05-Jan-2007, 01:14 AM
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Review: Nokia N70 3G SmartPhone
The Nokia N70 is the first of the Nokia Nseries smartphones to be released in the UK. The N70 is a 3G smartphone, similar to the popular and successful 6680, but with upgraded features.
Physically the N70 is similar in appearance to the Nokia 6680, with a conventional boxy shape and a functional (but small) keypad with a five-way scroll key, two soft keys, an application key, and a multimedia key. The N70 is slightly thicker than the 6680, but lighter. The screen is a good size and the two cameras are well located. Overall, it's a good, practical design for a smartphone, and the most traditional-looking of the Nseries phones. The surface does scratch however, so take good care of it.
The N70 is a powerful imaging device with a high quality camera with 2 megapixels. This is the first Nokia phone to break the 2 megapixel barrier. The camera has a very powerful 20x digital zoom, an integrated flash and a choice of modes including scenery, portrait, night and sports. It's possible to control settings such as brightness, white balance settings and colour tones. The camera, whilst good, isn't as good as the 2 megapixel camera on the Sony Ericsson K750i or W900i. There's a dedicated camera button and a protective slide. Nokia XpressPrint enables you to print photos directly to a PictBridge-compliant printer. Video recording is also possible (but not at the 2 megapixel resolution). A Movie Director application is supplied for editing videos.
The N70 has the full range of 3G capabilities, including video calling, video downloads and video/music streaming. A second VGA resolution camera is used for making video calls. Data transfer via 3G is very fast, opening up the possibility of media streaming and music or video downloads. The display on the N70 is very good with 262k colours and a bright active matrix display. It's a great multimedia device.
The RealPlayer media player supports video playback in MPEG4 format, plus audio in a choice of formats including MP3, AAC, Real Audio, WAV and Nokia Ring Tones. The Visual Radio lets you listen to songs from radio stations, with information about the song and artist. A stereo headset is supplied as part of the sales package.
The internal memory of the device is 30 Mbytes, with the addition of a 64 Mbyte MMC card which can be hot-swapped. Connectivity is via Bluetooth or USB.
The N70 takes the 6680 and adds a few more features such as the enhanced camera. In so many ways it's an outstanding phone, but there are several things that let it down. First of all, the effect of adding in all these features has made the user interface very slow. It's not an easy phone to use, takes a long time to boot up, and does have a tendency to freeze or shut down. The camera isn't as good as you'd expect from a 2 megapixel device and the screen isn't as good as you'd expect from its specification. The keypad isn't easy to use if you have large fingers and the overall build quality of the N70 doesn't seem to be that great. In particular the sliding camera cover always seems to be about to fall off. Don't assume that the N70 is actually any better than the 6680 that it replaced. The new N73 upgrades the N70 significantly and is a better phone.
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