Nokia 6110 Navigator
Nokia 6110 Navigator Review
The concept behind the 6110 Navigator is very simple: You can take the phone out of the box and use it for full satellite navigation straight away, without having to do anything else. You can even use it without a SIM card, as all the navigation information is stored in the phone itself.
Because this is the first Nokia phone to contain a complete navigation system (not just GPS but on-board route-planning software and maps too), this is the first model to use the suffix “Navigator”, and we’ll presumably see lots more Nokia Navigators in the future.
Surprisingly, the navigation software included with the 6110 Navigator isn’t Nokia’s own recently acquired Smart2go (aka Nokia Maps) but a third party app called Route 66. The actual Route 66 application is built into the phone’s firmware, but the detailed regional map pack is stored on the bundled memory card. Our 6110 Navigator was a Finnish retail version, so the map pack was for the Nordic Countries, and the pack included with your phone will depend on where you buy it (you can buy additional map packs through the phone’s internet connection
, or through the included Route 66 Sync program for your PC). There’s also a free basic world map built into the Route 66 application.
The 6110 Navigator In Real Life
The 6110 Navigator (the Navigator bit is because the original 6110 name belongs to a much older phone) is perhaps a tiny bit bulky by sliderphone standards, but not much, and, considering it has all its GPS hardware built in, it’s light at 125g.
The sliding mechanism is extremely sturdy, there’s a nice firm clunk when you open or close it, and there’s no looseness in either mode. The phone can be opened and closed with one hand, and it’s comfortable to hold when making calls as the bulk of the weight is in the keypad section. The front and back covers are a glossy plastic, with a matt metallic silver middle section that allows you to grip the phone more easily. The screen is surrounded by a brushed steel frame.
The back cover has a brushed steel middle section that covers the camera, part of which can be retracted to reveal the lens and flash (opening it activates the camera app, closing it closes the app). The steel camera cover got stained fairly quickly by fingerprints, although the screen frame didn’t stain at all.
On the top of the phone there’s a charging socket and a 2.5mm audio socket. The left side has a USB port, “My Own” button and hotswap memory card slot. The right side has external volume controls and camera button. The bottom of the phone has a cover removal button.
The front of the phone features a bright QVGA (240×320) screen, a smaller secondary camera for videophone calls, and the usual S60 array of buttons. As with all recent S60 models, the pencil (aka edit) key has been removed, and its functions have been completely replaced by the # key. Making its debut is a dedicated navigation button that looks like the points of a compass, which activates the built-in Route 66 software when pressed (you can assign other navigation software to the “My Own” button if you don’t like Route 66).
Overall, the 6110 looks and feels as sleek and business-like as any Eseries or Nseries device. However, the keypad keys are surrounded by a large amount of blank space, and it would have been so much nicer if the designers had made the keys take up all of the room available to them. This would have not only looked better, but also made the phone much easier to use.
One rather strange thing about the sales package is the lack of anything to attach the phone to a vehicle dashboard. Sat nav is at its best when navigating roads, so this seems rather odd, especially as everything else is included. You can buy a clip separately, but it seems that Nokia have missed a marketing trick by forcing the user to do so. It’s worth noting however that we reviewed the first European sim-free sales package, and packages may vary if you buy them outside Europe or through a network operator.
As a Phone
The 6110 Navigator is a Symbian S60 3rd Edition FP1 smartphone. It’s compatible with Quadband GSM (850/900/1800/1900) and 3G WCDMA/UMTS (2100). In 3G mode, the 6110 Navigator supports HSDPA networks (where they exist of course) which means you can download data at several times the speed of normal 3G networks. This is sometimes referred to as 3.5G, as it’s basically 3G with knobs on.
As usual, the telephony is excellent on the 6110 Navigator, it was easy to get a signal, there were no dropped calls, and there was high sound quality during calls. Messages were sent and received without any problems. Interestingly the “My Own” key is set to the text message reader by default, so you can make the phone read any new messages out loud by pressing a button on the side of the phone. Obviously you can redefine the “My Own” key to whatever function you want.
The 6110 Navigator supports all the usual features of S60 telephony including calls, speakerphone, text messages, multimedia messages, push-to-talk etc. It also supports videophone calls using the secondary camera and 3G network connection.
Battery life, as always, depends on what you do with the device. With typical use you probably need to recharge it every other day, but this will vary tremendously from person to person. The official standby time is 11 days in GSM or 3G mode, with talk time at 3.5 hours for GSM calls and 2.5 hours for 3G calls (these all assume you do nothing else with the device, of course).
If you intend to use the 6110 in a car (and that is probably its main purpose), it’s well worth buying a cigarette lighter charger. These cost about £10 / €15 for an official Nokia version, even less for a third party one, and work with any new Nokia phone. They let you plug the phone straight into your car’s electricity supply so you can charge the phone while you’re on the move, and you can still use the phone while it’s charging.
As a GPS Satellite Navigation Device
(Please Note: If you’re familiar with GPS units, you may want to skip the next few paragraphs as they might seem rather patronising. The reason we’re including them is because the 6110 Navigator will probably introduce quite a lot of people to GPS for the first time, so it seems to be worth exploring GPS from the perspective of a complete novice.)
Confession time: this reviewer has never used a GPS device before, and the 6110 Navigator was quite a revelation, not just in terms of this model but in terms of the entire world of satellite navigation.
New features and technological fads are often novelties that are of little use to the majority of the world’s population. However, after using satellite navigation for just over a week it’s become clear that this is more than a novelty, and could be of as much significance for travellers as conventional paper maps themselves. The price tag on sat nav (not just the GPS hardware but the up-to-date maps and software too) currently makes it too expensive for most people in the world, but if the price drops below $100 its use seems likely to spread into virtually every community, just as ordinary mobile phones are doing right now.
Using a satellite navigation phone for the first time has an enchanting simplicity about it: you switch it on, it finds where you are and it tells you exactly how to get to anywhere else. Not only can you feed in your own destinations as street addresses, the phone can also suggest destinations based on what you’re looking for (hotels, fuel stations, hospitals etc) and can do this anywhere in the area covered by the maps you’ve bought, which usually means your own country and its neighbours. If you need more coverage, you can buy more maps straight onto the phone. When it works correctly, this is mind-bogglingly useful on a similar sort of scale to the babel fish in Douglas Adams’ novels, it’s the kind of tool that might be useful to almost anyone from any background. For those who remember an age before cell phones were commonplace, using sat nav for the first time matches the wonder of your first mobile call or your first text message. If you haven’t tried satellite navigation yet, this reviewer strongly suggests giving it a go.
Of course, life isn’t perfect. When you first use GPS, you immediately run into the slight snag of having to lock on to satellite signals first. GPS receivers know where you are by listening for signals from a constellation of GPS satellites that permanently orbit the earth. Once the receiver has spotted a minimum number of satellites, it can work out where you are mathematically, and it will keep tracking those satellites (as well as listening out for more satellites) as you move about. However, if you’re indoors, the physical mass between you and the GPS satellites interferes with their signals, and if there’s enough mass between you and the satellites their signals will not get through at all. While the same is technically true of phone signals, phone signals pass through the walls of a house far more easily than satellite signals, so even if you can get a phone signal indoors you may not be able to get a GPS signal.
It gets even more complicated: the amount of time it takes a receiver to lock on to satellite signals depends on how long it’s been since the last lock on, and how far from your last known location you are. The receiver apparently keeps a log of the satellites’ last known positions in the sky, and the closer they match this log the quicker the lock-on happens.
The amount of time it takes to lock on to satellites varies from device to device. When outside and doing a “cold start” (where you start searching for satellites for the first time after a long break), the 6110 Navigator managed to get a satellite fix within one or two minutes. When doing a “hot start” (where the break between satellite fixes is brief, for example if you exit the GPS app and re-enter it soon afterwards) the 6110 managed a fix within just a few seconds. Once the phone had found enough satellites to determine its position, it stayed locked on, and the navigation application could be left switched on in the background all day if required.
The time to lock-on was perfectly adequate for any length of journey, as long as you started the lock-on process outside. Unless you live in the Batcave, you wouldn’t even have time to reach your car and turn the ignition key before the 6110 had locked on to the satellites. If you’re on foot (Route 66 has a pedestrian mode too) you would barely have left your house before the phone had located enough satellite signals. There’s no point waiting for the software to locate your position while you’re still indoors, as the thick and dense walls of modern buildings will block out the signals to such an extent that the phone may take ten minutes or more to locate you, or may not even manage it at all if you’re deep within a larger structure.
Get Your Kicks On Route 66
The Route 66 software itself is pretty good, and mostly did the job required of it.
As well as showing your current location on a map, it also lets you look up any potential destinations anywhere in the area covered by your map pack (in this reviewer’s case the Nordic countries) which can be an exact street address, a keyword search of destinations, or, most usefully of all, a directory of nearby services and points of interest divided into 15 categories. If you fancy getting a bite to eat for example, you simply go to the Eating & Drinking category and it will list all known restaurants nearest to your location in order of proximity. You then click on the restaurant, select “Navigate To”, the software instantly calculates a route from where you are now to your desired destination, and off you go…
If you’re in car mode, the display will change to a 3D one by default, although you can set it to 2D if you wish, and 2D is the default for pedestrian mode. As you make your way along the route the software will give you two spoken warnings of upcoming maneouvres (e.g. “At the roundabout take the second exit”), one warning well before and one just before. Once the route is calculated, it is possible to navigate completely by the spoken instructions, and during testing the driver made the entire journey without looking at the screen at all. Indeed, this is probably much safer than having the driver look at a screen, and you might well want to switch the backlight off so that the driver isn’t tempted to look away from the road.
The animated arrow on the screen which showed our progress moved along surprisingly smoothly, and did not noticeably fall behind or stutter. If we departed from the suggested route, a new route to get us back on track was instantly calculated and displayed. The screen also displays icons to show points of interest that you’re passing very close to, such as car parks and hotels, and you can set an alarm to go off when you’re getting close to particular kinds of amenities.
There’s a large number of of other options which let you fine-tune the Route 66 software, for example you can have the backlight switched off if you’re relying on the spoken instructions, you can set the angle of the 3D map, and you can set an alarm to go off when you break a (user-defined) speed limit. The vehicle mode can be set to both cars and lorries, and you can ask the software to avoid toll roads, motorways or ferries. There’s six different colour schemes, and a night time colour scheme. You can save maps, routes and positions to memory, and send them to others by multimedia message, bluetooth or email. You can add an optional progress bar that fills up as you complete the length of your journey.
Route 66’s drawbacks lie with the accuracy of the maps: all navigation software lives and dies by whether the maps match reality. What was in the maps was accurate, all the roads tested did exist and were correctly classed, but pedestrian-only roads and bridges were often completely missing from the maps. Some of the pedestrian routes it suggested were ludicrous, for example a kilometre-long detour to cross a railway when there was a footbridge that required no detour. The data in Route 66 is very car-centric and though the software does its best with the data that it’s provided, the keen walker would do well to take any route advice with a pinch of salt. Having said that, the location of various points of interest is accurate, so walkers could still get a lot of use out of this application even ignoring the route-planning.
Another (perhaps somewhat trivial) use for Route 66 is on public transport, to watch your progress as your bus snakes its way along. As well as showing your progress, the screen also displays nearby points of interest that you pass by, so you may even decide to nip off the bus early if you fancy exploring that art gallery icon you just went past.
Alternatives to Route 66 on the 6110 Navigator
It’s worth emphasising that you don’t have to use Route 66 on the 6110 Navigator, any S60 3rd Edition-compatible GPS software should be able to work with the built-in GPS receiver. Nokia Maps (aka Smart2go) worked fine when tested, and you can even download the Nokia Maps application straight onto the phone through the phone’s web browser (just select the PC download option, don’t worry that you’re not on a PC). The GPS also worked with other apps included with the phone such as Landmarks and GPS Data.
As a Multimedia Device
It’s easy to forget that the 6110 Navigator is much more than a GPS device, it’s a full smartphone with all the trimmings you’d expect from S60 3rd Edition FP1.
The music player is up to the latest S60 standards, and free of the between-track crackling that plagued earlier S60 music players, although it does still have the annoying one second pause between tracks so you can’t have gapless playback. The 6110 uses microSD memory cards and can use cards with a capacity up to 2 gigabytes, which (depending on sound quality and track length) is enough for about 500 to 1000 tracks. As usual the supplied headphones are okay but seem to limit the volume somewhat, and I couldn’t get them to stay in my ears as they’re completely symmetrical and fairly flat with nothing to anchor them. This is easily solved by just using your own favourite 3.5mm headphones with a 2.5mm adaptor stuck on the end (you can buy them for about £5 / €7.5 nowadays in any good electrical shop). The 6110 Navigator is also compatible with A2DP Bluetooth stereo headphones, and includes AVRCP compatibility so you can control music and video playback on Bluetooth headphones with built-in controls such as the BH-500. (Forum Nokia’s 6110 page claims there’s no A2DP or AVRCP compatibility, but my retail model 6110 worked fine with A2DP and AVRCP devices, so Forum Nokia’s information is clearly wrong.)
The 6110 has external stereo speakers, but for some strange reason the designers put them right next to each other on the back of the phone. This means the stereo effect is minimised, and the sound is muffled if you’re holding the phone (although on a table the uneven design of the 6110’s back panel keeps the speakers off the tabletop and perfectly audible). The speakers are definitely stereo, the 3D ringtone effects do work in 3D, but you wonder why Nokia bothered installing two speakers if they’re going to be badly implemented like this. Looking on the bright side, the speakers are clear and loud, and you can easily hear the spoken instructions in sat nav mode.
