Nokia 6700 slide review: Braving the odds

Introduction

A stylish and durable steel body, compact size and smartphone skill, the Nokia 6700 slide looks strong enough to hold its own in a modern world. Touchscreen, Android and whatnot have forced a sea change and many fear Symbian to have lost some of its mojo. It still has its strongholds of course – it seems the Eseries and Nseries will never fall out of users’ favor. But where does that leave an affordable midrange smartphone like the 6700 slide?

Nokia 6700 official photos

Affordable may as well be the key word here. We’re looking at an easy-going, eye-catching phone that wants to have mass appeal. It’s got some big shoes to fill too – its bar-shaped sibling was one of the best appreciated Nokia handsets last year. Adding smart to what was a pretty cool phone already seems like the next logical move. But let’s see if the 6700 slide is the right package for the right market.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
• Tri-band 3G with 10Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA
• Solid metal casing
• 2.2" 16M-color QVGA display with excellent sunlight legibility
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with Carl-Zeiss lens, dual LED flash
• VGA video recording at 15fps
• Symbian OS, S60 3.2 user interface
• Built-in accelerometer sensor
• Stereo FM radio with RDS, Visual radio
• Bluetooth (with A2DP)
• Standard microUSB port (charging)
• microSD card slot (16 GB supported, 2GB included)
• Rich preinstalled application package
• Smart dialing
• 2.5mm audio jack
• Great audio quality

Main disadvantages

• No WLAN
• No GPS receiver
• Small display
• No preinstalled document viewer
• 2.5mm audio jack limits third-party headphones choice
• Memory card slot under the back cover

The Nokia 6700 slide brings enough updates to justify its existence – smartphone skill, an audio jack and video-calling are there to address some of the main grudges we had with the 6700 classic. Gaps in the spec sheet are prominent enough though. GPS is perhaps irrelevant to the intended users but Wi-Fi will certainly be missed.

The Nokia 6700 slide views

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way of translating the 6700 classic to a slider form factor something must have gone wrong with the design language. Perhaps the only way to properly say that is we would have liked it better if the 6700 slide looked more like the 6600i slide and less like Wall-E. But whatever, design has always been a subjective thing so we’ll leave the biting comments aside for now.

Instead we’ll focus on the Nokia 6700 slide ergonomics right after the break.