Nokia 6555 Cell Phone Review - Software
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Alfredo Padilla Published on February 29, 2008 Comment on this |
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Summary
The Nokia 6555's software is a strange mix of the very good, like the calculator application, and the not so good, like the browser. The Series 40 interface does a solid job and is stable, but we wish some changes had been made to improve navigation, like allowing you to use the keypad as shortcuts for menu items.
OS (4.0)
The Nokia 6555 runs Nokia's Series 40 interface, which is the operating system they use in non-smart phones. In contrast, smart devices like the Nokia N75 run the Series 60 interface over Symbian OS. Series 40 is a fairly mature and capable phone interface. It is generally driven by the soft buttons, with most options available via menus that you can access via those soft keys. Unfortunately, this is also a place where the Series 40 interface lags a little behind other phone interfaces. On many phones when you open a soft key menu the options are mapped to your keypad buttons, so for example you can press 1 to activate the first options or 3 to activate the third. On Series 40 this is not the case, so you need to navigate the menus using your d-pad.
One of the things we do like about Series 40, however, is its support for multi-tasking. For example you can start music playing and then switch to another application like the calendar while music continues to play in the background. Many regular phones don't allow you to do this, they will turn the music off if you switch to another application. Overall, Series 40 is a fairly easy to use and powerful interface. Most users will have no problem learning and using it. Our score for regular cell phone operating systems is capped at five. We reserve higher scores for more powerful smart phone operating systems.
Home Screen Score (6.0)
The Nokia 6555 is fairly standard. Most of the screen is taken up by your wallpaper, which can be changed to various built-in images or to any photo you have loaded on the phone. Along the top you have a line of icons showing you time, signal strength, battery life, and additional indicators when needed, for example when you have a new message. The bottom of the screen shows the labels for your two soft keys. The left soft key opens an Options menu that gives you quick access to various functions. We're happy to see this list of applications can be changed depending on your needs. The right soft key opens the music application. Between these two labels is a label for the center select key, which opens the Application menu.
Although there is no visual indicator, the four directions of the d-pad are mapped to shortcuts for applications. By default these are new text message (up), contacts (down), Tones & Graphics (left), and IM (right). If you prefer having a visual indicator for these shortcuts you can turn one on in the settings where you can also reassign the applications mapped to the four directions. The Nokia 6555 also has an option to turn on an Active Standby screen, much like Series 60 devices like the N75. Turning this option on adds several user configurable plugins to the home screen, for example a strip of shortcuts and upcoming calendar appointments. For those who want to have information closer to hand this is a nice feature. It's also something we rarely see on regular cell phones, so it's a nice extra. Given all these options we have to consider the Nokia 6555's home screen to be one of the most customizable and powerful we've seen on a regular phone.
Extensibility (3.0)
Unlike Nokia's Series 60 devices, the Nokia 6555 running Series 40 does not support native third-party applications. It does, however, do a very good job supporting Java applications like Google Maps and Opera Mini. Java apps like these are automatically downloaded to your Applications folder under My Stuff, which makes them a little annoying to access, but you can assign them to a home screen shortcut if you use them a lot.
Customizability (6.5)
We've already touched upon the range of customization options available on the Nokia 6555's home screen, including custom backgrounds, reassigning shortcuts, the Active Standby display, and the Options menu. In addition to these you can also change the theme of the phone, which generally just changes the background and colors throughout the interface. The Nokia 6555 ships with nine themes and you can purchase more if you want. You can also change the font size for the messaging application, address book, and Web browser to one of three options, although you can't change the system-wide font size or type. You also won't see any option to move applications around in the main Applications menu or other more advanced customization options like reassigning hardware buttons. Still, the plethora of customization options on the home screen go a long way towards mollifying any concerns about these missing options.
OS Responsivness (6.0)
We found the Nokia 6555's software to be generally responsive, especially when moving through the interface. We did notice that some applications take longer than we like to launch - the music player is a prime example here. We consider the interface pretty average in terms of responsiveness overall.