There’s a built-in FM radio tuner, which lets you listen to normal radio stations, and you can download all of your local presets from an online database. The 6110’s gallery application also lets you enter the RTSP addresses of internet audio streams so you can listen to many internet radio stations too (the BBC for example uses RTSP streams to transmit its Listen Live and Listen Again services). You’ll have to turn to Google if you want to find RTSP addresses as the stations themselves tend not to advertise them.
As with all recent S60 models, the video player is very good, and you can watch high quality MP4 files in 320×240 full screen mode. The phone will stand on its side although you’ll have to put it on a shelf if you want to look straight at the screen. You can convert your own video files to a compatible MP4 format using Nokia’s free Video Manager software for the PC, and transfer them to the phone over USB cable or bluetooth using the same software.
The camera is a 2 megapixel point-and-shoot with built-in flash, and it can also shoot video at a YouTube-friendly 320×240. Using the camera is extremely intuitive, and in effect it’s as easy to use as a dedicated camera. You simply pull back the steel lens cover and the camera application automatically activates, then take the pictures using the dedicated button on the right side of the phone, holding the 6110 horizontally just like a normal camera. When you’ve finished, simply close the lens cover and the camera app deactivates, bringing you back to whatever you were doing with the phone before. Here are some sample photos:
| Sample Photo 1 | Sample Photo 2 | Sample Photo 3 | Sample Photo 4 | Sample Photo 5 |
| Sample Photo 6 | Sample Photo 7 | Sample Photo 8 | Sample Photo 9 | Sample Photo 10 |
As a Smartphone
The 6110 uses the 3rd Edition FP1 version of S60, and is compatible with all S60 3rd Edition software. The phone was very stable during use, with no crashes and no unexplained behaviour of any kind.
There’s less free RAM than usual on the 6110, 17 megabytes instead of the usual 20, presumably because of the built-in navigation application. This may make it a less attractive phone to power users who routinely have many memory-hungry applications running at once, but there were no problems with the built-in applications.
The 6110’s S60 browser, thankfully, supports both horizontal and vertical viewing of websites, which means they are far easier to read and navigate. It also means that flash-based sites like homestarrunner.com can run in full-screen mode without any scrolling necessary (you can see an example of this in the video link at the end of the review). Apart from this, there’s no real difference between the 6110’s browser and that on previous FP1 devices such as the Nokia 5700 and Nokia 6290.
Overall
The 6110 Navigator is a solid, stable S60 smartphone with a user-friendly and pretty reliable satellite navigation package built into it. Car users will get more out of the bundled sat nav application than walkers as the maps don’t adequately cover pedestrianised areas, but the maps and guides to local amenities are useful to everyone. It’s also worth mentioning again that you don’t have to use the bundled application, you can install a completely different sat nav package if you want to.
The relatively small screen size may be a worry for some people. However, the screen is high resolution and bright, and you can zoom out to any distance including the entire route or even the entire country. Plus, as stated above, it’s probably much safer if a driver relies on the spoken instructions rather than visual cues.
While bluetooth GPS accessories have been available for many years, most people only use phone features that are built into their device and don’t require any setting up. The 6110 Navigator is one of the first smartphones to provide full satellite navigation that works straight out of the box, so it may introduce a lot of phone users to the world of GPS and sat nav.
At about 400 euros (plus taxes) for the sim-free package, the 6110’s price may seem a bit steep, but if you consider what you’re getting (an S60 3rd Edition FP1 smartphone, a GPS receiver, GPS navigation software and maps for your part of the world) plus the convenience of having it all combined into one small unit, it’s a pretty reasonable deal if you are in the market for a GPS phone.
Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_6110_Navigator_Review.php
Nokia N76 (2)
Nokia N76 review: Elegant and smart
Nokia N76 will fascinate you! Not only will you fancy its slim clamshell body, but you will also like its rich functional portfolio based on Symbian S60.
Key features
- attractive slim design in clamshell form
- two excellent displays
- OS Symbian 9.2 with S60 3rd Edition user interface
- “improved” Feature Pack 1
- possible download of additional applications
- microSD memory slot
- 2 megapixel camera with diode flash
- Records video in QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) resolution
- UMTS and video calls
- multi-item repeated alarm clock
- functionally rich music player with external controls
- FM radio
- voice recorder with a 60 minutes limit
- great web browser
- standard 3.5mm jack and a miniUSB connector
- 256MB memory card, data cable and stereo handsfree in the package
Main disadvantages
- only 26 MB internal memory
- the phone is extremely susceptible to fingerprints
- joint toughness makes opening a bit difficult and less comfortable
- uncomfortable keypad
- switch-off button is unreachable when the phone is open
- the phone does not open full if earphones or data cable is plugged in
- no Wi-Fi or HSDPA
- camera image quality is below average
- music player constantly runs in background
- Bluetooth does not support A2DP profile
Nokia N76 in black and red
Not so long ago phones with open OS, the so called smartphones, were significantly bigger than standard feature phones. And it was just size that would often deter users from purchasing a smartphone. Nowadays, however, smartphones are slowly assuming the dimensions of standard phones. The new Nokia N76 – the first slim clamshell based on Symbian S60 is a brilliant example of this trend.
Tracing RAZR
A single glimpse at the elegant curves of the new Nokia N76 reveals clearly and immediately that the Finns have drawn from the experience of the competition. N76’s design unmistakably resembles elements of Motorola RAZR, which was the first mobile of a slim clamshell body featuring a flat etched keypad. Along with these two characteristics Nokia has also adopted the famous Motorola “chin” naturally associated with RAZR. Anyway, Nokia has given N76 a real flashy look. The phone is attractive and stands out among other smartphones.
Nokia has drawn from the experience of Motorola
In dimensional aspect Nokia N76 is an above-average clamshell. It is bigger than common phones (106.5 x 52 mm), but also extremely slim – its thickness is mere 13.7 mm. The phone weighs 115 grams. Nokia N76 is going to be offered in two color versions: a decent black one that will surely catch the fancy of gentlemen and a more attractive red one that will definitely be preferred by ladies. The model we have been testing is black. It features a lot of plastic elements that look rather cheap, which does not respond to a high-class phone. Nokia N76 deserved more steel. Yet, the real disaster is somewhere else: the awful susceptibility of the phone to fingerprints, visible on its entire surface: on the black matt plates, on the protecting glass of the external display, on the silver band winding the phone… In other words, cleaning is going to be a full-time job for the N76 owner.
Slimness follows the latest fashion trends • buttons beneath the external display • the external display is hidden behind protecting glass
Although the external display is active and is TFT, its legibility behind the glossy cover is poor. Legibility is especially limited under direct sunlight. The good news is that it displays 262K colors on a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels. Beneath the external display you will find three easy-to-manage keys controlling the music player and the FM radio. Their legends are illuminated. There are more external keys on the right side of the phone: a dual volume control key, a camera release button, and a key for an instant view of the last image made. A tiny connector for the charger is also situated here.
Three control elements on the right side • charger connector is almost invisible • the “chin” including the loud speaker
The standard jack is always welcome
The rest of the connectors are on the top of the phone body: a standard protected miniUSB connector and a standard 3.5 mm jack (a very unusual, but welcomed decision on behalf of Nokia, as this connector permits users to plug into the phone any type of headphones). The last element on the top of the phone is the on/off button, which can also be used for changing ringing profiles. Situating a major part of the connectors on the top of the body was not a happy solution, though, because plugging a device in them limits opening. Another inconvenience is the inaccessibility of the on/off button when the phone is open, which makes changing ringing profiles impossible too. The bottom of the phone only features an eye-let for a wrist band and a handsfree slot.
3.5mm jack, miniUSB connector and switch-off button on the top of the phone • the cap of the memory card slot does not stick perfectly
As usual, a great part of the rear plate consists of the battery cover that also incorporates the “chin”. It is made of trivial plastic material and is not easy to remove. In the bottom of the battery cover you will see a rubber stub, which prevents the phone from sliding on even surfaces. Nokia N76 has a Li-Ion battery of moderate capacity (700 mAh). A single charge is said to provide the phone with enough energy for 165 minutes of talk time or 204 hours on stand-by. In reality, Nokia N76 requires charging every 2 to 3 days.
Camera is untraditionally situated on the back • accompanied by the LED flash
The SIM card is inserted in an untraditional way: you have to first place it into a yellow drawer and then insert it into the phone body. The 2 megapixel camera, represented by a non-protected lens and a flash LED, is situated above the battery cover. A few millimeters aside you will also see the slot for microSD memory card, whose silver protection cap does not fit nicely (at least in our test unit). An additional 256MB card is enclosed in the retail package. Nokia N76 works great with 1GB memory cards too.
The battery cover surrounds the entire “chin” of Nokia N76 • the SIM card is first inserted into an uncommon tiny drawer and then into the phone body
Keypad: beauty at the cost of efficiency
The joint is quite rigid and requires time and effort before one gets used to it. The phone features a facilitating spring, but it is no big help, either. The top half of the phone jumps open to a stop position by itself, so you need to push it through the rest of its way with your fingers. Nokia N76 can be also opened with a single hand, but this operation requires getting used to it and is not really comfortable. The opening angle is big enough; the joint is solid and shows insignificant play.
Nokia N76’s elegant design has not been backed up by good-quality materials, unfortunately
Flat etched keypads are the style today. Besides, a keypad with elevated keys would have not suited this slim body at all. Flat keypads look cool, but tend to be less user-friendly. Nokia N76’s keypad is no exception to the rule. Its keys don’t feature touch separators, which inevitable leads to frequent typing errors. Tactile feedback is not positive, either. The delete and the editing keys wedged in between the navigation key and the numerical keys block are extremely small – bad news for users with large fingers. Along with the obligatory “pencil” key on the keypad you will also see a “Symbian” key that provides access to the main menu and a multimedia key for instant access to a selection of multimedia functions.
Unusual joint form • the flat keypad requires practice, but its design is really cool
There is no doubt that every user will get accustomed to Nokia N76’s keypad sooner or later. On the other hand there is no doubt that the phone is not made for keen texters, either. The keys legends including key contours are illuminated in flashy green at night. Backlighting is regulated by a light-sensitive sensor for the purpose of energy saving.
Keypad background is very impressive
Millions on the display
The main 2.4″ display is great. It’s a 16M color TFT one with a QVGA resolution (240 x 320 pixels). The brightness of the display image can be adjusted from the menu.
The main display is brilliant • not only the main display, but also the keys beneath it are illuminated
Above the display there is a tiny, almost invisible camera lens for video calls. It works at CIF+ resolution, that is, 384 x 320 pixels. Apart from video calls it can also be used for self-portraits and video recording.
The external display on stand-by • when somebody is calling and when a call has been missed • selecting a ringing profile
Symbian
The heart of Nokia N76 is its Symbian 9.2 OS. It uses the well known graphic user interface S60 3rd edition. Beside, Nokia has improved it by adding Feature Pack 1, which we first experienced in the high-class N95. The strongest advantage of Feature Pack 1 is its repeated alarm clock and the fact that its voice recorder is not limited to a mere minute, but to an hour. Nothing else but these two applications has undergone modifications.
The stand-by display with and without stand-by mode
The stand-by display naturally features an active stand-by mode. Yet, we find it rather simplified in comparison to the stand-by mode applied in the new Nokia S40 3rd Edition models: for example, you cannot freely reorganize its elements. In result, you have a band with icons for instant access to pre-selected functions in the top of the display and upcoming events from the calendar together with tasks in its bottom. In the bottom area of the display you will also find the title of the running song or the name of the tuned radio station. Text notes are not available.
The background of the stand-by display as well as its menu can be modified using various themes • Nokia N76 offers 6 pre-installed themes
Shortcuts can be assigned to both context keys as well as to all ways of the navigations key and to its confirming center as long as the stand-by mode is off. Other 4 functions can be assigned to the menu, opened by a press on the Multimedia key.
The four possible images of the main menu • the last two are really impressive, but not so practical
Font size can be changed in three steps
The basic configuration of the main menu is presented by a matrix with icons. Eventually, you could also display it as a standard list, in the form of a horseshoe animated list or in the form of a V-shaped animated list. The last two options are very impressive, but of little practical use. Icons can be reorganized or moved into a different menu folder.
Nokia N76 includes Feature Pack 1 • running applications • instant access to multimedia functions • a sub-menu level
Nokia N76’s menu is browsed fast. As soon as you try a more complicated operation, however, the phone will make you wait for a few seconds. Of course, the speed, with which the phone reacts, depends on the number of simultaneously running applications. Their list can be seen in the form of a Task Manager accessible through a longer press on the Symbian key. A great part of the applications supported by Nokia N76 get terminated if you use the red-receiver key to exit them. However, this does not hold true for the radio and the music player, which only get minimized. To download new applications from any computer you can use the proprietary program Nokia PC Suite or download them straight into the phone via data transfers. In order to do so, use the folder Download; this shows an upgraded portfolio with applications available on Nokia?s website.
Running applications are marked • applications prepared for download • file manager • application manager
Two megapixels on the back
Nokia N76 has a 2 megapixel camera (maximum image size is 1600 x 1200 pixels) with the lens occupying an unusual place for a clamshell – on the back of the phone. The lens is not protected and lacks auto focus. It is accompanied by a fairly powerful LED flash offering the following modes: automatic, always, with red-eye effect correction, and off. The flash LED cannot be used as a flashlight.
