Smartphones for Dummies

(10 things to do on your new Nokia 6630 or Nokia 6680)

By Steve Litchfield, Copyright 2005

With the new '3G' networks now quite common, your phone network may have provided you
with a Nokia 6630 or Nokia 6680. Both are top phones of course, but they're each quite a bit
more, as I hope to explain below.
This e-book is for anyone staring at the many icons on the smartphone screen and
wondering what on earth to do first. Where do you start? I'm also going to cover some things
you'll want to try a bit later, when you feel more confident.

1. Smart? Who's smart?

You'll notice the title of this short e-book - so what makes your phone 'smart'? After all, many
phones can take photos and play music these days. The difference is that the Nokia 6630
and 6680 have something special inside, a computer processor and grown up software with
the power of a small laptop.
Which means that you can do more than one thing at a time (e.g. playing music while writing
a text message) and that you can add extra programs to make your phone do more or less
anything you want (e.g. playing games, viewing office documents).

If you're interested, the 'grown up' software inside your phone is the Symbian operating
system. Think of it as like Windows on a PC, but designed from the ground up for
mobile phones. For more on Symbian OS and doing advanced things with your phone,
see the tips and articles at 3lib.ukonline.co.uk

2. Those buttons
At the bottom of almost every display on your phone,
there are two words, in the bottom left and bottom right
corner. For example, 'Options' and 'Exit', or
'Messaging' and 'Vodafone'. The two words
correspond to the two unmarked buttons either side of
your navigator key. In other words, pressing the left
button goes to the function shown in the bottom left,
and right goes to that shown in the bottom right, of
course.
These two buttons' functions vary all the time, depending on which
program you're in and on what you happen to be doing at the time.
Together with the navigator key (which you can jog left, right, up, down
and in), these two function buttons let you do almost everything you
need to do on your smartphone.
If you're familiar with a PC, you'll know what a menu (of options) is. In a similar way, when
you see 'Options' on your smartphone you can press the corresponding function button to
bring up a menu of things you can do.

3. What's on the Menu?

Your way into most of the programs on your smartphone is the Menu key, the one with the
symbol. Press it and you'll see lots of icons. Most of the program names are obvious (e.g.
'Clock', 'Camera') and you can simply move to the one you want and press the navigator in.
Have a play.
Some of the icons shown represent 'folders' and opening one of these will show other
programs that have been grouped together in the folder because they share a theme (e.g.
'Games' or 'Tools').

You may remember we said that one of the things that made a smartphone smart was
that it could do more than one thing at a time? Press and hold the Menu button and
you'll see a little strip of icons pop up, one for each of the programs currently running
on your smartphone. For example, you might see the game you're in the middle of, or
'Gallery' if you've been browsing through your images or videos. Use up and down on
the navigator to move the highlight up and down the list, pressing the navigator in to
switch immediately to a particular running program.

4. Read the manual!

It's true that the manuals for a lot of gadgets (perhaps including
your previous mobile phone) can be safely ignored and left in
the box. But don't make this mistake with your Nokia 6630 or
6680. Yes, the interface is very intuitive and you'll be whizzing
around in no time, but as I said above there's the power of a
laptop computer inside and you'll need a little instruction if you want to get to grips with
functions like checking your email and managing your contacts and calendar.
Nokia's manual is excellently laid out, with everything mentioned in just the order you might
need it, so keep it handy and (for example) pledge to work through a chapter a night. Each
will take half an hour or so to get through, trying functions as you go, but you'll easily recoup
this time later on, by virtue of being more productive with your smartphone.

5. Learning to type
If you've used a mobile phone for anything other than phone calls
before, you'll be familiar with the 'ABC', 'DEF' keys used on your
smartphone for text entry. You may not have seen 'predictive' text
entry (also called 'T9') before though. When typing in a lengthy text
message, you'll find that switching on your smartphone's 'dictionary'
speeds things up no end. With predictive text turned on, you simply
hit each key once, picking out the one that contains the next letter you want, and the
software works out what you're trying to say.
Don't stop at just the basics of common words though. If you don't want to get frustrated, it's
essential to note a few other text entry basics:
• The 'Edit' key brings up a menu that lets you 'Insert a word' (that's not in the
dictionary)
• The '0' key is your space bar
• The '1' key is your apostrophe – use it for words like I'll, Steve's and there's
• If the predictive text system shows a word that's not what you meant, press the key to
switch to the next most common matching word.
• Press and hold the key to bring up a list of punctuation characters, e.g. ?, &, =

6. Pictures and Memory matters

Even if you weren't entirely sure what a smartphone was when you were buying, you'll have
gathered by now that your Nokia 6630 or 6680 has a camera. Not just any camera, either, its
snaps are high enough resolution that you'll never need to take along a normal 35mm or
digital camera ever again. Your Nokia will always be with you and its photos are excellent.
You won't be able to appreciate the quality on the small screen, of course, which brings me
to mention ways of getting your photos out of your smartphone.
By default, your smartphone will be saving its pictures to the memory
chip deep inside. This can't store a lot and it's essential to switch to
saving photos onto the (64MB) expansion card that comes with your
phone. Open the door on the right hand side and check there's a card
inserted now. OK? Now start up your Nokia smartphone's camera and
press 'Options'. Press 'up' four times, to get to 'Settings' on the menu
and press the navigator key in. Now highlight 'Image' and press the
navigator again. Make sure 'Image quality' is set to 'High', make sure
'Image resolution' is set to '1280x960' and that (you'll need to scroll
down to get to this) 'Memory in use' is set to the name of your expansion card. Leaving this
last setting as 'Phone memory' is wrong and will result in you filling up your built-in memory
chip very fast.
The other huge reason for storing your high quality photos on expansion card
is that you can pop this out and take it to your nearest photo booth for
professional printing. Do remember to take along the little card adaptor that
came with your phone, as this makes the tiny DV RS-MMC card big enough to
fit into the standard MMC slot in the booth.

