Nokia N70 review: Universal fighter

Messages: plenty of options

Pros: Simple MMS settings • Good email client • Automatic email setup • Supports office formats and attachments
Cons: T9 problem with diacritics

The function menu to work with messages has been left unchanged. It offers SMS, MMS, emails and the so-called Chat, which is more famous as instant messaging.

  Messages main menu

Text messages: full comfort

The space reserved for incoming SMS is limited by the free memory space only. The editor writes in 8 lines, which basically means that a whole message can be displayed en block. It's possible to use T9 or to deactivate it for good.

 
Writing SMS • incoming message in the list • reading SMS When a SMS is being written the editor counts the characters in each 160-character message from the beginning. It also indicates the amount of messages, into which the particular SMS has been divided. Notice of delivery can be set to come with every sent message or in specific cases only.

Multimedia messages: setting can be automatic

Nokia N70 can fit up to 300 KB in a single MMS. As this size is unusually big, please bear in mind that your mobile operator may not be capable of transmitting it. This happened to me even with a MMS of 250 KB - it just did not make it from T-Mobile to Eurotel.

The message editor is otherwise non-sophisticated. Besides texts, multimedia messages can also contain pictures, videos and sound clips; MMS are even possible to divide into pages.

Common MMS editor

When the option Create presentation is selected, Nokia warns you, that this type of multimedia message is not always correctly accepted by all phones. If you take the risk, the phone offers you a number of patterns and an option for colors and effects modifications.

Work with patterns

Nokia N70 manages multimedia messages as well as other data functions thanks to the SettingWizard application. The latter locates your operator and automatically set up all necessary characteristics.

 
SettingWizard, Menu

Email client

Nokia N70 works with emails and attachments in both directions. It supports the POP3 and IMAP4 protocols. The SMTP protocol helps you to send messages. The setup to access a mailbox is simple. It works in the same way like in a computer. If you need help, use the SettingWizard application. To gain access to most international mailboxes you only need to enter a name and a password.

Message preview

The setup menu provides you with various possibilities: you can choose whether to download entire emails together with attachments, or their headers only. A trade-off is also possible - you set the phone to only download the first X KB of each message. N70 checks for new emails regularly, if set to do so. Within this option you can chose, whether to use it in operator's home network only or when in roaming too. In addition, you can select check days, hours (from-to) and a check break.

The email client is able to manage nearly everything: it reads messages with diacritics, works with HTML emails, shows and saves attachments. As it supports office formats, you can even open an attachment with a table in Microsoft Excel. Nokia N70 sends emails without problems.

I am not going to pay detailed attention to Chat - the application for instant messaging. It works only if the relevant operator supports it. Besides, Nokia is supposed to support Push to talk, but my efforts to test this application were in vain.

Organizer: is Nokia going to ever improve its alarm clock?

Pros: Good calendar • Functional synchronizing
Cons: Non-repeated alarm clock • Calendar synchronization excludes notes • Font is unnecessary big • Significant limits in the voice recorder

Nokia is constantly developing new applications for its smartphones, but it rarely improves the old applications. Perhaps this is the reason why N70 has the same alarm clock as Nokia's first Symbian phone - Nokia 7650. It is too simple and does not have a repeat function. Even Nokia 1100, which costs less than 70 euros, has a better alarm clock than Nokia's best-equipped smartphones. It is a shame, indeed.

 
An alarm clock from grandma's childhood  

The calendar offers a month, week and a day view. It is possible to set one of them as a default view. Days with events in the month view are marked with a tiny nook. In the week view they are displayed as different long stripes in a time axis. Beside everything else, the day view provides you with the name and the place of the event.

Month, week and day view at the calendar

When you add a new item, you can choose among three possible types: a meeting, a note and an anniversary. You need to enter an object, place, time of the event and alert time. The items saved into the calendar can repeat: daily, weekly, every two weeks, every month or every year.

The calendar synchronizes with Microsoft Outlook too. The time of the event, the task, the repetition interval and even the place of the event (which is however added in brackets next to the object) are easily sent. What the synchronizing software cannot do is transfer notes. At the same time notes usually contain quite important details each user will surely be glad to have saved in their phone. I would have also appreciated a smaller font option in the calendar, because the available standard font size allows only relatively short text to be displayed.

The task manager is very simple. You only have to enter a task, time of completion and priority. Once the task has been completed, you can mark it off. Notes are organized on the same principle. Unfortunately, here the monstrously big font and needless graphic elements are even more annoying than in the calendar.

Notes preview • note detail

My remarks about the alarm clock hold also true for the voice recorder application. What strikes me is that individual records can be no more than 1 minute long, even if Nokia N70 has 30 MB of internal memory and an additional memory card.

A 1-minute voice recorder: a cute friend of the alarm clock