Camera viewfinder (with the minimized music player running in background) • camera menu and exposure settings
You can take pictures with both open and closed phone, but always in a landscape mode – this is also the specific reason for the placement of the camera lens. Furthermore. this way the fingers of your right hand will lie perfectly on the side release button. Both displays offer an extensive camera menu with numerous setup options including exposure compensation, self-timer, white balance, color effects, 6 light modes, and even ISO sensitivity setup. Image size, release sound and other details are set up from deeper menu levels. The digital zoom reaches up to 20x. However, the more you zoom in the respective object, the worse the picture quality is.
Nokia N76 sample photos
20x digital zoom:
Color effects:
Images made under bad light conditions:
The LED flash works well at short distance • for distant objects you’d better apply night mode without flash
Exposure compensation:
Nokia N76 makes pictures of average quality. Colors are dull, with a slight purple tinge; noise is too visible. The camera has difficulties with high contrast areas and doesn’t deal well with macro images. Text captured on a picture is virtually illegible. On the other hand, the camera records videos in MP4 and 3GP formats with maximum resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, which is good news. Record length is only limited by the available free memory.
Gallery • surfing existing pictures • application Lifeblog • memory indicator
Images are saved in the folder “Gallery”, where you can also view other multimedia files kept in the phone. N76 offers an interesting application called Lifeblog, where all pictures available in the phone are displayed onto a time axis including those sent out or received in messages. The internal memory of the phone is 26 MB, but can be easily extended up to 2 GB by using microSD memory cards.
Video viewfinder • Gallery and its menu in a horizontal image • viewing pictures in a fullscreen mode
Telephony and messages in Symbian style
Nokia N76 offers the same communication functions like other phones based on Symbian S60. The number of both contacts and messages is only limited by the available free memory. The phonebook is detailed and can fit in numerous details. The contacts saved on the SIM card are displayed separately. The phonebook is searched through gradual typing of the initials of the searched contact, even though a predictive searching mode would have been more suitable. Naturally, contacts can be organized into groups, each of which can be assigned a specific ringtone as well as voice dialed. Nokia N76 offers relatively good voice control; you can switch between profiles or activate Bluetooth without having to teach the phone any additional voice commands.
Phonebook • searching • contact detail • working in the contacts’ menu
Ringing profiles set up the entire audio performance of the phone. Their settings are extensive, as usual. Call filters and Airplane mode are available, as well. Of course, the phone can work without a SIM card. Nokia N76 works in GSM networks at the following frequencies: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz. Video calls are supported in 3G UMTS networks at frequency of 2100 MHz.
Caller groups • number of contacts • ringing profiles and its settings
The message editor is the same like in other Symbian phones. It manages SMS, MMS and emails and offers three font size options.
Message menu • selecting message type • list with received messages • reading SMS in a small and medium font
The email client works with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 protocols. It can manage more than one account simultaneously and transfers attachments. It can download email headers only or regularly check newly received emails too. The phone has a special application called “Setup guidebook” to help you set up an email account. Along with standard message types here you will also find audio messages, sent out via MMS. “Push to talk” is available too.
Three font size options in the message editor • creating MMS • audio message
Poor work with Word and Excel
The Finnish manufacturer presents Nokia N76 as a “multimedia computer”, which explains the lack of office and work functions in the phone. For example, the phone has no viewer for Microsoft Word and Excel documents (you can download such a viewer, if necessary, though). Yet, a viewer for PDF files does appear in the main menu.
Month, week, and day view at the calendar • setup options for the calendar • the task manager is part of the calendar
The calendar is standard. It offers a month, a week, and a day view. You can insert four event types: meeting, note, anniversary, and task. Meetings can be repeated daily, weekly, every two weeks, every month, and every year. Tasks can be displayed separately and marked off once accomplished.
The application Clock contains a detailed and repeated alarm clock as well as world time
In the folder “Organiser” you will find text notes, a unit converter, a simple calculator, and a voice recorder which can make records of up to 60 minutes. The voice recorder can also be used as a call recorder. The phone is well equipped for connection to a wireless Bluetooth keypad and GPS module, of which the applications featured by the menu are sufficient evidence.
Office • text note • the voice recorder is no more limited to a mere minute • calculator • unit converter
Viewer for PDF files • Nokia N76 is prepared to connect to a GPS module
Entertainment is what matters
Nokia N76’s primary purpose is to entertain users and thus its functions are designed to perfectly meet the needs for multimedia fun. It offers a great music player manageable through external keys and thus controllable even with a closed phone. The player works with MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, and WMA formats. It first indexes music files and then names them according to the available ID3 tags. Songs can be sorted by various criteria and organized in playlists.
Music player • songs can be sorted by various criteria
The function for displaying the most frequently played and the last played songs is quite interesting. The player has an equalizer and a pair of video visualizations too. The player is constantly active, even if it’s not used, which is rather unusual. It cannot be deactivated at all, which might be considered a con by some users as it slows down the phone and occupies precious operational memory.
There are two visualizations available in the music player • FM radio • list with stations • Real Player
The phone also offers a FM radio. Its main con is the lack of RDS, its plus – it can store up to 50 radio stations. Videos are played in the famous Real Player. A flash animations player is available too.
The music player can be easily controlled from the external display
The same holds true for the integrated FM radio
The earphones delivered in the retail package of the phone are pretty good. They hold well in one’s ears and produce good-quality sound. You can hang them around your neck thanks to a special black strip. If you do not like the original earphones, feel free to plug another model. The 3.5mm jack makes this possible, which is great. Bluetooth does not support A2DP and thus excludes the use of wireless earphones.
The earphones enclosed in the retail package are quite good • their tiny control box including a microphone on the cable has new design; they also feature a special strip, thanks to which you can hang them around your neck
There is only one game in the phone – 3D snake. If you want to download other games you’d better use Symbian-based instead of Java-based as the latter is rather slow.
The snake is the only available game in the phone
jBenchmark results:
- jBenchmark 1.0: 6020 points
- jBenchmark 2.0: 636 points
Minimizing data
As far as data transfers are concerned, Nokia N76 does not offer what is expected. Data transfers are backed by UMTS at a maximum transferring speed of 384 kbps. If you don’t have a good 3G signal at your location you might have to put up with EDGE or GPRS. There is no HSDPA support. The lack of Wi-Fi is an even more serious obstacle, though. The phone has Bluetooth 2.0 and offers a connection to a miniUSB connector through a data cable. A data cable is enclosed in the retail package together with the phone. Once you have connected it, N76 will offer you 4 modes to choose from: PC Suite for synchronization, Data transfers for Mass Storage, Image print via PictBridge, and a Media player for connection to applications in Windows Media Player.
Yahoo! Search engine is also available • the Log counting the amount of transferred data
Nokia N76 is supplemented by a CD including a number of useful applications, like the new Nokia PC Suite, Nokia Lifeblog, and Adobe Photoshop Album for work with pictures, Nokia Multimedia Player and Nokia Music Manager.
The web browser in landscape mode
Let us now say a few words about the web browser integrated in Nokia N76. It is the same as the one used in all previous handsets based on Symbian 9.1 S60 3rd edition. Along with WAP pages it also opens fully-working Internet pages, and all of these can be browsed in landscape mode. Font size and graphics are user-configurable, of course. The phone offers an application called Setup Guidebook, which will help you set up data transfers.
Inconsistent personality
Nokia N76 is a controversial device. On one hand it presents itself as an elegant phone of modern slim design and high-tech functions underlined by the presence of a brilliant display and Symbian 9.2 with S60 3.1. On the other hand, however, a closer look reveals several significant drawbacks: cheap-looking plastic material, expressed susceptibility to fingerprints, which requires constant cleaning… You?’d better put gloves on your hands, if you try to show off with your new N76… In terms of hardware we should mention the flatness of the keypad resulting in uncomfortable usage of the latter as well as the impossibility to fully open the phone when earphones are connected to it.
Accessories: data cable, earphones and 256MB memory card
The situation regarding the functions of the phone is similar. Picture quality does not fascinate at all; data transfers cannot be fully made use of because of the absence of Wi-Fi and HSDPA. A2DP Bluetooth profile necessary for connecting wireless earphones is missing too.
To sum up, Nokia N76 can be considered an interesting purchasing option mainly by people who refer to their phone as to a stylish fashionable accessory and do not care about its functional abilities too much. On the other hand, exactly such clientele will remain disappointed with the cheap looking plastic covers and the fingerprint smudges. The cons become even more visible when combined with the high price of the phone. As you can see, sales records are the last Nokia N76 is expected to achieve.
Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n76-review-148p4.php
Nokia N76
At the launch of the N76, Nokia stated “With the Nokia N76 multimedia computer, technology and design come together to create a revolution in design for a multimedia computer. Using premium materials to enclose world-class Nokia Nseries features and experiences, Nokia has created a very eye-catching device.”
A number of things about the N76 puzzle me, of which more later, but “a revolution in design”? Even the most casual observer can’t help notice the similarities between Motorola’s iconic RAZR feature phone and this new smartphone. OK, it’s the first genuine ’smartphone’ to be styled like this, but still….
It’s also worth watching Nokia’s own design video for the N76, giving an insight into what the designers were trying to do. In the perfectly lit offices of the design studio and with everyone keeping things squeaky clean, it’s easy to be very, very impressed. Back out in the real world, it’s considerably less so, I’m afraid.
I’ll get the tech spec out the way quickly and come back to it later in more detail. Under the hood, this is standard Nokia Nseries fare, i.e. S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1, similar to that in the Nokia N95, but with less gadgetry to play with. There’s no Wi-Fi, only a 2 megapixel fixed-focus camera, no HSDPA, no landscape mode, no GPS (of course). Still, the N76 still runs an impressive smartphone software package.
Build quality is good, too, with metal and chrome dominating, though there are apparently a few compromises made to achieve the 7mm thickness (rising to 13mm at its thickest point). Chiefly the way the battery has to sit upside down (with the power pins flush to the phone’s rear surface) and the clumsy way the SIM card has to be caddied rather than simply slid into place – a strange design. And, as other web sites have reported, the positioning of the USB port and 3.5mm headphone socket on the top of the N76, where they foul the lid and stop it opening all the way. Still, if ‘thinness’ is important to you…
Along with the 13mm thickness, the N76 achieves ’style’ by virtue of being very shiny, with chrome inserts on front and back and with a mirror-finish external screen/cover. In addition, the main keypad surround is also mirrored. Now mirrors are fine for their intended purpose and are usually hidden away in handbags and on walls for good reason, to keep them away from greasy fingerprints and dirt. So let’s go over the rationale for putting mirrors on the outside of a mass market smartphone again, shall we, Nokia? On a device that’s going to be picked up and handled in a wide variety of possibly greasy and messy every day situations, all day, every day. As you can see below, it’s the front cover that attracts the worst of the prints:
Opening up the clamshell cover reveals the main display, of course, along with the aforesaid shiny keypad. Thankfully, the etched keypad is first class and every marking has excellent mechanical feedback – I take back everything I ever said about flat keypads:
The main display is QVGA and lovely indoors, but suffers from the same design flaw as the N93i (for example), in that its construction means almost complete invisibility in bright light, with the display also turning into a mirror:
This is in complete contrast to the still superlative displays being used in Nokia’s Eseries devices (and even older Nseries, e.g. the N93), which are quite superb in sunlight – I suspect that the Nseries division has gone down this technological route in a drive to ‘up’ the number of screen colours for impressive indoor viewing, but it’s a sacrifice that’s too big, in my opinion – I’d rather have a display that I can actually read out in the real world.
As already mentioned, the metallic construction and build quality is excellent. There’s an E90-like ’slide and fold’ microSD card slot on the left side of the N76:
The hole beneath the slot is for the standard Nokia mini charging jack. On the right side of the N76 are volume up/down buttons and Camera mode and Camera shutter buttons.
A long press on the latter is enough to launch the two megapixel camera (note the LED flash in the photos), with the external screen (only 1.25″ diagonal, don’t let that large mirror surface fool you) acting as a small and makeshift viewfinder, with the three music controls acting as ‘Exit’, menu and ‘Settings’ respectively. Thankfully, the camera also works well with the clamshell open, in which case the full 2.4″ screen can be the viewfinder, even if the resulting camera form factor is not exactly elegant.
The screen contrast problems rear their ugly head here too. Most smartphone cameras produce good results only in good light, exactly the circumstances under which you can’t really read either screen on the N76. Grrr…… In short, the camera is hamstrung. The photographs that you do take, in good light, are as good as on many other Nseries devices and certainly a cut above the average non-Nokia camera-toting smartphone. Video recording is at 320 by 240 pixels by 15 frames per second, but again you can’t really tell what you’re shooting when the light’s good enough to shoot in.
The bottom of the N76 sees the main (mono) speaker aperture and a lanyard hole, while the top sees a 3.5mm stereo jack, a rubber-flapped miniUSB socket and the regular power button. Having a ’standard’ stereo jack is always helpful, but the quality of music over the supplied headphones wasn’t anything special, with plenty of hiss in quiet passages and a really annoying one second delay when pausing or resuming playback – it’s easy to think that the external controls aren’t working for a split second. There’s also no current A2DP support for Bluetooth stereo headphones, but there’s hope that both these problems can be rectified in a firmware update in the future.
Music formats supported include all the usual varieties of MP3 and unencrypted AAC, plus unencrypted WMA as well, always good to have. The external display works well for controlling playback, with an animated equaliser interpreting the music:
In terms of smartphone/S60 functions, the applications here are much the same as on any other Nseries device, although with prominent placement of Lifeblog, Search and Download! icons, it seems that Internet integration is being well handled here. There’s the usual Visual radio but, curiously, no Quickoffice viewer in the firmware itself – this is in the Download! section and can be grabbed and installed if the user needs it.
