Nokia N70 review: Universal fighter

Office functions: pocket Word and Excel

Pros: Support for Microsoft Office and PDF formats
Cons: These are viewers, not editors • Too much wasted space on the display • Documents cannot be displayed horizontally

Among pre-installed programs there are three icons with the prefix Quick. These are browsers for formats of the Microsoft Office package. Quickword opens Word text documents, Quicksheet - Excel tables and Quickpoint - Powerpoint presentations.

The original versions of these programs are full-featured. This means that they not only read documents, but can also edit them or create new ones. The applications delivered with Nokia N70, however, are only able to read. It is not that bad, of course, but if you want to be able to do something more than read an email, you will have to pay extra. The entire Quickoffice Premier package costs 50 dollars.

Work with documents in Microsoft Word causes certain delays before the documents are fully displayed. Even though the program opened the first page, when I tried to go to the second one, it started to behave somewhat unpredictably. The important thing however is that no matter what size or type of Word file I would select, the phone managed them all. Yet I regret that the documents are not shown across the entire display, which is occupied by the needless titles and status bar.

Nokia press release in Quickword

The spreadsheet viewer shows information across the entire display and offers therefore more details. It is also quicker. Bigger files are viewed almost immediately. But as with Quickword, the information is in read only. Quickpoint is the third application that opens presentations, but it features lower compatibility compared to the first two programs.

This article's table displayed in Quicksheet

As you can expect, the PDF viewer is the slowest. Even though it does take time before a whole page gets displayed, the effort is worth making, for the result is identical to the image you will get in Adobe Reader on the PC. Files are opened across the entire display. The browser offers various zoom options too.

PDF viewer

There is one thing all the mentioned programs lack - the horizontal view option. To blame for this inconvenience is the Symbian Series 60 OS, whose current version does not support horizontal rendering.

Among offered office functions you will also run across various applications for work with Bluetooth printers. As I do not have such a printer, I did not try the InfoPrint program, nor did I print pictures. As for the calculator, it is as simple as usual - it manages basic operations; but does not work with precedence.

 
3 + 4 × 5 = 35 - is that right?

Music: This smartphone has a radio!

Pros: Built-in MP3 player and radio - Stereo everywhere • New MP3 application called Music
Cons: No jack for common earphones • MP3 files do not continue from the moment of the interruption • No RDS for the radio

Nokia N70 uses the new Music application as a MP3 player, instead of the old RealPlayer. I won't go in details about the new music player, I would only mention one unpleasant feature of Music: once you have accepted a phone call, the playing file does not continue from the moment it was interrupted. In general, however, Music is better than the older application.

   
New Music application

Nokia N70 is delivered with white plug-in earphones. To be honest, this is not my favourite type of earphones, mainly because of their inflexible cable, which seems as if it is going to keep the curves it got when bent in the factory forever, but also because of cable's denticulation - if a man is not shaved, it scratches their beard so loudly that they can hear the result in their ears.

The quality of the earphones is good and meets all expectations. Even though the common "plugs" do not transfer the bass elements properly and they accentuate all other frequencies, I am able to stand them in my ears. For a better sound you will need to buy an adapter, which conducts a slot for the jack (where standard earphones can then be plugged) from the Pop-port. The earphones can be used as a handsfree set too. On the pip that hangs from the cable there is a microphone and a button for accepting phone calls. If you press and hold this button, the voice dialling gets activated.

Fortunately, Nokia has installed a radio in this smartphone. Earlier, the only Series 60 phones that could offer a radio were the first N-Gage model, the cheap 3230 and the 6260 clamshell.

N70's radio is of the "Visual" type. It is prepared for simultaneous parallel data broadcasting and common radio broadcasting, but this service is currently only available in Finland. Anyway, the radio in Nokia N70 allows for listening to common FM broadcasting. The signal quality varies from station to station and is generally worse than the quality of the MP3 player sound. As usual, the cable of the earphones substitutes the antenna, so it is possible that a single move of your body can affect the radio signal.

Radio is playing

Data and connection to PC

Pros: EDGE and 3G support • Preinstalled Opera browser • Data profiles are easy to set up • Free PC Suite
Cons: It does not signal the presence of EDGE in the net • No infrared

Once you get connected to internet, you will find out that Nokia N70 is probably the best equipped mobile phone ever. It works with GPRS Class 10 and EDGE Class 10. In addition, it supports third-generation networks in the WCDMA standard. Unfortunately, I did not try out data transferring via 3G. I do not have exact proofs about EDGE either. The problem is that Nokia does not alert you, when EDGE is available. As a result, the user has no idea, whether he is connected through GPRS or through the faster EDGE. The situation changes when 3G come into the play, for its symbol gets clearly displayed.