Nokia E70

By Alex Kidman, CNET.com.au
Oct 20, 2006

At first glance, the E70 looks rather like any other candy-bar form factor mobile phone, albeit a touch bigger and chunkier at 117 by 53 by 22 mm and with a carrying weight of 127g. That's hardly surprising for a phone that sells itself on its business savyy, where having a super-slim form factor is less of a concern than whether you'll be able to synchronize to your e-mail client.

Design (continued...)
The main physical feature of the E70 that separates it from the candybar herd is the flip out thumbpad that rests behind and underneath the main dialing pad; you flip the dialing pad over the "top" of the phone, and it reveals a small spilt QWERTY keyboard underneath. When the keypad is open, the display on the 352x416-pixel screen flips from a vertical to horizontal perspective, indicating the correct way to hold the E70 when using the keyboard.

In exactly the same style as the Nokia E61, the E70 features an astonishingly small joystick selector just underneath the screen.

The E70 features a single 2-megapixel camera, and while it's 3G capable, the lack of a second camera means it's only recommended for video calls for the exceptionally shy/ugly/one-sided conversationalists--delete where applicable.

Features
The E70 is a tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900) and 3G capable phone with connectivity options for Bluetooth, wireless LAN, USB and infrared. For the truly connection-crazed types, it can even manage 802.11g, Bluetooth, USB and infrared at the same time, according to Nokia's specifications, although we struggled to come up with a scenario where that was even possible, let alone desirable.

On an operating system side it runs on Symbian OS 9.1 with 64MB of internal memory and support for miniSD cards to expand that out. One minor quirk here is that the slot for the miniSD card sits underneath the battery cover, which could make changing cards a touch on the difficult side. The single camera on the E70 is a 2-megapixel model that's also capable of video recording, although as previously noted you won't be making too many interactive video calls with it.

Applications that the E70 supports include push e-mail--and yes, BlackBerry Connect is amongst your options--as well as push-to-talk, instant messaging, VoIP calls via Wi-Fi as well as what you'd think of as "normal" phone functions, such as SMS, MMS and music playback. As always with Nokia phones, PC connectivity is via the provided PC Suite software.

• Most Popular

• Upcoming

What's Hot