Browser Features (6.5)
The Nokia 6555's browser is not in the class of the Series 60 Web found on its bigger siblings from Nokia, but it does a reasonable job for those who just need to access mobile sites or look up a piece of information. It supports both mobile WAP pages and regular HTML pages. Javascript support is mixed; the browser supports some basic javascript, but more advanced code will stymie it. Frames are not supported, nor are more advanced technologies like Flash, Java, or RSS feeds. Encryption and cookies are supported, and we're somewhat surprised to see support for Auto-Fill as well. This is a feature you don't see on many advanced browsers like the iPhone's Safari. Overall, the Nokia 6555 does a reasonable job for a browser on a regular phone, but don't expect to get a full desktop-like browsing experience. We recommend you take a look at the Opera Mini browser if you want something more capable.
Browsing Interface (3.5)
The browsing interface on the Nokia 6555 isn't very impressive. If you're just viewing websites meant for mobile devices you should be fine, but start trying to browse full pages like our own or the The New York Times and the interface becomes rather more muddled. Pages can be viewed in either "Full" or "Small" mode. The former attempts to render the page as you would see it on your desktop, while the latter squeezes the content down into a single column. The problem is that the former requires a lot of scrolling, as the Nokia 6555's browser lacks any kind of overview option to make navigation easier. We also noted that menus and some other items on the page are incorrectly rendered. The single column view addresses some of the scrolling issues, but rendering problems are still present.
The menu system for the Nokia 6555's browser is fairly straightforward. The right soft key is assigned to the "back" function while the left soft key opens a menu where you can access your bookmarks, history, advanced functions, or enter a url. The bookmarks provide solid functionality. Not only can you create folders to better organize your bookmarks, but you can also edit existing bookmarks, including the ability to move them into different folders. The history is less impressive; it's just a simple list of sites visited. There's no support for bookmarking a site from the history and it is not saved between sessions.
Browser Access (4.44)
To see how easy it is to access the Nokia 6555's browser we count the number of steps it takes to go from phone closed until we have browsed to our site. We counter typing out the URL as a single step. We use steps here instead of the timed tests we use elsewhere because we don't want network issues to interfere. The Nokia 6555's clunky interface really shows in this test, as it took us nine steps to bring our Web page up on its browser. You can see from the table below that only the LG Venus performed worse in this test than the Nokia 6555. We found the lack of keypad shortcuts really slowed us down on the Nokia 6555, as we had to use the d-pad to navigate all of the menus to find the function we wanted.
| Cell Phone | Steps | Score |
| Nokia 6555 | 9 | 4.44 |
| Samsung SLM | 6 | 6.67 |
| LG Venus | 10 | 4.00 |
| Sony Ericsson W580i | 5 | 8.00 |
| Razr2 V8 | 6 | 6.67 |
| Nokia N75 | 8 | 5.00 |
Gaming (3.0)
As we've seen from other AT&T phones, the Nokia 6555 doesn't have a single full version game. This continues to be disappointing - we feel every cell phone should ship with at least one quality game out of the box. The Nokia 6555's controls are fairly good for gaming. The d-pad in particular is easy to use, as it's responsive and not prone to errors. You can install a wide array of Java games on the Nokia 6555, but there are no native games available.
Calculator (8.0)
The Nokia 6555's calculator is surprisingly good. Not only do you have access to basic arithmetic functions, but it also supports advanced features like exponents, square roots, and trigonometric functions. The most surprising thing is that this is much more functionality than you see from the calculator on Nokia's higher-end Series 60 devices like the N75, which only provides access to basic arithmetic functions. The interface is fairly easy to use, there are buttons on screen that you navigate using the d-pad while the top right quarter of the screen displays your formulas. Not only is the Nokia 6555's calculator better than that on most regular phones, it's also significantly better than those found on most smart phones.
Alarm (6.0)
Document Software (0.0)
The Nokia 6555 doesn't allow you to view or edit any standard office documents like Word, Excel, or PDF files.
Other Software (0.0)
There is no additional software on the Nokia 6555 that we felt was worthy of additional points.
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