to the system partition, meaning you may bump into the 50MB limit sooner than you may have thought.

Great telephony

Reception is great on the Nokia 6720 classic. The phone has commendable speaker quality and the sound during calls is clear and free of any interference. Vibration is also strong enough to make sure you never miss an incoming call or message.

Calling Dexter on the Nokia 6720 classic

The 6720 classic passed our loudspeaker test with quite decent scores. Check out the table to see how it stacks up against some of the handsets we've measured. In case you want to find out more about the test itself or a complete list of tested devices, hit the link.