One plus point is the inclusion of more RAM than on all other Nseries devices so far. With 45MB free after booting, as opposed to only 18MB or so on the theoretically much higher-end and demanding Nokia N95, maybe Nokia has finally, finally learned a lesson here. Having the extra RAM means no more Support calls from confused users complaining that they keep running ‘out of memory’.
The N76, currently on exclusive in the UK to Vodafone, is bundled with some music tracks and, together with the prominent, dedicated music controls on the front cover, give clues as to where the industry perceives this device should be positioned. In truth, it’s not a bad music phone, with a 2GB microSD loaded up with WMA or AAC tracks, your favourite in-ear 3.5mm headphones and the front controls, you’re all set for some pretty good listening – at least you are once they’ve fixed the A2DP, the hiss and the button delay in a firmware update.
Currently though, with these music player issues, with the camera functions hamstrung by the appalling display characteristics, and with S60 available in many other form factors these days, about all the N76 has got going for it is its sense of style.
And, of course, that’s what the designers were aiming at, above all. A trinket of a smartphone that will let its owners look good while out and about in clubs and pubs. (There was even a design contest recently whereby you got to design your own N76 cover!) And, let’s be honest, its S60-hosted Internet functions knock spots off any competing feature phones out there, so it’s important not to be too dismissive.
The N76 isn’t a bad smartphone, it’s just one that hasn’t had all its functions and aspects thought out properly. As a result, it’s (probably) one which won’t appeal to the vast majority of readers of this review.
Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_N76.php
Nokia 5700 (2)
Nokia 5700 official images
Key features:
- Fast and responsive user interface
- Excellent display, with unmatched legibility under direct sunlight
- Great earphones
- Symbian S60 3rd edition FP1
- Sporty, youthful design
- The swiveling part is well-built and very functional
Main disadvantages:
- Awkward joystick
- Weak bass
- Bizarre Menu and C keys
- No Pencil key
- No built-in 3.5mm jack
Nokia 5700 went off to a flying start with its very release, earning itself quite a number of fans. Smartphone functionality topped with music phone charisma was sure to appeal to all walks of life. Although its design was originally meant to mostly please the young, Nokia 5700’s curvy lines and lacquered plastic are enjoyed by men and women of all ages.
Nokia 5700 – first look is promising
We started this review with a couple of questions on our mind, and we put the phone to the test looking for the answers. First and more important, we were wondering which one gained the upper hand in Nokia 5700 – music phone or smartphone. And secondly we wanted to know what had changed in the music lineup since the Nokia 3250 release. Answering the first one was going to involve a lot of digging, while the other didn’t need this much of an effort. Only a quick glance at both handsets’ specs was enough to convince us that Nokia had not been wasting their time. The display is now bigger and offers QVGA resolution and 16M colors. Connectivity has undergone a major improvement, with 3G support added. All that, plus shedding a good 15g of weight, clearly shows that Nokia 5700 and Nokia 3250 are two phones that simply do not belong to the same class.
The box
The retail package we got the phone with was quite well equipped. Alongside a 1 GB microSD memory card, there’s a wired remote serving as an adapter for plugging the included 3.5mm earphones into the phone’s 2.5 mm jack. The earphones turned out quite a pleasant surprise, but we’ll come back to that later when we look at the music capabilities of the handset. The other package contents included an adapter for the microSD card (making it compatible with standard SD card-readers) plus a USB cable. Of course a DC charger was also present and, to our greatest pleasure, we found out that this phone was using the latest Nokia AC-5 charger. It’s the most compact and yet best performing among its Nokia siblings. A CD with the required software for synchronizing your phone with a PC, a manual and a booklet highlighting the Nokia 5700 most important features complete the box contents. Most of these of course are strictly market-dependant, so we cannot guarantee that everyone will get the same bunch of extras that we did.
The retail package has some pleasant surprises for you
Revolver Action
The phone comes in three different color versions including Red, Gray and Black but with all of them the rotating part and the top part are finished in very nice looking lacquered white plastic. It looks very durable and blends well with all the different color versions of the rubber sides and the plastic battery cover. We received the black version for testing and we have to admit we liked that color combo very much.
We are more than pleased with the construction of the 5700. The casing didn’t produce any creaks during our test, and it didn’t seem likely to start playing up after a few months of use. The phone is also very comfortable to hold, the rubber sides provide for a great grip.
In terms of size Nokia 5700 is a little bit above the average. It is bigger than common phones (108 x 50 x 17 mm), but not as heavy as you would’ve guessed from the numbers. It weighs exactly 115 grams. And, a real nicety: the phone is fingerprint proof with even the shiny plastic surfaces very hard to blotch during normal operation. In other words, cleaning is no issue for 5700 owners.
| We’ll now have a look at Nokia’s most recent creation in the genre – the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic family. Just a quick glance at its features tells you this phone is promising, to say the least. | // <
The earpiece and the ambient light sensor are doing a great job
Right above it, on the top of the phone, is the On/Off key - it's made of the same white plastic as the surrounding surface, fully flat and blending perfectly. This makes it a little less tactile, but we guess it will only take a while getting used to. In terms of functionality there is almost no change. It is responsible for switching the phone on and off, changing profiles, locking the keypad or the phone, and activating offline mode.
The top is quite plain
The left side of the device features two volume keys as well as a speaker grill right at its top. Depending on the swivel position, either the second speaker grill or the camera and the LED flash are found in the lower end of the left side. None of these needs going into much detail regarding functionality. The volume keys are tiny knobs in the rubber part of Nokia 5700. Despite that, they are very easily felt by fingertips and therefore no problem to use without looking at the phone. They do require a stronger press however but it prevents accidental keypresses when the phone is in your pocket. The loudspeakers position is well-thought of, as the sound doesn't get muffled when you put down the handset on its back, as with some other mobile phones. In all honesty, we should admit that positioning them on both sides of the display like in Nokia N95 is probably better. Nokia's flagship makes great use of its loudspeaker layout as the speakers are not covered by your fingers when you hold the handset.
Left side holds the volume keys and the loudspeaker • further down you either have camera and LED flash or the second loudspeaker, depending on how the rotating part is flipped
The bottom side is pretty plain. It hosts the eyelet for a attaching a neck or a wrist strap. Right above it is the 2.5mm audio jack. The microphone pinhole is the last thing to find there. The lack of a built-in 3.5 mm audio jack is a serious flaw having in mind that Nokia 5700 is supposed to be a music phone. This is partially resolved by the included remote, which acts as an adapter too. This of course means that you should carry it with you at all times, and we personally are not very excited about this.
The bottom side holds no surprises: microphone pinhole, neck strap eyelet and 2.5mm audio jack
The right side of the phone is where the Infrared port is placed. Right below it there are three openings under a plastic cover. The cover fits in very tightly and we find it very unlikely to go loose and open by itself even if not treated with enough care. Under the cap are the charger plug, the USB port and the memory card slot. Unfortunately the cover is not active, so when removing the memory card you will have to go to the on/off button menu and select remove memory card. Otherwise there is certain risk of loosing data. The plastic cover itself goes well with the design of the phone without doing wrong to its looks despite being quite large.
An infrared port and a bunch of openings with caps are found on the right side
The largest part of the back is taken by the battery cover. Right in its middle the Nokia and XpressMusic logos are etched. The lower part is taken by the other face of the rotating keypad.
The back side has no functional elements
Getting to the battery is not as simple as usual. The first time you open the back cover you can lift it using the plastic tag on the back of the phone. Then you can remove the tag and procede releasing the battery cover by rotating the swivel to 90 degrees and using the gaps under it. Removing the battery itself is also not as easy as some other phones, especially if you have larger fingers and not long enough fingernails. On the other hand, this is not something a regular user needs to do very often, so it's not going to spoil the user experience of the phone. Under the battery lies the SIM card slot that has a lock mechanism that should be used, once a SIM card is inserted.
Getting to the SIM card
Of course the main highlight in the phone's design is the swiveling part, which takes up the lower third of the device. Although not new, let alone revolutionary, it deserves a couple of words. Nice words that is, as we think that designers have done a great job with it. The numeric keypad is one of the most comfortable we have worked with. It has terraced keys of sufficient size and tactility to make typing and dialing a piece of cake. When you rotate it at 90 degrees in any direction the camera is automatically activated. It does wait for a second or two before the screen actually turns into a viewfinder but that is because the phone expects to see if the user will do a full 180 degrees rotation. This 90 degrees rotation can be used if you want to take a picture of yourself or of something standing in front of you. When a full 180 degrees rotation is performed the dedicated music keys are positioned under the display, the music player is automatically activated and displayed on the screen. Then you can change tracks with the dedicated music keys. An obvious minus here is the lack of a dedicated stop key, although one is present in the player. You can use the joystick instead, but then one might ask what the purpose of the dedicated keys is if not to operate the player. There is one extra function of the swivel. When watching a video you can rotate the swivel at 90 degrees and position the phone on its side. Upon doing this the video player automatically goes into fullscreen landscape mode to ensure better viewing experience. This works the same way with the image gallery too. Overall, the swivel is very sturdy and rotating produces distinct clicks when it locks into position. There are hardly any chances of it coming loose with time.
Finally we come to the part of the keypad that is not on the swivel - right below the display the two soft keys are located -their functionality varies according to the phone's current state. The Call and End keys are right below them. The Menu and Clear keys are located on the sides of each of these. We did experience some troubles as we tended to press the captions instead of the buttons for the first few days of dealing with this phone. Some members of our team tended to press the Menu and the Left selection key simultaneously, but that is not a major concern and only takes a while getting used to.
Menu and Clear keys can be confusing as the captions themselves are not to be pressed but the vertical marks above them
Dead center on the D-pad is the Joystick. Now, this is where this phone really lacks in user-friendliness. Having worked with all kinds of navigation solutions, and a lot of joysticks in particular, we can hardly think of any to have behaved as badly as this one. It really does seem to have a mind of its own and ever too often pressing it to the right requires three or four attempts for example. Pushing upways more than often led to pressing the confirming center. This is the probably the biggest letdown of the 5700 keypad. Still, we believe that it will be appreciated by all, except for the QWERTY freaks.
The uncomfortable joystick somewhat spoils the nice keyboard functionality
Overall the phone feels great when held in hand, despite its thickness
The even white backlighting of the keypad is strong enough and ensures great usability in dark environments. The display is also quite visible thanks to the ambient light sensor.
Nokia 5700 likes the dark
Pure quality
The display in Nokia 5700 may not be oversized, but with its 2.2" diagonal it is on the right side of big in its class. Moreover it is one of exceptional quality and with its 16M colors and QVGA resolution provides fine and smooth graphics. The emphasis here is its legibility under direct sunlight. When exposed to even the brightest sunlight, Nokia 5700 is doing an incredible job up to the highest Finnish standards. We have been repeatedly mentioning Nokia's hybrid electronic displays consisting both light emissive and light reflective elements in our reviews. Nokia 5700 is another step ahead of the competition in this seemingly one-horse race.
Another great Nokia display in terms of legibility under direct sunlight
A phone is a phone
Nokia 5700 signal reception is just what you would expect from a Nokia smartphone - flawless. The loudspeaker of the phone is also good, and as we already mentioned - due to its position it is hard to muffle it in your pocket or when you put it on a table. Ringtone volume is loud enough and is audible even in crowded places. The vibration of the phone is as strong as you would have hoped, so missing a call, even in very noisy environments is not an option. The phone has brilliant speaker quality and the sound during calls is very clear and without any interferences.
Numbers are large and easily visible when dialing
Smart to the bone
The heart of Nokia 5700 is its Symbian 9.2 OS. It uses the well known S60 3rd edition graphic user interface. Beside, Nokia has improved it by adding Feature Pack 1, which we first experienced in the high-class N95. The strongest advantage of Feature Pack 1 is its repeated alarm clock and the fact that its voice recorder is not limited to a miserly minute and allows hour-long recordings and quality customization.
Symbian 3rd edition, feature pack 1 - same look, better functionality
The new alarm is worth the praise
We find the blue circle displayed on running applications' icons in the menus useful, as it reminds you to turn off applications you do not use anymore to save some RAM. A thing we ought to mention here is regarding the phone's speed. Armed with Nokia's fastest processor, this phone is truly as fast as you can possibly demand a smartphone to be. The menus open in an instant and any command is executed in a blink of an eye. Not even the N95 is that well performing in terms of speed.
| Pushing upways more than often led to pressing the confirming center. This is the probably the biggest letdown of the 5700 keypad. Still, we believe that it will be appreciated by all, except for the QWERTY freaks. | // <
Active stand-by hasn’t changed much either
The phone has an Offline mode, switching off transceivers but allowing the use of the other capabilities of the device. It is also used if you start the handset without a SIM card. The radio is not available in Offline mode. Other functions, such as Bluetooth connectivity and music player are usable though.
As with any smartphone, a Task Manager is present. It is launched by a longer press on the Menu key on the keyboard. This pop-up allows switching between applications and you can shut any application down by pressing the Clear key. Generally, the red End key does not close an application, but just minimizes it and it keeps running in the background, so unless you leave applications by pressing the exit key or use the task manager for closing them, you might end up with a lot of applications running and eating up your precious RAM. Luckily, the phone has enough RAM so a few minor applications will not slow it down at all.
