With the EDGE-enabled Nokia 6682, the folks in Finland have unleashed one of their most stylish and powerful smart phones to date. Armed with a 1.3-megapixel camera, full Bluetooth capabilities, and a sweet music player, the Nokia 6682 will have phone fanatics and on-the-go shutterbugs green-eyed with envy. That said, this tempting handset suffers from Nokia's characteristically bulky design, a tough-on-the-fingers keypad, and a camera that's a tad shy of state of the art. This unlocked GSM phone comes with a steep $550 price tag, but look for prices to fall once a carrier (likely Cingular) is announced.

Design
The Nokia 6682 is typically big and bulky for a Nokia candy-bar-style phone. Measuring 4.2 by 2.2 by 0.9 inches and weighing 4.6 ounces, the hefty handset is slightly smaller than its jumbo-size predecessor, the Nokia 6600, although it still makes for a tight fit in a jeans pocket. That said, the silver and ice-white design is sleek; if there were an Apple iTunes phone in our future, it should look something like this.

The Nokia 6682's 2-inch, 176x208-pixel display looks great. Images and snapshots boast rich color and plenty of detail on the phone's 262,000-color LCD, compared with those on the 6600's meager 65,000-color screen, although we had a hard time reading the display in direct sunlight. The 6682's colorful menus are easy to navigate. That said, the phone sports Symbian Series 60 OS, and it's beginning to show its age.

The phone's backlit, silver and gray keypad looks great, and we especially like the easy-to-use five-way mouse, the jumbo-size soft keys, and the dedicated text-entry key that lets you toggle between predictive text, symbol, and alpha modes. Still, we have a bone to pick with the numeric keys, which are way too small for our fingers and have a shimlike design that makes for tough tapping. It's too bad Nokia didn't shrink the large soft keys to make more room for the digits.Performance
We tested the Nokia 6682 (GSM 850/1800/1900; GPRS; class 10 EDGE) in New York City, and we had no trouble with our calls; our fellow chatters reported that we sounded loud and clear. We also tested the phone in our living room with a TV, a wireless network, and a microwave oven whirring away, and we noticed no extra interference or signal loss. Calls made over the speakerphone were somewhat diminished in quality, but that's to be expected.

The Nokia 6682's photos look quite vivid and detailed for snapshots taken with a camera phone, although they can't match the picture quality of the latest 2-megapixel handsets. While we experienced little in the way of lens distortion on the edges of our pictures, we did notice some video noise creeping into our images, even in bright, day-lit shots. The movies we shot with the 6682's video recorder looked predictably murky. Our MP3s sounded pretty good with the Nokia 6682's earbud-style headset, although we wish we had been able to crank the volume a little louder. Plus, some bass- and treble-boosting EQ controls wouldn't hurt.

During battery tests, we managed TK hours of talk time on a single charge, compared with the rated time of 4 hours. The promised standby time is 11 days. According to FCC radiation tests, the Nokia 6682 has a digital SAR rating of 0.82 watts per kilogram.