Nokia's Series 60 line gets a boost with the 6670, sporting a MP camera, Bluetooth and a refreshingly normal keypad. Anthony Newman investigates.
Nokia's Series 60 OS is behind some of the most successful - and critically acclaimed - smartphones around - just take a look at our top five for proof. To flesh out the range further, Nokia have produced a 7610-alike, the 6670, aimed at the business market. Has the Finnish giant hit another home run?
Unusually sobre - for a Nokia
Nokia has never been afraid to push the boundaries of design (the 3650 springs to mind), but to target the more restrained commercial market, the 6670 is rather more sobre than usual. It's a standard candybar handset, attractively decorated in silver, chrome and black - although both front and back covers can be replaced. Like all of Nokia's smartphones, the 6670 is a little on the big side - 109 x 53 x 21 mm, and 118 g in the hand - but it's not uncomfortable in a pocket or suit.
The front of the phone is graced with a typically excellent display, running at the standard 176 x 208 resolution. Colours and brightness are both good, and the screen acts as an excellent viewfinder for the 1.2 MP camera, located on the reverse of the unit. Although not protected by a lens cover, or equipped with a flash or vanity mirror, we were impressed by the photos produced - which is handy given the various media applications included. We'll come on to those later.
The frequently crazy Nokia keypads have been foregone in favour of a standard layout. Feedback is good through the clear plastic, blue-backlit keys, but we found the spacing a little close. Nonetheless, the OS and keypad were happy to keep up with very fast T9 input. The call-control and menu keys are unfortunately placed close to the edges of the front face, making them hard to push - but not as hard as the power button, which lurks, hermit-like, on the top of the phone. The directional pad, on the other hand, is great. What's more, the two soft keys are very large and easy to press.
Say bye-bye to connectivity blues
Nokia haven't skimped when it comes to connectivity for this 2G handset. Tri-band 900/1800/1900 MHz GSM and Class 10 GPRS take care of WAN connections, while well-implemented and reliable Bluetooth covers the PAN end, but, refreshingly, there's no IR port. We found reception to be reliable, even in marginal areas, and volume from both normal and speakerphone modes proved to be loud. On the bottom edge of the phone we find the usual Nokia charger port and a Pop-port for expansion, making owners of existing Nokia peripherals happy.
Under the hood, Series 60 devices have always appeared more as phones than PDAs. Just 8 MB of RAM is included, which led to several 'out of memory' errors during our tests. However, this is expandable through and RS-MMC slot, inconveniently placed under the battery. One 64 MB card is provided in the box. In terms of speed, the 123 MHz ARM processor didn't let us down, and surprisingly, the now-standard BL-5C Lithium Ion battery, at 900 mAh, gave us nearly five days of battery life.
The latest version of Series 60 is superb to use, both as phone and PDA, especially compared to Microsoft's offering. We'd like to reiterate that there's no better smartphone operating system.
And owners are spoilt by a plethora of applications. Of note are the top-quality camera application, which takes 1280 x 960 pictures and 10 minutes of 176 x 144 video clips; speaker-dependent voice control; RealPlayer; chat/presence functionality; an electronic Wallet; NetFront web browser; three print applications (Kodak, Fuji and Print); the handy Quickoffice document viewer; a photo and video editor; a 'Transfer' app for copying data from another Nokia, and the exciting Lifeblog.
But the app that made us jump for joy? SettingWizard. It works out what network you're on, and automatically fills in SMS, MMS, WAP, Web and other settings for you. Genius. Also available, for free, is Nokia Album - a picture taker and viewer that tags each image with the location it was taken, using cell information. We did say there was a lot of media functionality...
Availability
The Nokia 6670 is available now in Europe for approximately 600 EUR without subscription.
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