The 6620's biggest selling point—or at least the one Nokia is pushing hardest—is its imaging capabilities. The camera takes still pictures at up to 640x480 pixels and highly compressed digital video at up to 176x144 pixels and 65,536 colors.

You can send video or still pictures by e-mail directly from the camera, and also using the phone's multimedia messaging functions. We were not able to test sending video over the multimedia messaging service from end to end.

There are limits, of course, to what you can achieve with a digital camera jammed into a package this small, on top of all the electronics for communicating wirelessly. The lens is fixed focus and fixed focal length, meaning that pictures are never in critically sharp focus and you can't zoom in or out.


Photo Taken with 6620's Camera

There is also no flash. All of this tends to limit its usefulness as a camera. In this, though, it's no different than other camera phones.

The pictures we took in our tests were good enough to send to other camera phone users, which is supposedly one of the big applications. At best quality, you can print them at sizes to about 5x4 inches, though they're by no means "photo quality," tending to be a little fuzzy and washed out. Overall quality is similar to the very earliest dedicated digital cameras, which is to say, not terribly good.


Another Photo Taken with 6620's Camera

Still, it's adequate for applications such as sending headshots of people or product shots from a trade show floor—or wild and crazy snaps of you and your friends at a rave up.

Nokia sent along a whole imaging kit that included the Nokia Image Frame ($400), a 5.1-inch LCD with a modular plastic frame and stand for displaying pictures on your desk. You can send pictures to it from the 6620 very slowly via Infrared.

The Nokia Image Viewer ($100) is a device that you attach to a TV set. You send pictures to it from the 6620—much more quickly using Bluetooth—and the Viewer displays them on the TV.

Nokia even included the Hewlett-Packard 450 ($100), a supposedly portable inkjet printer that measures 13.3 x 3.2 x 6.5 inches and weighs over four pounds. As you might guess, it isn't the greatest printer in the world for printing photographs, for which it was never really intended. It too can receive pictures from the 6620 impressively quickly via Bluetooth.

The video is tiny, pixilated (you can see jaggy edges around moving objects), it's not full motion, the sound doesn't appear to be synchronized with the video and you can only capture ten-second clips. But again, this really isn't meant to be a replacement for a camcorder. You can point the thing at yourself, smile and say, "I love you, baby," and send the clip to your best guy or girl via e-mail or MMS. That's about it.

Well, there's a bit more. The phone comes loaded with the trial version of an application from Ulead Systems that lets you do rudimentary video editing right on the 6620. You could string together a bunch of short clips into a little movie, such as highlights of a trade show or presentation, for example.

Also, the screen, processor and high-speed mobile connection with EDGE are just good enough to make it feasible to stream video over the network. The phone comes loaded with the trial version of Nokia Sports, a service that provides, among other things, game highlight videos from Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.

These are tiny 15- or 20-second clips that took minutes to start streaming in my testing on the Rogers network. You can just make out what's going on, though they break up with fast action. It's another one of those cases where you're so amazed the bear can dance you forgive it for not being able to dance well.

The 6620 is an enormously impressive piece of technology, but you have to ask yourself, to what purpose. How much is it worth to have all these functions combined in one little device? Unless you actually have an application for sending images or video directly from mobile phone, it's as much toy as serious business tool.

A better bet, for my money, would be to invest in a good miniature digital camera, which will take infinitely better pictures. Add a good miniature digital music player, and a good mobile phone. You'll be able to do almost everything the 6620 can do, only better, and still stow the works in jacket pockets, briefcase or purse.