I’ve owned my Nokia 6610 for almost a year now, but I only discovered two of its nice hotkey features only recently. You’re welcome to skip this post if you’re not interested in techie minutiae. (I’m a self-confessed geek. So sue me.)

Anyway, I knew way before back when I still had my 6150 that when you’re in the main screen, pressing “up” or “down” brings you to the phone’s address book. The same thing happens with the 6610 but there’s also a “left” and a “right” key this time. So I recently tried pressing “left” and lo and behold! To my utter amazement, the create new message screen came up. Amazing! How come I didn’t know this before? I’m quite sure I never read that in the manual. Before, I had to press a key four times to get to that screen. Now I can do it with 75% less effort. Yay for efficiency!

Pressing “right” brings up the Calendar. Cool. Now I can easily find out what day of the week my next date will be on. Except that I don’t have a date. (There goes its usefulness.) But at least the efficiency rating increased by 200%. Before I had to do a Menu-8–1 key combination (not to mention that I had to scroll down the menu before I internalized that key combination) to get to the Calendar.

I wonder if there’s a way to remap those hotkeys? I use the To do feature more often than I use the Calendar (which is to say, practically never). Maybe if I hack at the firmware? Hehehe.