Task manger pops up upon a long press of the Menu key
The phone’s main menu has four different view modes. The first two are the well known grid of 4 x 3 icons and the list view. There are also two additional looks brought in by the Feature Pack 1. Same as in Nokia N76, there is a V-shape and a Horseshoe mode. Both are 3D and look quite nice but are very hard to use. Navigation in any of them kills the joy of navigating the phone. Most of the submenus also allow changing the type of view. We have already mentioned that navigating the menus is amazingly fast with instant response to keypresses and no delays.
Different Menu looks: the new horseshoe and V-shape layouts look nice but are of little practicality
Nokia 5700 has 38 MB of internal memory, expandable through the already mentioned microSD memory card. Luckily, the retail package of the 5700 will be including a memory card of quite ample size (1GB in our case). This is a smart move by Nokia, which benefits the phone’s musical image as there is enough memory for all your favorite songs without extra spending.
As with all recent Symbian smartphones, a great feature of Nokia 5700 is the voice recognition system, which can be used both for dialing contacts and starting applications. It is not voice dependent as it doesn’t need to have your commands pre-recorded. It handles most of the voice commands you give it but still its performance in that area doesn’t go anywhere near Nokia N95. The voice recognition of the latter is still unrivaled.
Color all around
There are 6 preinstalled themes in Nokia 5700, which is a respectable count compared to most other Finnish models. Along with the standard Nokia theme, there are 5 others, which all have names related to music, a reiteration of the phone’s music image.
The four themes that are not showed in other pictures in the review
The five predefined ringing profiles (six if you count the Offline mode) are no news when talking about Symbian. They are probably enough to deal with almost any situation a regular user may have to deal with. Should you need more, creating a new profile or modifying a currently existing one is only matter of a few seconds.
Phonebook… sky is the limit
The phonebook of Nokia 5700 is just like a normal Nokia Symbian phonebook. It has no limit of the contacts, as it uses the phone’s free memory and can thus hold an enormous amount of entries. They can be ordered either by first or last name and can be searched by letter-by-letter typing of the desired name. The phonebook can be accessed by the joystick in stand-by mode or from the main menu.
The phonebook brings no news
An unlimited number of fields can be assigned to any new or existing contact. You can add each field as many times as you like, which gives you the option of assigning 3 or 4 mobiles to a single contact, for example. Editing a field’s name is also allowed if you would like to assign a field that does not already exist. Naturally, you can assign ringtones and pictures to contacts of your choice, and in this case even a personal video clip can be attached. Synchronization with PC works seamlessly, too.
Editing a contact: should the enormous number of different fields prove insufficient, you can create your own
The Calls log of Nokia 5700 contains three tabs for Dialed, Received and Missed calls. Every tab can hold up to 20 call records with their date and time. However, if you enter the Log application, you will find yourself in a list of all calls, which have taken place in the last 30 days. This includes even data connections and the messages sent and received in that period. Log length can be reduced to save some memory space, but it is not that memory-consuming anyway, so it’s very unlikely that you resort to that.
Typical Symbian call log
Messaging
We have already mentioned that Nokia 5700 is aimed at the young, and texting is surely an age thing. Given its target, it’s important that the phone scores well in the SMS department. We were glad to discover that it completely lived up to our expectations. For a non-QWERTY keypad that is, because it can hardly match the efficiency of its business orientated contemporaries – Nokia E70 and Nokia E61 for example. But among standard numeric-keypad devices 5700 scores great. We have already explained the benefits of the keypad, so we’re not going to go in any more detail now.
Typing a message is easy thanks to the great keyboard and the intuitive interface
The SMS editor displays a counter of the characters left of the 160 limit. It also displays in brackets the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending, should the single message character limit be exceeded. The display allows 6 lines to be shown en bloc. If activated, delivery reports popup on the standby screen when the keypad is not locked. After that, they are stored in a separate folder in the Messaging sub-menu.
The MMS editor is very intuitive and easy to use. Nokia 5700 works with POP3 and IMAP4 protocols. The email client can download headers only, as well as full messages. Attachments are also supported. This email client manages most user needs regarding email communication. There is also an audio message recorder in case you want to send someone a voice note.
Symbian developers have done a good job with the MMS and the audio message composers
E-mail client works like a charm
Music player – no novelties
Considering its XpressMusic label, with Nokia 5700 we expected something totally different (read: better) from other Nokia devices. As it comes out this is not completely true. The player is quite usual indeed. It has not undergone any innovations or significant changes compared to other Symbian 3rd edition devices. The supported file formats are MP3, AAC, m4a, eAAC+ and WMA. The controls of the player are very intuitive. It also manages the M3U playlist format perfectly and can even handle the file automatically if it is placed in the same directory as the tracks. Users can use card readers for transferring music to the memory card but the phone’s own USB port is just as fast and thus a much more convenient solution. Upon completing a USB transfer, the phone automatically prompts for scanning for new music tracks and, if allowed to do so, adds all of them to the music library.
Music player – nothing has changed
The player comes with four different equalizer presets but it also allows altering them or creating a new one. These can come in handy because the phone sound quality has an obvious flaw – the severe lack of bass elements. That can be partially compensated for with the equalizer. On the other hand the phone is doing very well with the high tones. This is especially true when you listen to music through the earphones that come in the retail package. These are also very comfortable and with a long enough cable that allows to put the phone in a pocket even at you knee level. Same as with Nokia N76, the music player of Nokia 5700 cannot be switched off once it is started. Not that it slows down the phone noticeably, but still having a program that you don’t use running in background and consuming precious RAM is not that good.
Equalizers can really improve sound quality
The phone also supports the A2DP Bluetooth profile allowing listening to your favorite tracks on stereo Bluetooth headphones. This is easier said than done though, as we faced a lot of difficulties trying to pair our Nokia 5700 with a Motorola headset we had around. We never succeeded to get them to work properly, but this is probably an isolated case. Still, if you have a stereo Bluetooth headset on your mind – you’d be better off if you test its compatibility with the Nokia 5700 before handing the cash.
| The last components of the music installation of the device are the loudspeakers. Positioned in a way that makes them stand on one side when the dedicated multimedia keypad is active they produce great stereo sound of good quality, though not as impressive in terms of volume. | // <
Video player is nice and intuitive, going fullscreen once you flip the swivel
Flash player has no extraordinary traits
Gallery – old but gold
Nokia 5700 doesn’t have the 3D rotating gallery of the N-series smartphones. Images and videos are presented in list view only. Other than that, there are no differences in terms of functionality. You can view the pictures and videos both in portrait and landscape mode, as well as in full screen with no visible borders at all.
Gallery is nice but is missing the 3D view of the N-series
Once you pick a picture you can zoom on it up to 800% and view it in great detail. The actual zooming is also very fast, in line with the overall performance of the smartphone. So is every aspect of the media-related performance of Nokia 5700.
Zooming a picture reveals great details and is very fast
Otherwise the gallery has a nice file-management functionality, meaning that you can select and send multiple files. Besides, the smartphone has the usual file manager that does a pretty decent job when it comes to filtering files according to the memory used, and marking, moving, copying and managing files. As for application management, there is also a separate Application manager. The latter is very familiar as it doesn’t differ from other Symbian devices.
The file manager has always been a handy feature of S60 Symbian phones
Regretfully, Nokia 5700 doesn’t feature one especially useful application – “Search”. This means you have to spend extra time in organizing your applications, unless you want to end up with a mess that will take ages to deal with. Anyways, you can always download it additionally from the Nokia’s website.
Let’s take some pictures
We made it clear that Nokia 5700 is a phone aimed at the young. So having a camera is an essential thing. The handset is armed with a 2 megapixel camera with a maximum available resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels. The camera settings are not as limited as in its business brother E61i, for example, but still this is not the most highly customizable camera in the world. The available settings include: panorama, night mode, sequence, self-release, white balance, and color effects. The panorama is an interesting feature similar to that found on Sony Ericsson devices. It allows you to combine several shots in a single picture. The only flaw is the low vertical resolution it uses. We couldn’t produce a picture more than 230 pixels high no matter how hard we tried. You can also adjust white balance and color tone manually. Flash settings are also present although the built-in LED flash is quite inadequate even indoors. Pictures are stored in JPEG format and carry EXIF information. As far as quality is concerned, we find the 2 megapixel camera a jot below-average, but still passable. The picture quality is pretty much the same as the one of the Nokia E70 – they seem to have identical hardware and processing. Somewhat confusingly, the shutter sound goes off a second or something before the actual capturing of the picture so you really have to keep the handset still even after you’ve heard the sound in order to take a picture of your intended subject. The camera button is quite comfortable to press when the swivel is twisted to 90 degrees but the joystick is not, as it is located too close to the rotating part and therefore can make adjusting the camera settings quite a hard job.
Camera interface is not as simplified as E61i but still isn’t the most configurable of all
Here are some sample photos made with Nokia 5700 camera:
Outdoor shots: photos are usable only if taken in perfect light conditions • the camera is not good with highlights
Studio shots: colors are washed and are far from the original
Panorama mode: each individual shot is made in QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels)
As far as video is concerned, the maximum video resolution is 320 x 240 pixels (QVGA) and video is recorded at 12 fps in the MPEG-4 video format. The digital zoom during recording is smooth – unlike that of Nokia N80, N93 or N95. The movie editor (Muvee) program is also available allowing you to create your own movies.
Video and camera setting aren’t rich in options
Nokia 5700 sample video – QVGA 12fps
Hello world
In terms of connectivity Nokia 5700 is in the golden mean: not the most loaded of all devices, but still won’t let you down in most cases. Besides the already mentioned Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, the phone supports USB connectivity, which works seamlessly, and an Infrared port, which seemingly is making an unexpected comeback in most new Nokia models. The network capabilities for data transfer include HSCSD, GPRS and EDGE as well as UMTS of course. Latest support for SIP-based VoIP services is also available.
WWWonderful
Web browsing with Nokia 5700i is a sheer pleasure as is the case with all current Nokia smartphones. The web browser makes even very sophisticated pages fit on the screen and displays web pages just as on PC. There is no doubt that the great display helps a lot here.
There is even a mouse cursor which can be operated through the four-way navigation button. Surprisingly, it works great and is very easy to control, except for the uncomfortable joystick. A semi-transparent mini-map of the page shows up on the screen when scrolling a webpage. The mini-map can also be accessed by a shortcut – the “8″ key. You can zoom in and out on the page using the “*” and “#” buttons. Of course, on 5700 all those shortcuts are available by using the selection key.
| The Nokia 5700 performance as a smartphone is by far superior to its music capabilities. The latter are only slightly above average. So if you are looking for a phone to use for strictly music purposes, you’d better look elsewhere. | // <
Web browsing is one of Nokia’s specialties
The Symbian web browser is unable to open simple WAP pages so for that purpose the Nokia 5700 is equipped with the much simpler WAP browser called Services.
Plan and go
The phone has various organizer applications and features. The Calendar has Month, Week and Day views. You can schedule a Meeting, Anniversary, Memo and To-do in the Calendar. All those can be set alarms.
Calendar is simple but effective
Applications aren’t the 5700’s element. The Quickoffice is missing here and so are the PDF reader and the ZIP manager. Converter, calculator and voice recorder are available, as well as the Notes application. They have the same well-known functionality as in other Symbian devices.
A glance at 5700’s applications – Calculator, Converter and Voice recorder
Finally, the phone has an excellent Tutorial tool which describes the main functions of the phone in a very user-friendly way.
A user-friendly tutorial helps you to get to know the phone quicker
Game on
Nokia 5700 comes with the same two preinstalled games the Nokia 6120 classic has. Both are very entertaining. Moreover, Nokia has set up the www.nokiazine.net website, where you can find a lot of free new games for Nokia 5700. Although not very popular at this stage, Nokiazine is expected to play a key part in some Nokia campaigns in the future.
Games menu can be filled up with free games form Nokiazine
Marble game: shooting down marbles in series of at least 3 in matching color
City bloxx: build a city by skillfully constructing towering residential buildings. A game of logic and quick reflexes, it was appreciated all around the GSMArena team.
The verdict
Having squeezed every last drop out of our Nokia 5700 let us end our review by putting everything in context and saying a few words about our general impression. We believe we’ve answered the question at the beginning of the review. The Nokia 5700 performance as a smartphone is by far superior to its music capabilities. The latter are only slightly above average. So if you are looking for a phone to use for strictly music purposes, you’d better look elsewhere. Are you after a balanced overall performance? Look no further. Nokia 5700 is exactly the phone for you and its unmatched speed will never make you regret your purchase. We really don’t believe that the target audience should be confined to music fans. This highly capable handset is a true value for money.
Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_5700-review-163p4.php
Nokia 5700
The Nokia 5700 is a Symbian S60 3rd Edition FP1 smartphone. It’s being sold under the XpressMusic sub-brand, which emphasises music and multimedia playback.
What is it like in real life?
The 5700 is a monoblock phone which weighs 115 g. It has a casing made of glossy white plastic, and a black or red matt plastic middle section. There’s a rubber flap on the right hand side which covers a microSD hotswap card slot, USB port and charging jack.
The keypad is rather unusual, it can be twisted to four different positions, each allowing easier access to a specific function of the 5700:
- Keypad facing forward: this is the main mode of the 5700, which works just like keypads on any other phone.
- Playback controls facing forward: twisting the keypad round to this position automatically activates the music player.
- Camera facing away: this position automatically starts the camera application, and lets you photograph or video objects in front of you. If you’re already using the phone’s video player app, twisting to this position automatically changes the video to horizontal full screen mode, and it’s physically possible to stand the 5700 on its side in this position so you can watch the video more easily.
- Camera facing forward: this position also automatically starts the camera app, and is intended for self-portraits and for videophone calls. This position also lets you stand the 5700 horizontally on its side so you can talk to the video camera without having to hold the phone.