If and when you get round to connecting up your Nokia 6630 or 6680 to your family
PC, you'll find that it's easy to 'Store' all your photos on the PC's hard disk, where they
can be printed on your printer or emailed to friends or posted to your family photo blog
on the Internet. (On the CD that came with your smartphone is Nokia's PC Suite; you
need version 6.6 or later, do make sure you check and grab the latest from Nokia's
web site if necessary.)

7. Clever contacts
One of your first actions with your new Nokia will be to get all your favourite contacts into it:
friends, family and so on. If you had their numbers on your old SIM card in another phone,
just insert this into the 6630 or 6680 and go into 'Contacts' and you'll be asked whether you
want these numbers copied across into your smartphone.
But – if you're reasonably good with computers and perhaps have even more details (e.g.
people's addresses) in Microsoft Outlook on your PC, why not use PC Suite, mentioned in
the tip above, to copy all of these over to your smartphone in one fell swoop? Just open up
PC Suite 6.6's window, double click on 'Synchronize' and follow the prompts.

8. Who needs an iPod?

With your Nokia 6630 or 6680, there's really no need to walk around
with a Walkman or iPod. Did you know that your smartphone is
capable of holding a dozen or so CD's worth of quality stereo music?
You'll need to buy a larger expansion card though. You can get a
512MB (DV RS-MMC) card for less than £30 these days (try eBay, for
example). You might also want a £10 USB card reader for your PC to
let you copy music files onto the expansion card directly. The stereo
headset supplied with your Nokia will be fine for listening to music. If
a call comes in while a song's playing, you'll be able to answer it with
a push on the button halfway up the hands-free headset.

Although there are schemes for downloading music files using the phone network, you
can save a lot of money by simply converting songs from CDs that you've already
bought. By far the simplest (and cheapest) system for this is to install the freeware
program CDex (you can get this on the Internet at cdexos.sourceforge.net). Once
installed, make sure you're online and then pop a CD in your PC. Once the (so far
unlabelled) tracks appear on the screen, use 'Read Remote CDDB' from the menu and
you'll see track names and album details appear as if by magic. You can use the
'Settings' menu function to change the 'Encoder' to make 'MP3' or 'Ogg Vorbis' music
files. MP3 files use about 1MB of your expansion card for every minute of music and
can be played through 'Gallery' 'Tracks', while Ogg Vorbis music files use about half a
Megabyte a minute and can be played using the free OggPlay (MMF) utility, which you
can download from symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/S60MMF.html.

Once CDex has created your music files, copy them out of 'My Music' and onto your
expansion card, in your card reader. Using your Nokia smartphone as your music
player isn't currently as trivial as with one of Apple's iPods, but with a little effort you
can save yourself having to carry around an extra gadget.

9. Bluetooth
You may not have heard of this before, but it's worth being aware of as you'll find Bluetooth
very useful whenever you come across someone else with a compatible phone or
smartphone. As a new Nokia 6630 or 6680 owner, friends can send contact information to
you 'through the air' at distances of up to a few metres. You can also send photos and video
clips backwards and forwards between handsets.
Bluetooth will also come in useful if you plan to use a wireless hands-free earpiece (for
example, when driving), just follow the instructions that come with the earpiece.

10. Satellite navigation and the world

One of the things that really makes your 6630 or 6680 'smart' is that
it can run add-on programs. One of the most sophisticated types of
add-on is navigation software, such as TomTom's MOBILE 5
(www.tomtom.com) or Route 66's Mobile Britain (www.66.com).
Using a Bluetooth-compatible GPS on your car dashboard, run one
of these programs on your smartphone and you'll be guided, street
by street, with voice instructions, directly to your destination
anywhere in Great Britain.
Once you have a large expansion card inserted and are feeling
confident, you might also like to investigate other programs for your smartphone, many of
which are completely free. These range from document readers to instant chat applications
to addictive games. The world of Symbian Series 60 software really is your oyster now that
you own a Nokia 6630 or 6680 smartphone.

For a full list of freeware for your Nokia 6630 or 6680, see
3lib.ukonline.co.uk/nonagss60.htm.
For a more general catalogue of software, see www.my-symbian.com or
www.allaboutsymbian.com

I hope this little e-book has helped you. If you would like to say thank you, please drop me
an email at [email protected] or consider transferring a small amount to me by
PayPal at the same address. Steve Litchfield, September 2005.
This printout of Smartphones for Dummies was made for The Smartphone Show 2005, for
www.allaboutsymbian.com Email [email protected] for more details of all
AllAboutSymbian offers.