Nokia 6555 Cell Phone Review - Multimedia
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Alfredo Padilla Published on February 29, 2008 Comment on this |
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Summary
The Nokia 6555's music software is solid, if unspectacular, but a little slow to load. We didn't like that there are no media controls on the exterior of the phone, so if you're listening to music and want to make a change you'll have to open the phone up. Video playback is not a strength for the Nokia 6555, as it wasn't able to handle any of our test files.
Accessing Music Software (3.57)
It takes an average of 5.6 seconds to get a song playing on the Nokia 6555. This is not a very impressive time, you can see below that only the Razr2 V8 did worse on this test than the 6555. In fact, several of our handsets did much better, taking less than one fourth the time in the case of the W580i. This is despite the fact that there's a shortcut to the music software right on the Nokia 6555's home screen. We found the software was very slow to load up, and once it did we had to go through a couple of pages before we actually got a song playing. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| Nokia 6555 | 5.60 | 3.57 |
| Samsung SLM | 2.70 | 7.41 |
| LG Venus | 3.62 | 5.52 |
| Sony Ericsson W580i | 1.56 | 12.82 |
| Razr2 V8 | 5.86 | 3.41 |
| Nokia N75 | 4.04 | 4.95 |
Dedicated Music Controls (1.0)
Apart from the volume keys the Nokia 6555 lacks any dedicated music controls. If you want to control music playback you'll have to open the phone up, get to the music application, and control it from there. This is in contrast to a flip phone like the Nokia N75, which has music controls on the exterior of the phone.
Music Software Functionality and Organization (6.2)
The Nokia 6555's music software is fairly well featured. Playlists are supported, as well as the ability to create your own playlists on the device and edit existing playlists. The Nokia 6555 is also able to recognize tags for our MP3, AAC, and WMA files. You can view your music by title, artist, album, or genre. There's no support for rating or searching through music. The Nokia 6555 didn't recognize the album art for our test music, but it did automatically update the library with files we placed on the memory card. We were pleased to see you can have music play in the background while you are accessing other phone functions. This is often an area where regular phones lag behind. Visualizations are not supported.
The Nokia 6555 does have an equalizer with several presets, but no ability to manually adjust it or create your own presets. The interface of the music player is fairly straightforward. The music library is a list of various options for viewing your music. If you choose to view all music you get a list of songs arranged by title. Options like Album or Artist expand to show you the available selections. When music is actually playing the d-pad gives you access to functions like play/pause, next, and previous. The left soft key opens a menu to access additional options.
We found the music software on the Nokia 6555 to be pretty good, especially for a phone that doesn't seem focused on multimedia. It's not as good as the excellent Walkman software found on the Sony Ericsson W580i, nor is it as good as the excellent music player found on Series 60 smart phones like the N75, but it's better than that found on the Razr2 V8 and many other regular phones.
Online Song Downloading (0.0)
The Nokia 6555 allows you to access AT&T's online music options, but the handset won't download songs directly to the phone. So even though you can buy Napster and eMusic songs on the phone you'll have to wait until you get home to download them and move them over to the phone.
Streaming (0.0)
The Nokia 6555 doesn't support streaming music via MP3, Windows Media, or Real Audio formats. AT&T offers various pay streaming audio services like XM Radio and Pandora, but we don't award points for these.
Podcast Support (0.0)
The Nokia 6555 doesn't include any software to automatically download and/or organize your podcasts.
Music Sync with PC (0.0)
Because the Nokia 6555 doesn't ship with a data cable there's no way to directly synchronize music with your computer. Instead you'll have to go through the trouble of opening the battery cover, removing the battery, pulling out the memory card, and moving music directly onto it using a memory card reader.
Music Formats and DRM (4.0)
The Nokia 6555 supports MP3, AAC, and WMA music files. It also supports WMA files protected by Microsoft's Plays For Sure DRM.
Music Interruption (4.0)
The Nokia 6555 handles interruptions to music playback by a call a little differently than we might like. When a call comes in the music pauses just fine and you can take the call. What is strange is that instead of opening the phone to see the call screen you instead are taken to the music player. This might be confusing to some people, but you can easily end the call by hitting the end key. Our problem is that music doesn't start playing again automatically, instead you have to manually start it up again. We prefer phones that start playing music again automatically, and we also would have preferred to be taken to the call screen during a phone call.
Video
Video Software Access (3.89)
The Nokia 6555 took an average of 5.14 seconds to get a video playing. This is slightly faster than getting music to play back, despite the fact that we used the music player software to get a video playing. The reason is likely that the video we were using was a very small and low bitrate 3GP video we took on the Nokia 6555. Normally we use our own video files for this test, but we couldn't on the Nokia 6555 (more on that below). The Nokia 6555 is pretty decent, you can see below that only the W580i did significantly better on this test than the Nokia 6555.
For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| Nokia 6555 | 5.14 | 3.89 |
| Samsung SLM | 5.60 | 3.57 |
| LG Venus | 9.12 | 2.19 |
| Sony Ericsson W580i | 3.42 | 5.85 |
| Razr2 V8 | 7.30 | 2.74 |
| Nokia N75 | 13.12 | 1.52 |
Video Controls (6.0)
When a video is playing back on the Nokia 6555 you get an interface very similar to that for music playback. The center select key is mapped to play/pause while left and right are assigned to next/previous when pressed once or fast forward and rewind when you hold them down. Up takes you back to the main music library while down takes you back to the video list or your playlists. The right soft key is assigned to take you back while the left soft key opens a menu where you can access various functions. The volume buttons control the volume, of course. We found the controls fairly easy to use, but it would have been nice to see some options like full screen, repeat, and shuffle assigned to the keypad rather than forcing you to go into the left soft key menu to access them.
Video Software & Organization (1.5)
Video Sync with PC (0.0)
As with music synchronization you just can't do it out of the box. There's no data cable and no synchronization software included.
Video Formats (1.0)
As we've mentioned, the Nokia 6555 isn't able to play back any of our test videos. Not 3GP files, of which we try three different kinds, not MP4, not anything. In fact, when we tried to place those videos on a memory card the handset would often freeze up, and if it didn't do that immediately it would when we tried to open the music software to get at our videos. Waiting didn't help, and neither did formatting the memory card or just trying to load one video at a time on the card. We know the Nokia 6555 is capable of playing back 3GP videos because this is the format used for videos created by the handset, so we're going to give it one point, but be warned that you may not be able to get your own 3GP videos on there.
Video DRM (0.0)
The Nokia 6555 doesn't support any form of DRM-protected video like iTunes music store video content or videos from Amazon's Unboxed store.
Video Playback Smoothness (0.0)
As we weren't able to get any of our test videos to play on the handset we weren't able to do this test. As such, the Nokia 6555 will receive a zero in this section.
Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Nokia 6555 doesn't support any direct-to-handset video download services.
Video Streaming unscored
We don't score this section because mobile video streaming has not been standardized to any extent. We do, however, test a few popular services to see if they work on the Nokia 6555. We were happy to see the Nokia 6555 was able to play back streaming 3GP video from Zoovision.com and Youtube mobile. It wasn't able to handle streaming Windows Media Video from Windowsmedia.com, however. AT&T also offers various pay services for accessing streaming video content.
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