The main keypad itself has clicky buttons with angled surfaces that let your finger distinguish one from the other. Above the keypad are the soft keys, call keys and S60 keys which generally work fine. However, the S60 menu key is somehow too closely connected to the left hand soft key, and occasionally you find yourself accidentally activating both. The 5700 has a joystick, and joysticks seem to divide opinion: some love them and some hate them. It’s a matter of taste, but as joysticks go the 5700’s is perfectly adequate, with a smooth metal finish that doesn’t dig into your thumb the way the E61’s joystick does. Personally I would have preferred a direction pad, but that’s due to my own hatred of phone joysticks in general.
There are volume controls built into the left side, and the on/off button is on the top of the phone.
The playback controls are physically excellent, a vast improvement on the tiny buttons of the Nokia 3250. The 5700’s controls take up as much space as possible, so they’re as easy to press as possible.
The QVGA (240×320) 16 million colour screen is bright and crisp, with a sensor that turns the lighting on or off depending on how bright the surroundings are. You can set the sensor to various sensitivities, or switch it off, and you can also adjust the screen’s auto switchoff time from 5 to 90 seconds.
Battery life is what you’d expect from a smartphone, and will vary wildly from one user to another depending on what they do and how much they do it. I used the 5700 as my main phone and found I had to recharge it every couple of days.
Overall the 5700 feels surprisingly solid, despite having a major moving part. The twisting keypad is very sturdily implemented, and doesn’t feel loose at all. The phone isn’t quite as chunky in real life as it might appear from the photos, it’s much thinner than the 5300 for example. The curvy edges give it a nicer appearance than the 3250, and the multimedia controls are far superior.
As a phone
The 5700 is a Quadband (850/900/1800/1900) GSM and WCDMA/UMTS (2100) 3G phone, and as far as calls go it’s up to the usual high Nokia standards. I never had trouble picking up a signal, I never dropped a call, and the sound quality was consistently good. The curvy edges made it comfortable to hold to my ear and the matt centre section stopped the phone slipping while being held.
The 5700 has a speakerphone mode, and also supports all current bluetooth headset profiles including A2DP stereo. You can take calls (or redial the last dialed number) through A2DP-compatible bluetooth headphones with built-in microphones. Testing this feature with the Nokia BH-501 bluetooth headset, the callers I spoke to reported that I sounded just like I was using a phone normally.
If you have a 3G connection available, you can use the videophone mode, for which you have to twist the camera to face you and hold the 5700 horizontally. The twisted mode also lets you rest the phone horizontally on a table. You can also use the camera to record and send multimedia messages.
As a Music Player & Radio
Accessing the 5700’s music player is extremely intuitive: you just twist the playback controls round to face you, and the player application activates automatically. The controls themselves are very easy to use, with one large and two enormous buttons. To go back to the phone’s standby screen, you just twist the normal keypad back to the front.
The music player is compatible with a wide range of audio standards (AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, MP4, M4A, WMA, Mobile XMF, SP-MIDI, AMR (NB-AMR), MIDI Tones (poly 64), RealAudio 7,8,10, True tones (WB-AMR), WAV) and you can transfer tracks using the Nokia Music Manager or Windows Media Player. The 5700 has a hotswap microSD memory card slot, which can use microSD cards with a capacity up to 2 gigabytes. Depending on what quality you like, this is enough space for roughly 500 to 1000 tracks using the AAC format or one of its variants. Tracks can be transferred through a standard USB cable, or via bluetooth, infrared or the internet.
The 5700 has an FM radio tuner, which like all phone FM tuners requires headphones or external speakers to be plugged in to act as the aerial. You can also download your local stations’ frequencies via the internet from a worldwide database, and automatically use these as your presets. This saves a lot of bother at home, but it’s also useful on journeys where you don’t know the local stations. The 5700 also supports Visual Radio if you have access to it.
The 5700 has support for 2.5mm headphones that plug straight into the audio socket, 3.5mm headphones through an adapter, and stereo Bluetooth headphones. The sales package includes a 3.5mm adapter, which also has its own set of external music controls, and some 3.5mm headphones to plug into the adapter.
Sound quality is very good on the 5700, although it is largely determined by how good your headphones are. If you’re an audiophile, I’d strongly recommend using your own favourite headphones. The included 3.5mm ones have good sound quality but seem to limit the volume, and using third party alternatives made the music much louder. You can use third party headphones through the 3.5mm adapter, or wirelessly through a BH-500 Bluetooth adapter.
The 5700’s music player is silent between tracks (older S60 phones used to have a distinct crunching noise when tracks changed), and you can change tracks during playback without the music player panicking. It’s worth emphasising that there IS a gap between tracks, even if it’s silent, so if gapless playback is important to you (for example if a long classical piece is divided into several tracks) then you have to combine the piece’s separate tracks into one big track on your PC, then transfer it to the phone. It’s also worth mentioning that there’s a one second delay between pressing a music control and the action actually taking place.
The 5700 has built-in stereo speakers, which are mounted along the left side of the phone in music mode but spread on the left and right sides of the phone in normal mode. The speakers are pretty loud (the phone shakes if you hold it at maximum volume) but as with all phone speakers they’re a bit tinny and have trouble generating bass.
The 5700 is compatible with the A2DP Bluetooth profile, which lets you listen to music wirelessly through A2DP stereo Bluetooth headphones. It also supports the AVRCP Bluetooth profile which lets you change or pause tracks wirelessly. I tested the 5700 with Nokia BH-500 and BH-501 Bluetooth headphones, and was able to connect it to both. One thing that really threw me for a while is that you have to place both of these devices in a special mode during pairing, indicated by a blue/red light on the BH-501 and a rapidly-flashing blue light on the BH-500, otherwise they won’t be found at all.
Once the pairing has happened, the headphones can be authorised to automatically connect to the 5700 without taking the phone out of your pocket or bag. The BH-500 and BH-501 both support this feature, although to activate the 501’s automatic connection you have to press the 501’s main button a second time after switching it on. Apologies to those who read my recent 501 review where I claimed it didn’t support this feature… it does, but you have to read the manual carefully to find out.
If you haven’t tried Bluetooth stereo headphones before, I’d strongly recommend giving them a go. As long as they’re A2DP compatible they should work with the 5700, even if they’re not made by Nokia. In the same spirit, Nokia A2DP headphones can be used with non-Nokia A2DP phones. A2DP is now becoming available even on lower-end phones such as the recently released 3110 Classic, and it seems likely that by 2008 almost all new Bluetooth-compatible phones will support A2DP.
What’s puzzling about the 5700’s music features is that there’s no built-in 3.5mm headphone socket. This is by far the most common standard for headphones and audio cables, and although the 3.5mm adapter is perfectly good it’s still another bit of kit that you have to remember to take with you. The 5700 isn’t the thinnest phone on the market, and it seems likely that Nokia would have been able to fit a 3.5mm jack somewhere on the phone, but for some reason they haven’t done it.
As a Video Player
The built-in RealPlayer application handles video playback, or you can install third party alternatives such as SmartMovie. The 5700’s twisting ability comes into play, as you can twist the keypad round so that the 5700 stands horizontally on a tabletop, which also automatically puts the video player into full-screen horizontal mode. You can twist back and forth between horizontal and handheld mode as much as you want, and the video continues to play. Video quality on the built-in player is excellent, and should provide stiff competition for third party playback apps.
You can use the 5700’s playback controls with videos in horizontal mode: Play/Pause plays and pauses, while Forward and Back take you forward or back within the current video. You have to hold Forward or Back down for a while to get them working.
The 5700 is officially supported by Nokia’s new Video Manager PC application, which lets you convert existing video files on your PC into files suitable for playback on your phone. The first version of Video Manager was shockingly bug-ridden, however a new version has come out pretty quickly after the first one, and presumably Nokia will continue to issue regular updates as more and more compatible phones appear in the market.
As a Camera
The 5700 has a 2 megapixel camera which can be activated by twisting the keypad so the camera faces away or towards you. The screen automatically goes into horizontal mode, and pictures are taken by pressing the white Camera/Play button in the centre of the playback controls. The Forward and Back controls zoom in and out using the digital zoom facility. The camera includes a flash.
I found using the playback controls useful, partly because the large Camera/Play button was easy to activate, but mainly because in twisted mode it was easier to hold the phone steady with two hands. Alternatively, if you prefer taking pictures with one hand, the 5700’s main body is light enough (and the keypad joint is sturdy enough) to let you hold the phone by the keypad alone.
Twisting the keypad back to its normal position deactivates the camera app automatically.
The camera can also shoot video at 320×240 pixels, the resolution of YouTube videos. The 5700’s web browser is good enough to let you access the normal YouTube website and upload videos just as you would on a PC, and the 3G connection means you can upload large files fairly quickly. There’s potential here for videos at concerts or sports events getting on YouTube within minutes of their being filmed.
The camera application has the following options: Image Mode, Video Mode, Panorama Mode (which helps you take two photos and join them together within the app), Night Mode (which can be activated for any other mode), Flash (always on, always off, automatic), White Balance (to take account of different lighting conditions), Colour Tone (which lets you film in normal colour, sepia, black and white or negative), Image Quality and Image Resolution.
Here are some sample photos so you can judge how good the camera is. The first three were taken on a cloudy day, the rest were taken on a sunny day: Sample 1 Sample 2 Sample 3 Sample 4 Sample 5 Sample 6 Sample 7 Sample 8
One bug pointed out by an AAS reader remained even after I had updated the firmware: if you try to move photos in the Gallery application from the images folder into a user-created sub-folder, the Gallery app only moves one photo at a time, even if you mark several to be moved at once. I also had problems moving photos out of sub-folders back into the main folder.
As a Computer
The 5700 is a S60 3rd Edition FP1 multi-tasking smartphone, and is compatible with S60 3rd Edition applications and games. You install apps just as you do on previous S60 3rd Editions, most easily by using the PC Suite’s Application Installer program. You can also download and install apps straight onto your phone over the internet, for example through the built-in Download! application or through the phone’s web browser.
The 5700’s browser is the now-standard Nokia S60 OSS browser, and you can download at broadband speeds thanks to the phone’s 3G connection (although page rendering is slower than on a PC). The S60 browser is based on the same core as the Apple Safari browser, some sites will even mistakenly identify you as using Safari. You can visit most HTML and Flash-based sites, providing you remember to switch on the Flash support in Settings, although some processor-intensive features such as watching YouTube videos simply won’t work (the rest of the YouTube site works fine). There are a couple of snags though: Some sites such as the BBC insist on auto-redirecting you to their cut-down mobile versions, and it would have been nice to be able to disguise your mobile origins. The other snag is that there’s no option to work in horizontal mode (320×240) as well as vertical mode (240×320).
The 5700 runs the FP1 update of the S60 3rd Edition user interface, which contains new features and improvements over the ordinary 3rd Edition. You can read more about these in AAS’s review of the 6290, but it includes sensible things such as putting all settings menus under one icon. I also found that the feature for indicating a still-running application, a blue circle next to its icon and folder, is actually very useful. At first I was sceptical but I’ve come to rely on the circles to remind me when an app has accidentally been left running, consuming battery life and precious RAM.
One rather worrying thing about the 5700 happened two or three times during the first week I had it: it inexplicably decided to reboot in the middle of using an application. I wasn’t running any third party software, just the apps that came with the phone (for example the built-in City Bloxx game), and this is something that never ever happened to me with the almost-identical 6290. I updated the firmware of the 5700 and the reboots haven’t happened since, so hopefully the problem has already been dealt with, but there were other occasional instabilities after the update. For example, while attempting to pair with a Bluetooth headset the phone crashed and I had to take the battery out to restart it. This kind of thing was relatively rare, but it shouldn’t be happening at all, and didn’t happen at all on the 6290.
The 5700 contains a 369MHz central processor, almost twice as fast as the processor found on something like the E61. It’s difficult to compare the 5700 to phones like the N95 however, as the N95 contains two processors instead of one, so even though it has a lower clock speed than the 5700 it might actually be faster at getting tasks done.
Overall
Clearly the 5700 isn’t going to win any fans from the “All phones must be thinner than an After Eight” brigade.
The 5700 is also not going to please the “Where’s the wi-fi and DVD-quality camcorder?” market either, who will make woeful comparisons with the N95 and the like. However, the launch price of the 5700 is literally half the launch price of the N95, so it’s hard to see how they can be compared directly.
The 5700 also isn’t going to be bought by people who want phones to look very serious and business-like, but many of us don’t want serious-looking phones. It’s interesting to note that the 5700 is being promoted in China, where tastes and marketing are just a little bit different to the West.
The twisting keypad is much more than a novelty, it’s genuinely intuitive, innovative and useful. Twisting the music controls to the front in effect turns the 5700 into a dedicated music player. Twisting the camera away from you lets you hold it more steadily to take better pictures. Twisting the camera towards you makes it a very convenient videophone or video diary camcorder, as it can be placed on a table and has exactly the right angle to film your face.
The unexplained reboots and occasional instabilities are worrying, although they were rare and some may have been eliminated by the latest firmware update. The lack of a direct 3.5mm headphone socket is a bit silly, especially when absolutely everything else is in place to make the 5700 a direct alternative to dedicated music players. The horizontal screen mode in the video player and camera app is very welcome, but it would have been nice to see this extended to the web browser as it has been on the N95.
