It’s been a few days since I pulled the Nokia 6790 Surge for AT&T out of its box, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time getting this bad boy setup for proper use. This involves setting up Google Sync and GooSync to get my contacts and calendar ready to roll, installing Nokia Messaging (which went off without a hitch, btw), and getting a number of other things setup. I have also been taking note of which applications do and do not install on this phone, and will report on those later. For now, I have some rough knee-jerk impressions that I wanted to share.
For starters, it’s quite a bit less ugly in person that it was in all the photos, including the press photos. Don’t get me wrong – this is still one hideous piece of kit, but it’s more bearable than I imagined initially. It’s clad in a classy black and chrome color scheme, without any childish bright plastic colors anywhere, so it at least looks professional.
The slide mechanism is quite nice. Having started with the Nokia N95-1, I’m pleased to see that Nokia has finally seemed to master the slide mechanism in their phones. The Nokia 6790 Surge’s slide is smooth and solid, with a confident thud to end either sliding direction. There is absolutely zero wobble, either with the slide open or closed, which is nice.
The keyboard is nice, but somewhat of a letdown. The keys are awesome – big, with plenty of tactile movement. Unfortunately, it’s incredibly simple. There’s the alphabet, the embedded numeric keypad, and the appropriate shift/symbol/etc buttons, but nothing else. No shortcuts to messaging, no nothing. I would have liked to see something like the E90, which had shortcuts galore. I’m also pleased to see predictive text, ala the E63, available, as well.
The top of the phone is horrendously designed, and wastes incredible amounts of space. There is a good 1-inch x 3-inch section to the left/top of the display that’s wasted with an elongated speaker grille and light sensor, and a weird angled area below the display that takes up additional space. It’s not difficult to imagine a slight rearrangement that would have allowed for a 2.6-inch display. Here’s a quick Photoshop of how they might have rearranged things for a bigger display:
The build quality is about what I would expect from such a cheap phone. Sturdy plastic, but it creaks alot, and the S60 navigational cluster, with the d-pad, is incredibly loud when you click it – not good for schoolkids texting in class, that’s for sure.
From pulling the phone out of the box, until now, I would say that if you can get past the overall aesthetics of the Nokia 6790 Surge, it’s not really a bad phone. You can currently pick one up for $80 from AT&T with a 2-year commitment, and that puts it head-to-head with the Nokia E71x. I’ll snap some comparison photos with the E71 and E63 shortly. Tomorrow I’ll let you know a few things that I really hate about this phone, so check back.
