Features
If you've never used a Series 60 phone, you may well be blown away by how much the operating system resembles that of a personal computer. The E70 runs on Version 3 of Symbian's 9.1 OS - built on the Series 60 platform - and as such is a true smartphone. 70 MB of onboard memory powers the phone and allows for everything from Web browsing and email to viewing and editing of MS Office documents. The E70 is also capable of multitasking, with one or more programs running "beneath the surface" of the visible application.
While getting truly familiar with Series 60 on the E70 will require some time, a highlight that's easily appreciated is the Active Standby mode. Somewhat similar to the "Today" view on PocketPC devices, S60's Active Standby displays a shortcut menu on the main screen along with a day-at-a-glance view of today's meetings, appointments, and to-dos while the phone is in standby mode. Selecting any shortcut or event with the joystick drills down through the OS to the appropriate application (i.e. Clicking a To-Do activates the Calendar App and opens the details of that reminder).
The Contacts and Calendar applications on the E70 are excellent, and benefit greatly from the QWERTY keyboard and landscape-mode display. Contacts may be assigned photo and/or ringtone IDs and an amazing amount of personal data including multiple phone numbers and email addresses, company info, and personal notes. Organizer information can be synched via Bluetooth, USB, or WLAN. The E70 is also capable of voice dialing and voice commands for launching applications and carrying out other system tasks.
Beyond the myriad business and Email/Web/Messaging applications that come pre-installed, Nokia has also included a music player that supports mp3 and AAC files, a media player that can handle various video formats, Real Player, Flash Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader clients, and a single game - Pro Tour Golf . The music player works quite well, features an useful equalizer, and can play files stored either in the ample internal memory or on a removable miniSD memory card.
Suffice it to say that the E70 is one of the most feature rich mobile phones available today. The S60 OS opens the device up to a host of configuration options best left to corporate IT experts, including over the air installation of OS updates and JAVA applications. The executive can use the phone as a Blackberry alternative and the tech-savvy phone enthusiast may customize the device to his heart's content.
The E70 features a 2 megapixel digital camera with video recording capabilities. It's interesting that Nokia chose to build a relatively high-end camera sensor into the E70 but skimped when it came to including a flash or even the normal range of adjustment settings usually found on a cameraphone of this resolution. Settings include resolution (VGA or 2 MP), quality, color tone, white balance, and night mode, but no exposure settings. As a result, picture quality varied from very good under near-perfect lighting conditions to rather lacking in detail and clarity for a 1600 x 1200 pixel image.
Video recording results were actually a bit better than those of still photos, with clips shot at CIF resolution (352 x 288) playing back quite nicely on the display or when transferred to a computer. Interestingly, while digital zoom is almost always near-useless on a cameraphone, the E70's zoom function worked quite nicely when shooting videos, yielding a relatively smooth, watchable moving image.
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4.7
