Comments on: Nokia N70

By: marxy

marxy — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

Nice review.

I bought one too (following your recommendation) and it's a good phone, if a little bulky. One correction is that, it does have an FM tuner but it only works when the headphones are plugged in, which seems a little strange as the speaker works so well.

Python on the phone is great. You write your program, bluetooth it over and it just runs. On my first attempt I got a program going that walks the contact book, finds everyone called Peter and sends them to a WebService.

cheers,

marxy.

By: Frances

Frances — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

Man.. I know what you mean about the whole camera thing. I couldn't get my head around why I'd want a camera on my phone for AGES (having a canon digital seemed to suit me fine), but recently I replaced my aging nokia with a samsung, with fancy camera.. and hell.. now I'll never be able to go back. Oh how I lol at night-out photos the day after.

Can't seem to manage to bring myself to use it's MP3 player though. How every many megs just can't take the place of a 20gig iRiver.

By: alastair

alastair — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

Agree: there's nothing quite like having your entire music collection in your pocket. But the iPod (mine is a 60gig) is just a little bit bulky to take everywhere, so it's nice to have the phone to entertain me, eg on the bus when going out on the town.

Talking of drunken photography, I should have mentioned the N70 has an LED flash for nocturnal journalism. The picture quality is, needless to say, terrible. But again it's better than nothing!

As another followup, check out this talk about mobile phone viruses. Kinda scary, they're all on Symbian.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

I have an aging Nokia 3200 which was my first camera phone. The 3200 put a very sour taste in my mouth about camera phones. It's hard to imagine why Nokia even bothered. I think if Canon put a phone in their cameras it would be a better phone than my phone's camera... if you see what I mean. All photos taken by a 3200 look like drunken photos taken in smokey pubs no matter what I was photographing, or whether I was drunk or not.

Anyway, my spouse just fell in love with a Motorola Razr. It seems to take pretty decent images and the UI is actually pretty good. I can't work out how to easily get from dictionary to text entry mode so I can type in URLs to the wee browser, but I suspect that knowledge is a quick flip through the manual away.

The geneal quality of phones seems to have taken a huge leap in the last year.

By: Sally

Sally — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

The main reason for buying the phone was so that I can connect to the PC to share my contacts and calendar. But after many attempts I've not managed to get the PC to recognise the cable connection at all.

I am trading in my E200 SPV which has been great until recently when the main scroll button started failing, hence the reason for the change. Come back MS Activesync, all is forgiven!!

By: alastair

alastair — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

Sally: yes mine has been especially troublesome of late. I haven't got a workaround yet. The last time I revived the Nokia PC Suite I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling it.

There are a few N70 forums around the place and from a quick perusal it seems there are others having similar problems.

By: N70 guy

N70 guy — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

How can you compare a phone to an MP3 player? The nokia N70 only has a 64mb mmc as standard, with very small onboard memory. it is ideal for contacts, messages, symbian applications and other cool files, but not music. MP3’s use HUGE amounts of memory when looking at this phone, and expandable memory is still VERY expensive. The latest version of Quickword is very cool, and some things suck as game boy emulators are very impressive, but the idea of a phone being used to take the place of an MP3 player, whilst using mmc’s is very odd. The phone is fairly easy to use (though not as easy as past nokia OS) but for the capabilities it has other than music, it is AWESOME. the sliding back is super cool and the phone in general is definately worth the money BUY ONE!

By: Ajarn Cole

Ajarn Cole — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

Nerd Factor X has written one of the BEST reviews on the N70 I have read to date. Not only is it informative, accurate, and precise, but SUPER fun and enjoyable to read. Thanks for this article!

As for me, I've had the N70 for almost 2 weeks now, and it seems that everyday I find something else on this phone to enjoy. I've been buying mobile phones for 14 years, give or take a year, and this is by far the best phone I have ever owned. Like Nerd Factore I asked the same question just a couple of years ago, "Why would I want a camera on my phone?!", and now it's definitely "It HAS to be at LEAST 2MP or I'm not buying it!" LOL

So all things being equal, the N70 is really a great phone for the money.

By: alastair

alastair — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

N70 guy: well I was trying to compare the N70 to an iPod only with respect to its design, ease of use, and other human factors. I wasn't trying to compare the functionality of the two.

Ajarn: glad you liked the review.

I need to do a followup. Opera is available for the Symbian phones and it is way better than the built-in browser. Highly recommended.

By: Ben Cornwell

Ben Cornwell — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:34:56 +0000

I got this phone cos it was free, and quite cool. I used my last phone as an MP3 player, and I shall do with this one. By the way, 1Gb of RS-MMC memory just cost me GBP 24, so I don’t think it’s very expensive. 1Gb isn’t as much as an iPod of course, but I put on all the albums I’m currently listening to, and I only used up 700Mb

I’ve found the thing crash after a couple of hours listening to the radio though… Oh, and does anyone else find the Symbian OS is a bit slow for menus etc? Reading text messages takes a good few seconds.