Is the Nokia 5700 the phone for you? It’s a matter of your technical requirements and taste. It doesn’t have every smartphone feature, but its relatively low price tag reflects this. It does look quite quirky and isn’t a thin phone, but some people prefer having something chunky, brightly coloured and with a unique character. To use a car analogy, the 5700 is perhaps the smartphone world’s Mini Cooper.
Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_5700_XpressMusic_Review.php
Nokia BH-501
Nokia BH-501 Bluetooth Stereo Headset
The Nokia BH-501 is a fairly standard Bluetooth stereo headset, compatible with all devices that adhere to the A2DP standard, both Nokia and non-Nokia products. Once the BH-501 has been paired with a device and connected, it will pipe all that device’s audio through the headphones.
I tested the BH-501 paired with a Nokia 5700 smartphone (Symbian S60 3rd Edition FP1) and a Nokia 5300 normal phone (Series 40 3rd Edition FP2), both of them running the very latest versions of their respective operating systems and interfaces.
What’s it like in real life?
Physically the BH-501 is nice and light, a mere 68 grams, and can be folded into a fairly small size. Putting the headphones on can take getting used to as they hang down the back of your neck rather than looping over the top of your head, but once you’ve worked out how to do it it’s actually quite easy. It’s slightly annoying having to clear hair and/or glasses out of the way when you put them on (if you have hair and/or glasses!), but it’s no worse than for other large headphones. Despite their one-size-fits-all nature, they’re fairly comfortable to wear as the joint between the two earphones is made of very flexible plastic, and as the joint doesn’t go over your head its size is mostly irrelevant. The parts of the BH-501 which rest behind your ears are made of a soft almost jelly-like plastic, so they don’t really dig into you. The earphones are covered in soft foam and press against your ears comfortably.
It’s a matter of taste, but I think the BH-501 headphones look okay too. They aren’t huge coke cans, and are relatively unobtrusive. You don’t feel a prat wearing them.
The BH-501 has three buttons: one general purpose button which starts and stops connections, and two volume control buttons. There are no playback control buttons, although pressing the general purpose button twice during a connection will redial the last used phone number (the microphone is built into the right earphone). Switching the BH-501 on by pressing the general purpose button once lets it connect to devices it is already paired with, while switching it on by holding it down until the blue light turns red puts it in a mode where it can be paired with new devices.
Charging time for the BH-501 is four hours and is done using the now-standard Nokia charger with the thin plug. There’s a charger included in the sales package as well as a manual. A fully charged BH-501 gives you 11 hours of playback with about 6 days of standby time.
Using the BH-501
Pairing the BH-501 is painless, it’s simply a case of switching on Bluetooth and asking the phones to search for new devices. The pairing code for the BH-501 is fixed and printed in the manual, you simply enter it when the phone prompts you to make the connection. There’s a slight quirk here: while the BH-500 automatically connects as soon as you switch it on, the BH-501 requires you to switch it on by holding down the multifunction button, then let go, then wait a couple of seconds, then press the multifunction button again briefly to automatically open the connection with the phone. A semi-automatic connection then, you could say. 
The sound quality on the BH-501 seemed fine, I couldn’t really tell any meaningful difference between it and wired headphones. Of course audiophiles will have varying opinions about what makes for high quality, but as far as the average person in the street goes, I can’t hear any problems with the BH-501. Volume is more than high enough for me, although this will vary with taste and/or the physical condition of your ears. The BH-501 lets you control the volume both on the headphones and on the phone, and it will beep when you’ve reached a minimum or maximum.
Taking phone calls on the BH-501 is fairly straightforward, you can answer calls by pressing the general purpose button on the headphones or you can answer them using the phone itself. The built-in microphone works surprisingly well considering it’s on the side of your head: the callers I tested it with said they could hear me as clearly as if I was using a normal phone.
Connectivity
One of the main issues that gets mentioned with all Bluetooth wireless headphones is the reliability of the connection. I did the same tests with the BH-501 that I did with the BH-500 in a previous review, and found that the 501 seems to have a slightly less beefy connection. Whereas the 500 could reliably cope with me being two walls away, the 501 seemed to be limited to one wall. However, in normal use (with the headphones on and the phone in a bag or pocket) I didn’t find any problems with the BH-501, the connection seemed perfectly stable.
One of Nokia’s official bloggers said he got occasional cutouts with the BH-501 but I didn’t experience this. It’s possible that the problem was more related to the particular phone used than to the headphones themselves, applications running on that phone, interference from other nearby devices, or just be that he got a dodgy unit while I got a good one.
The BH-501 can be paired with up to 8 devices, although naturally you can only use it with one phone at a time. Interestingly, the official specs say you can use the headphones with two devices simultaneously if one device is pure audio and the other is purely for handling phone calls using the headset/handsfree profile. However, I was unable to test this as I have no non-phone A2DP devices.
Overall
The BH-501 headphones do what they’re supposed to, although the lack of playback controls is annoying. However, it’s worth noting that the BH-501 is at the cheaper end of the price scale, you can get them for about 50 Euros plus sales tax, which is half the cost of the BH-500.
If you prefer using your own wired headphones over Bluetooth, or if you want Bluetooth playback controls, I’d recommend the BH-500 instead. But if you want a pair of completely wireless stereo headphones for your phone, or if you want Bluetooth stereo without paying through the nose for it, the BH-501 could well be the better choice.
Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_BH-501_Stereo_Bluetooth_Headphones.php
Nokia E90 (5)
Navigation
Since the very beginning of the PDA/smartphone scene, there has been interest in mapping and routing – with the handheld device with you all the time, it’s the ideal gadget to tell you where you are and where to go next. The first bit (where you are) is of course down to a GPS receiver. These started to appear in handheld form in the early 1990s and have steadily come down in size and price, to the extent that the Nokia 6110 Navigator, the N95 and now the E90 Communicator all have one built-in, so no need for a separate Bluetooth GPS, let alone any wires.
The slight catch is that GPS receivers are fairly hungry little devices and powering one from a smartphone’s battery isn’t going to be that friendly. Nokia’s solution has been to implement a custom-designed low power GPS. They haven’t release full technical details but I’d guess that it keeps locks on less GPS satellites and that it’s quite a bit less sensitive than, say, a standalone TomTom receiver.
As with the Nokia N95, the GPS in the E90 requires patience and lots of it. After starting the E90’s built-in Maps application, it’s normally necessary to give the GPS a good minute or two to acquire a ‘lock’ on three or more satellites. If you’re in a hurry and set off immediately, the GPS will generally take longer to lock on - ok if you know now the first section of your journey, but a pain if you’re driving blind and have no idea which direction to set off in.
Once locked on, the E90 GPS generally works quite well, only rarely losing the lock. It also works just as well in ‘closed’ mode as it does with the clamshell ‘open’, so you can use Maps on the small cover display instead if this is more convenient in your vehicle (see photo below). Voice instructions are nice and loud, as you’d expect from the fabulous E90 speakers.
Click to enlarge each screenshot, as usual…
Maps itself, as on the N95, is really Nokia’s Smart2Go application, but tweaked with support for the built-in GPS. Without being too unfair to Smart2Go, I’d sum it up as having an intuitive interface and a clever subscription system but rather let down in its current ‘beta’ form by less than stellar routing. Over the last two months, I’ve driven over 1000 miles with Maps/Smart2Go on the N93, N95 and E90 and have had more than my fair share of routing oddities. Yes, the application always got me to my destination but there were too many occasions when the real world fastest route was ignored. But the official download is still in ‘beta’, as I say, and hopefully routing will be more reliable when it’s finally released (and the update rolled into N95 and E90 firmware updates, of course).
In full navigation mode, “In 300m, turn left…”
An alternative to paid-for navigation, but only if you’re not the driver! Planning a route and then following it step by manual step – and note that the junction logos aren’t accurately shown in this manual mode, i.e. shown as third exit rather than second, etc.
In addition to the dual screen support, Maps is of course enhanced on the E90 by working on the much larger display. Although the voice-guided navigation (with the usual Smart2Go subscription model) isn’t really affected, since your eyes will hopefully be on the road most of the time, browsing maps and getting a feel for an area is much easier on the 4″ display.
As usual with Smart2Go/Maps, it’s tempting to try navigation using just the basic routing function, along with navigator-up to move between junctions and the on-screen display of GPS position. But, if you’re in the car on your own, a few words of advice – DON’T DO IT – YOU’LL CRASH! In the basic mapping mode, the backlight will turn off as normal, plus you’ll have to keep pressing ‘up’ and trying to keep track of the GPS indicator – a recipe for disaster if you’re driving but quite doable if you’re a passenger. Instead, pay up the (IMEI-locked) fee for however long you need voice-guidance for – I’m still an admirer of the way you can pay small sums for short periods (e.g. £6 for 1 month) and pay for it on your phone bill, even if you’re using a pay-as-you-go SIM card. All very elegant.
Navigation is helped on the E90 by the fact that there’s a beefy 1500mAh battery driving things but I’d still recommend powering the E90 from your car 12V supply if you’re travelling more than a dozen miles.
…and there’s more…
In the last three weeks, I’ve covered every aspect of the Nokia E90 in detail, in themed review parts. But there are bound to have been applications and functions that slipped through the net. Here are a few that caught my eye:
As with all other S60 3rd Edition devices, there’s a full GPS/positioning sub-system, implying both that you can also connect to an external GPS and that third party applications will also be able to hook into the built-in GPS data.
There’s the standard Eseries Search utility, although this has also now been merged into Nokia Mobile Search, if anyone’s still looking for it.
The standard Connectivity app set, still nice to see both Modem and Infrared in there, for a business device.
With a 2GB microSD inserted. The 1100MB used is split between music and map data, in my case. Backup and password functions are standard S60, as usual.
There’s Barcode reader, as on all other S60 auto-focus smartphones, though even on 2D barcodes I’ve been generally disappointed (not the E90’s fault, specifically).
As with the 5500 Sport, there’s full voice support. It’s a bit of gimmick really and very niche, but there’s fun to be had in having your emails read to you while doing the washing up or driving….
The FP1 version of Clock has copious support for one off and repeatable alarms, as many as you like as often as you like.
Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_E90-Navigation_and_More.php
Nokia BH-500
Nokia BH-500 Stereo Bluetooth Headset
The idea behind the BH-500 is simple: it lets you turn any standard headphones into stereo Bluetooth headphones by plugging them into the BH-500’s 3.5mm socket (and you’re not restricted to headphones, speakers and audio cables work too). The accessory itself contains no built-in headphones, is very small and light, weighs 40 grams and has a thick sturdy clip to attach it to your clothes or bag. It’s coated in rubber, with a flap over the charging socket, and is apparently splash proof and dust proof.
You can use it to listen to music on all A2DP-compatible devices, which includes phones, music players and computers, including S60 devices such as the Nokia N91 8GB, N95, 5700 and 6110, among others. You can pair the BH-500 with up to eight different devices, although obviously you can only use it with one at a time.
The BH-500 is also compatible with the AVRCP, Headset and Handsfree Bluetooth profiles. AVRCP (Audio Video Remote Control Profile) lets the BH-500 control a device’s multimedia functions, using its own play/pause, forward and backward buttons. It also has its own volume control and a call handling button. The play/pause and call controls are very large silver buttons in the middle, with the other controls are embedded in the black rubber surround.
The sales package includes the BH-500, some standard headphones (although you might want to use your own ones, that is after all the point of this thing!), three sizes of rubber headphone buds, a Nokia AD-47W Bluetooth USB adaptor (which lets you use the BH-500 with your PC) and a standard Nokia charger.
Getting Started
Charging takes about 90 minutes and gives you eight hours of music playback, or about six days standby (with the Bluetooth on but unused). There’s a multi-coloured LED buried underneath the black rubber which is yellow during charging and turns green when it’s full.
The BH-500 doesn’t have a keypad, so its fixed Bluetooth pairing code is printed in the manual, and you enter it on your phone during the pairing process. After pairing, Nokia A2DP-compatible phones also give you the option of automatically connecting to the headset whenever it’s switched on. I found this option very useful indeed.
One slightly confusing (and undocumented) complication is the dual nature of the power switch on the BH-500. If you hold it down until a green light appears, and then release it, it will connect to your phone without any problems, and the light will then turn blue to indicate the Bluetooth connection is established. However, if you turn the BH-500 on by holding down the power switch beyond the green light, it eventually turns blue and refuses to connect to your phone. This seems to be the BH-500’s PC mode, which you use when connecting it to your computer, but more about that later.
Using the BH-500 is fairly straightforward. The music controls are identical to those on the phone, and the volume level is totally separate from the phone’s. The call handling button lets you answer calls, end them, or dial the last used number if you press it twice. There’s a built-in microphone in the BH-500 so you can handle calls without taking your phone out of your pocket or bag. The microphone seems to work well even when worn quite a way from your mouth.
Unfortunately you can’t listen to your phone’s FM radio, mobile devices require wired headphones attached to them to act as their FM aerial.
Sound Quality
But how good is the sound? Well, the answer is: how good are your headphones? Various manufacturers’ headphones sounded as they did when directly connected to the phone, so it seems that the BH-500 doesn’t noticeably affect the audio signal it handles, at least to my ears.
The BH-500’s signal proved consistent over the usual Bluetooth range of 10 metres. As a more extreme test, I left the phone in a room at one end of the flat and walked to a room at the other, which was about 10 or 12 metres away with two walls between us. The signal quality didn’t change, although it broke up very briefly but then returned and stabilised (perhaps the phone increased its signal strength to make up for the greater distance). If I walked further than that, with three or more walls in between, the signal broke up and never stabilised, but it kept the connection open and returned to normal if I walked back towards the phone.
