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Voice phone by day, e-mail machine by night, the Nokia 6820 looks like a perfectly normal compact bar phone. But flip it open and youll find a hidden QWERTY thumb keyboard.
Suited for text messaging and e-mail, it also has Bluetooth and high-speed EDGE network compatibility for data, giving it even greater business-traveler appeal. Later this year, when Nokia and AT&T bring BlackBerry e-mail functionality to this phone, it will really soar.
The keys on the keyboard are relatively large but close together. Once you have the keyboard down, get ready to fly through SMS, MMS and the 6820s very basic (no attachments, no URLs, no connection to Outlook or Lotus Notes) POP3/IMAP e-mail client. The phone will also support AOL, ICQ, Yahoo and MSN instant messaging.
The 6820s e-mail power will increase when BlackBerry Connect comes on board later this year, linking the phone to enterprise servers and giving it push e-mail capabilities.
We mated our 6820 with an IBM laptop via both Bluetooth and an optional USB cable. AT&T Wireless Connection Manager software got us online in a few clicks. AT&T claims an average of 100K bps to 130K bps throughput on its EDGE wireless data network. In our tests, we got an average of 80K bps in midtown Manhattan. Not quite what AT&T estimated, but still double the speed youll usually get with GPRS.
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