Screen

The Nokia 6820 comes with a 128 x 128 px 4096 color passive matrix display. Unfortunately this is the same display found on Nokia's older models. Nokia has done little to keep up with the market. The newest phones today can display an impressive 262K colors.

With passive displays, ghosts can become an issue. The STN screen (as opposed to TFT) does not have the circuit transistors placed on the glass at the pixel locations. As a result, there is a delay needed to scan each pixel. This results in greatly hindering the response time and ends up slowing down refresh rates. For example, action-packed games may, display remnants of previous screens when the on-screen action changes rapidly. Fortunately, the ghosting is not too noticeable in simple tasks like changing menu functions.

The screen is bright and clear in dim conditions, but in areas with ample ambient lighting, the screen tends to washed out a good deal as is the case with most STN displays.

Controls

By far the main feature of the 6820 is the fold-out keypad. When folded, the 6820 looks like any standard phone with a plain numeric keypad. When unfolded, the two halves of the 6820 transform into a full QWERTY keypad.

Typing with the QWERTY keypad is far more preferred than using a conventional numeric keypad. With two thumbs on a keyboard, typing becomes much faster. Text messaging is far simpler on the 6820 than on any other phone on the market today.

Battery and Charger

A 850 mAh Li-Ion battery is used with the 6820. Nokia claims the battery lasts for 7 hours of talk time and 240 hours of standby. Realistically, however, the times are much lower.

Minimum Rated Standby Time: 145 hours
Minimum Rated Talk Time: 215 minutes

The results of our tests for battery talk time and standby time should be viewed as relative information only. Many variables including carrier signal strength, signal consistency (including incoming and outgoing calls), display and ringer settings, and battery charging methods and history will affect performance.

When handset manufacturers and mobile phone carriers list talk-time and standby-time ratings, they usually include disclaimers about variable performance and often refer to the times they publish as maximum times. Some carriers quote expected battery life ranges, and in this case it's probably safe to assume at least the minimum rated range. Note that manufacturers of dual-mode digital and analog handsets publish battery-life rates for both digital and analog modes as analog mode consumes much more power than digital mode.

Storage

The 6820 comes with about 3.5 MB of shared internal memory for contacts, text messages, multimedia messages, ring tones, images, video clips, calendar notes, to-do lists, and applications. Expandable storage slots are not present on the 6820, so deleting content is the only way to free up extra memory.

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