Nokia 6108

Click for more pictures of the Nokia 6108.

SARS or no SARS, China houses more than a billion people--and many, many, many millions of potential mobile users. Nokia has long lusted after this market, but has faced fierce competition from Motorola and a whole posse of local phone makers. In response, the Finnish handset leader has fired its latest salvo: The 6108, a clever phone that makes messaging simpler for Chinese-speaking users.

Learning To Write
At first glance, the 6108 appears deceptively ordinary, coming in the same gray hues so common in cell phones. But if you take a closer peek at this handset, you'll discover the keypad flips open to reveal a touch-sensitive text input area. A stylus can also be found tucked away snugly at the back of the housing.

The 6108 thus offers an alternative to the keypad for typing SMS messages. The 10 numeric buttons on our handphones, together with predictive text, have served us well when it comes to messaging, but you do need a bit of practice to get it right initially. Mastery of this gets steeper when it comes to writing in non-Romanized languages.

The new Nokia thus makes it more intuitive for Chinese texters: Whip out the stylus, open the flip cover, and write away. If you decide to revert to convention in the middle of a message, simply close the keypad and continue thumbing.

The software engine identifies characters by their overall form, so it's all right if you don't follow the conventional top-to-bottom, left-to-right method of writing. This also explains why you can miss a stroke or two and still get the right word.

This brings us to the key question: How good is the 6108's character recognition?

In most cases, I was pleasantly surprised by its accuracy. While typing out a few stanzas of a Chinese song with about 90 characters, the vast majority of my handwriting was easily recognized by the phone. In a few cases, the immediate interpretation was wrong but I could pick out the right one from a given list of similar words. I only had to rewrite on a couple of occasions.

Hits And Misses
The 98g 6108 impresses with its compact size, which disguises the unique feature that it holds. Evidently, much thought has gone into developing the hardware of the 6108. Most commendable is the surface texture of the handwriting area. Not completely smooth, it offers just enough friction to create some semblance of writing on paper. This helps users write legibly despite the limited space available.

It's also handy that Nokia includes an extra stylus that clips onto your shirt pocket plus an additional back cover without the stylus slot. One minor grouse, as far as hardware design goes, is the keypad flip gets in the way of the user's wrist.

That said, the 6108's software needs a little more tweaking. For example, you can use handwriting input to create new contacts, but you won't be able to search for them the same way. At the same time, the recognition of handwritten English is underdeveloped, especially when you compare this against the options available on PDAs. If you're writing the letter "O", you have to complete the full circle, or it's interpreted as a "C". This is significant because your message may be a mish mash of English and Chinese, and you don't want to keep opening and closing the flip while writing it.

Other Features
The 6108 contains most of the qualities of a typical Nokia--a 4,096 color display, polyphony, triband and MMS. The speaker of our unit was, strangely, shrill enough to make some of the melodies painful on our ears, forcing us to switch off gaming sounds.

Another surprise is the exclusion of an FM receiver, which has become a mainstay in many Nokia phones. As compensation, there is an English-Chinese two-way dictionary that may prove handy when you're searching for the right word.

We experienced no issues with the reception and voice quality of the 6108. Its 850mAh Lithium-ion battery lasted four days before conking out, which is quite credible for a color-display handset.

Conclusion
You don't have to pay top dollar for the 6108, which currently goes for S$518 with a two-year contract or S$638 without a line. As proof of concept, this terminal shows that handwriting input can be incorporated effectively in a small form factor, which bodes well for other languages such as Hindi and Thai. As a practical handset, the 6108 is a boon for hardcore Chinese texters, but its poor English recognition prevents it from reaching a wider crowd. In Singapore, where hanyu pinyin is commonly taught in schools, the 6108 will be a good buy for the older set.

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