Nokia E70 review: Folding typewriter

Business after all

More than everything Nokia E70 is a business phone. That's why it offers great office features. It has Word, Excel and PowerPoint editors which work very well. You can zoom in and out the file, jump to other page or edit the content. You can also create new files. These Office applications are much better, compared to those in Nokia N80, which could only read office documents but couldn't edit them.

Office menu • Word document • Excel document

E70 features a dual clock. You can set two different times and dates in two time zones. The Calendar has Month, Week, Day and To-do view. You can assign Meeting, Anniversary, Memo and To-do tasks in the Calendar. You can also put alarms on those assignments.

Month • Week • Day • To-do view of the Calendar

There are also the Notes, Converter, Calculator and Recorder applications in the Organizer menu. The Converter converts Currencies, Area, Energy, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Temperature, Time, Velocity and Volume. If you open the QWERTY keyboard and press any key, the Notes application starts automatically, very convenient indeed. The calculator is very simple and easy to use. Regrettably, the Recorder has a one minute limit for voice records as in all Nokia smartphones.

Organizer menu • Notes • Converter • Calculator • Voice recorder

PDF and ZIP come welcome

The phone has a PDF reader application which is very useful if you need to open a document in this format. E70 also has a zip archive application which opens archives with this extension.

Installations menu • PDF options • zip archive name

The test phone we had didn't have any preinstalled games but there will be a Pro Golf Tour game announced by Nokia which is supposed to come preinstalled on E70. Fortunately, installing games is very easy and if you're near a Wi-Fi hotspot, it is a two minute job. There is an update application in E70 which connects to the server and offers you to download the Pro Golf Tour game. There is no doubt that this golf game is graphically far from the golf game in Sony Ericsson M600 but its gameplay is rather amusing.

Brilliant, especially if you type a lot

Nokia E70 is an outstanding phone almost in every aspect - convenient QWERTY keyboard, high-resolution display and full set of connectivity options. The controversial design and the annoying response delay during the switch between landscape and portrait orientation of the display doesn't seem enough to create a bad reputation of this great mobile phone. If it is offered on a reasonable price, there is absolutely no doubt that Nokia E70 will be a huge success.