Nokia N70 is a good workhorse PDA phone

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Product: Nokia N70, Tri-band GSM and 3G (W-CDMA) smartphone
Manufacturer: Nokia
Web: www.nseries.com
Price: Free - £260 depending on contract

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IF YOU want a clear idea of the direction Nokia is heading with its business orientated smartphones, then take a look at the N70. It's probably the best Nokia you can currently get for 3's 3G network as well.

In a nutshell, it's a Symbian based Series 60 handset which combines PDA functionality with an MP3 player and FM radio capability. It's the right form factor to fit into your pocket and, for once, doesn't boast a strangely styled keyboard either. In terms of cameraphones, the N70 is pretty slick since it boasts a sliding cover to keep the rear 2 megapixel camera and flash clean. Nokia claims that it offers up to 20 x digital zoom too. There's a dedicated camera button on the casing's side to fire the camera up. The second, front camera is a boring VGA job which is really just intended for video calls.

So where are its faults? Anything which causes the user to reach for the manual has to score a minus point. So in the N70's case, it's not immediately obvious how to change the five onscreen icons from their default settings to your own personal preferences.

Once that's sorted, it's down to using the handset in earnest. One of the applications is the Visual Radio facility. This is intended to match up a regular FM radio with browser based information broadcast by participating stations.

The radio doesn't work, however, until you plug in the supplied headset. Then you can launch the browser and look at a list of local stations to discover if any of them do visual radio. Unless you live in Finland, you're currently going to be unlucky.

The next facility to try out is the MP3 player supplied by Real Networks. The easiest way to get your existing sound collection onto the N70 is via the USB cable and the associated PC Suite software supplied with the handset. Only a foolish person attempts the same trick via Bluetooth.

The N70 sports a tiny 64 MB RS-MMC memory card as standard. At least you can pop them into the handset's memory slot without having to take the battery out. A Nokia bod did hint that his company might eventually go over to using SD cards rather than MMC but we've been waiting for that quite some time already.

Somewhat irritatingly the N70 contains an IM (Instant Messaging) client. The INQ suspects this is just intended for IM systems which the mobile operators themselves decide to offer. There was no sign of how the client could connect to MSN Messenger, for example.

You can feed IM settings in manually, of course but you've got to know what they are in the first place. Entering the settings for your own POP3 or IMAP4 email service is a lot easier. Email works quite well. The INQ attributes this to the fact that the N70 has some 22 Mb of internal memory. By contrast, our Nokia 6630 was for ever running out of memory for messages.

Nokia has also placed a good deal of emphasis on the fact that the N70 boasts its XpressPrint facility. The idea is to make it as easy as possible to print the snaps the cameraphone has taken. So it supports PictBridge/USB and Bluetooth connexions, for example.

The only other gripes the INQ has with this handset is that it no longer supports infra-red. It relies on Bluetooth instead. Plus, for some reason, Nokia has changed the mains charger so all our old Nokia chargers no longer fit.

The N70 is a good workhorse smartphone which would keep the majority of business users happy. If you're a Symbian lover, then this is the handset for you.µ

L'INQ
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