Why I Like My Nokia E70
Various VoIP bloggers have gotten their hands on the Nokia E61. I’ve played with the Nokia E61 and I generally like it, except for the form factor in my pocket. That and the Record button is very easily to accidently hit if you forgot to lock the keyboard.
Personally, I am a fan of the Nokia E70, which is the phone I currently carry. Here’s my personal highlights, in no particular order:
- 2 megapixel camera. It takes decent pictures for a camera phone. Certainly won’t replace my digital camera for family photos or anything, but it does the job in a pinch.
- Email: POP3/IMAP (with optional TLS or SSL support), not to mention optional Blackberry, Intellisync Wireless Email, and other types of mobile email.
- Syncs with any SyncML client, PC Suite, Intellisync products. Haven’t tried sync with my Mac yet.
- Full QWERTY keyboard, yet folds up to a reasonable size in your pocket. Lift up the numeric keypad and fold it all the way back, and you have a full keyboard. Half on one side of the screen, half on the other. The screen orientation “rotates” to acoomodate. You type with your thumbs. It works surprisingly well, though it does require two hands, so please don’t do it while you drive.
- 802.11b/g WiFi, with full support for WPA. The phone also supports GPRS/EDGE. The European model also has UMTS.
- Media player plays MP3s and AACs.
- Podcast App at http://www.nokia.com/podcasting. While they specifically list this as an application for the Nokia N91, any Series 60 Third Edition phone such as the Nokia E70 can use this application. I download and listen to all my podcasts from the phone using this application and (usually) my home WiFi connection.
- A full web browser, which can render the vast majority of websites. It won’t do flash-based sites, but pretty much anything else I’ve thrown at it so far has done fairly well, unless it loads a significant number of page elements. The device does have limited memory after all.
- ssh client available for it from the Putty for Symbian OS page. If you don’t know what SSH is, this probably won’t matter to you.
Basically it does the vast majority of what I need in a mobile device. It could always be faster, have a little more RAM, and better battery life. For what it does do and what my needs are, it’s a pretty good fit.