Using decent headphones makes phone calls themselves sound surprisingly good, and it’s actually quite fun to take calls using the BH-500, although as with all headsets it looks a bit odd in public if you’re talking by yourself and there’s no phone in sight.
The devices you pair with the BH-500 seem to affect sound quality. With the non-smart Nokia 5300 phone there was some stuttering between tracks as the phone tried to cope with handling the music and handling the Bluetooth signal simultaneously. With a PC there was absolutely no stuttering between tracks at all.
Now time for a small confession: the Finnish branch of All About Symbian doesn’t currently have an A2DP compatible S60 device to test the BH-500 with, so I can’t say how well it works with S60 phones. However, we should be getting a 5700 to review at some point, so expect an update to this article. [The 6290 will be back with you within a week! - Ed]
PC Use
The AD-47W Bluetooth adaptor included with the BH-500 is a USB dongle which plugs into your computer and lets you use the BH-500 with it. There’s no set up required, just plug it in and it works, although you may need to press a button on the dongle to get it connected to the BH-500. Windows PCs (and possibly others too) automatically switch to a different set of volume controls, which you can access by clicking on the usual volume control icon next to the system clock.
As stated above, to put the BH-500 in computer mode you have to switch it on by holding down the power button until the green light turns blue. If the USB dongle doesn’t automatically connect to the BH-500, try pressing the dongle’s button. When the connection is established, the dongle’s blue LED will remain lit instead of blinking.
The BH-500 works fine with the PC, and might be used for (for example) listening to internet radio or PC-stored music in rooms near your PC. I couldn’t get the BH-500’s multimedia controls to work with my computer, but presumably an AVRCP-compatible computer wouldn’t have problems.
Overall
People often have their own favourite headphones, so it’s nice that a device exists that can turn them all into Bluetooth headphones. The unavoidable downside is that you still end up with wires, because that’s what standard headphones use. (Having said that, the headphones included in the sales package do have an extremely short cable to minimise the problem.)
What the BH-500 does in effect is act as a sort of phone-connected version of the clip-on iPod Shuffle, giving you a small, wearable set of music and call controls in a durable and barely noticeable package. Walking through a dodgy area of town, or just being caught in the rain, I’d much rather use the BH-500 than fish an expensive phone out of a bag or pocket.
Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_BH-500_Stereo_Bluetooth_Headset_Review.php
Nokia E61i (4)
Nokia E61i – Part Three, The Applications
One of the delights of the E61i is the sheer ‘all rounder’ factor it has. With 61 application icons (including those in each folder), there’s a lot that the E61i claims to do. I covered Messaging, Web and the PIM suite components in the previous part of this review; here I’m going to look at some of those other applications that are available out of the box.
The Mobile Office
Given the enterprise focus of the E61i, one of the key applications is Quickoffice. It provides E61i owners with(Microsoft Office compatible) word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications, with both viewing and editing capabilities. Quickoffice puts the E61i firmly into the realms of a full blown mini-computer and means that leaving your laptop behind is a much more realistic proposition.
The components of the Quickoffice suite are solid applications and are well suited to a device where users are likely to be receiving, reading, editing and sending documents over email. It is not the latest version (more on that in a moment) but it is stable and can handle displaying pretty much any file that is thrown at it. For gentle use, it’s a strong application, but those of you looking to seriously use it in the wild, editing ‘master’/rich documents from your boss, should consider moving up to the latest version 4.0 by using Quickmanager
This is the fourth component of Quickoffice (the others being Quickword, Quicksheet and Quickpoint – although all are accessed from a single application icon) and it allows you to update or upgrade the software suite. Building in update functionality makes a lot of sense, more so for an application like Quickoffice, which may need to issue compatibility updates (e.g. the ability to open new versions of Microsoft Office files). In case you’re wondering, the optional update to v4 brings better rendering, better editing, table support and the ability to include your own graphics. With Quickmanager, E61i users can upgrade to version 4 of Quickoffice on the device with very little fuss. Admittedly this does cost, but it is very easy to do and costs less than buying a license from scratch (currently a 40% discount is on offer).
Sitting alongside Quickoffice, to give you the best chance of being able to look at any attachment emailed to you, are two utility applications. First up is Zip Manager, with the goal of opening and extracting files from any zip archive, and creating your own zip files. It’s a simple list based interface – choose the zip file, highlight the contents, and where you want them saved on extracting, and a similar process to add your own files.
The second utility is the official Adobe PDF reader for S60. There’s the familiar list view of available files – in this case .pdf files – and you can switch to a file browser if you need to find a file from a specific folder. This is a solid viewer, does what it says on the tin and, being coded by Adobe, it (like Quickoffice 3) doesn’t have many file compatibility problems. While there are third party PDF readers out there that arguably perform better, the built in viewer is going to be used by the majority of users, who’ll never need to look for more features than those on offer here.
Multimedia
While not an Nseries device, there’s enough of the standard S60 software inside the E61i to make it a competent device for multimedia. Naturally, with a 2 megapixel camera now designed into the rear of the unit, it’s great for quick shots when out and about. It might not have a Carl Zeiss lens, but it’s fine for casual leisure photography up to 1600×1200 resolution, provided there’s good enough light. The same goes for the video recording, it’s not fantastic, nor is it up to the quality of high end devices like the E90, N93 and N95, but again it’s well suited for capturing quick moments.
It’s fair to say that 18 months ago the quality of the images and video from the E61i would have been regarded as some of the best available from a smartphone. Given the progress Nokia and others have made, it seems a shame to label the optics and results here as ‘slightly above average’, but when you compare it to some of the pictures from non-Symbian smartphones, you realise just how good even the average camera from Finland can be.
Both the Flash Player and RealPlayer applications now appear in every S60 device. For new users it is worth noting that the Flash Player is for Flash Lite (1.1) content only, this is a subset of the full Flash specification (so no playing the “Badger Badger” song from the internet – which might be a blessing). Similarly, RealPlayer supports 3gpp (which is the format the built in camera records video at), MPEG-4 and versions 7, 8, 9 and 10 of RealVideo.
While the E61i isn’t specifically designed as a multimedia device, it copes admirably if you want to make it into an all rounder, with stereo music playback. As well as the 80MB internal disk, there is a microSD slot under the back cover and, with 2GB cards available for around £25, you can store a lot of music. The Music Player is similar to that of the N91, but designed to take account of the much larger screen (320×240 as opposed to 176×208) and of course it’s in a different aspect ratio. One gotcha might be that the fast forward/rewind shortcut keys that are normally under the cursor are now moved to the ‘4’ and ‘6’ keys on the main keyboard, and the d-pad controls volume and the on-screen cursor.
What’s lacking for all of these is a good way to get the sound into your ears. In the box you’re supplied with just a mono (single earpiece) hands-free set. If you’re serious about packing some music or video into the E61i you’ll need to grab yourself a Pop-port audio adaptor, to provide a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack so you can use your own preferred headphones. With no headset attached, the Music player will default to the main speaker and this still packs quite a loud punch.
Other Applications That I Liked…
With plenty of applications on the E61i, all of them holding potentially vital information, the addition into the firmware of Nokia’s Search application is a great boon. This performs a global search through your choice of applications (text messages, emails, Calendar entries, To-Dos, Notes, Contacts and ‘other files’) for your search string. It does take a few seconds, but you get a progress report for each area as it moves ‘through’ them. Over time, as more and more information is stored or synchronized, Search becomes more and more useful. I’ve already moved it to the home screen on the E61i after just two weeks of use.
Teams is another interesting one, hiding in the Office folder. This allows you to set up a team of people (such as “All About Symbian”) so you can get quick access to communication options for more than one person; setting up a conference call; sending group emails or sms’s; or use its link through to the Search utility to find out mentions of the team in your whole device.
One nice touch is that this is actually just a different use of the ‘groups’ function that has always existed inside the Contacts application – and because of this you can use this Teams view or the groups view in Contacts interchangeably.
Unfortunately, the team setup information isn’t passed through to Outlook during synchronisation (it would have been nice to have these tagged using the categories field in Outlook Contacts) so you will have to set this up manually on the smartphone, but that’s a one-time operation and the benefits to someone with large teams to manage is definitely worth it.
I’d also point out a few other applications as being very useful; the inclusion of a File manager is a welcome touch to people like myself (and many an AAS reader I guess) but with the potential number of Office documents on the device it is very much needed for every user. A small subset of applications can use the on-board HP printer drivers for output; and, of course, like all S60 v3 devices, there is support for downloadable and user generated themes to style the device to your tastes.
Summary
The E61i is a great messaging device – the simple fact that it looks like a Blackberry, but is not restricted to a single push email implementation (MS-Exchange is available, as is Blackberry Desktop, DataViz Roadsync, or even low-tech auto POP3 server checks every thirty minutes) means there’s very little lock in to a specific service – you’re not stuck with whatever Verizon or T-Mobile provide for you. This alone makes it an attractive business device.
The maturity of S60 is another strong point. The built in applications have been put through the mill, and with over 100 million S60 devices now shipped, you have to assume that Nokia have a wealth of surveys, user tests and bug reports to draw from. These are some of the most stable smartphone apps around and, while there will always be the occasional crash, thanks to Symbian OS it is very (very) unlikely that you’d suffer a loss of data – vital when the E61i is the sort of device that you might rely on for a few days while out of the office.
The question of an upgrade for existing E61 users is a little bit more difficult. Beyond the camera and the Ford Cortina styling touches, there’s little difference in the physicality of the E61 to the E61i. The built in software changes are, for the most part, included in the firmware updates available to end-users of the E61 using Nokia Software Update. As a replacement unit for a damaged E61, by all means take the later model, but there’s no real need to lust after that extra ‘i’ just yet.
Personally, I could rely on the E61i to keep me in touch. I wouldn’t want to be without my laptop while travelling, but that’s due mainly to the amount of processor and screen intensive applications I run. The E61i is fine for checking in with the web, blog feeds, emails, managing my diary, and keeping the little day to day things running smoothly.
The E61i is a stylish device to look at, the application suite is both mature and well targeted at the Enterprise device user, and, thanks to the large 320×240 screen, S60 has been given a chance to spread its wings and the screen real estate is used well (if not perfectly). Would I recommend the E61i as a regular smartphone? No. Would I recommend it to the target audience of messaging-centric professionals? Definitely. This is a smartphone that knows exactly what it needs to address to be popular in its niche, and it does it very, very well.
Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_E61i-Part_Three_The_Applications.php
Nokia E90 (4)
Nokia E90 – Web and Work
This is where I turn my attention to actually working on the E90, i.e. not just organising my life and answering email. Of course, Calendar, Contacts and Messaging are all part of the working environment, but it’s handling Office files without breaking sweat and allowing Web work with some semblance of desktop normality that could really ‘make’ the Nokia E90.
Office documents
By ‘Office’, I mean those file types that generally get passed around between you and your colleagues. Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, obviously, but also PDF documents, RTF text files from WordPad, JPG images, plus HTML hyperlinks.
The Nokia E90 ships with Quickoffice 3.85 in its ROM, just as did the Nokia E61i, reviewed earlier this week. This bought in solution copes with more Office file variants than the original Nokia 9500’s Symbian-sourced suite did, and can be updated on demand ‘over the air’, at least in theory. Quickoffice includes Quickmanager, whose job is to handle these updates, with the main thrust being to facilitate the paid upgrade to Quickoffice 4.0. This has much better round-tripping (with far less content changed or lost when returning edited documents to their source) and better editing of in-document graphics and tables, but it’s also pickier about which documents it will open (it’s not a friend to OpenOffice’s saved .DOC and .XLS files, for example).
Mind you, for casual Office file editing, the built-in Quickoffice v3.85 will do just fine, while Office power users who care more about ‘rich’ content preservation will almost certainly have Microsoft’s own Office software installed on the desktop and so are less likely to hit compatibility problems. Quickoffice isn’t really optimised for the E90, in that there isn’t the wealth of keyboard shortcuts that previous word/sheet solutions have enjoyed on the Communicator. Large Word files are best navigated in read-only mode and then switched into ‘Edit mode’ when needed, while large Excel spreadsheets are just plain frustrating to move around in, cell by cell.
Quicksheet is solid but not yet a good fit for the Nokia E90.
All applications have the aforementioned printing support, especially useful for Office apps
Quickpoint works well, but suffers (again) from lack of keyboard/E90 optimisation and no zoom control
Adobe’s own PDF reader for Symbian OS is present and correct here and did a decent enough job on all the PDF documents I threw at it, as did S60’s built-in JPG image viewer for photo attachments. RTF attachments open in Notes, with the raw text markup shown – not ideal, but at least the content was visible, and in any case RTF isn’t that commonly used these days. HTML attachments (either intentionally attached by a sender or auto-attached because the sender was using an HTML-enabled email client to apply font effects, formatting and images) open directly in an instance of Web.
Most of the above is, incidentally, almost identical to the software bundle in the smaller Nokia E61i, which is also a capable part-time mobile office. In addition, the shipping E90 may have a Presenter module, to allow slideshows to be driven from the device itself – watch this space.
Working on the Web
Now, I’m going to be a little bit critical here, but the S60 3rd Edition Web browser team shouldn’t take it personally. Web on any of the S60 3rd Edition-powered devices is a tremendous piece of software and, allied with a good 3G or Wi-Fi data connection, means that you can browse and enjoy a huge fraction of the web pages on the Internet. So good so far.
But the problem is that the ‘Web’ itself has become a mess. The original pure HTML web was clean and elegant, but over complicated table layouts started to become a problem. Then we had the rise of Javascript, relied on by many sites for ‘interactivity’ such as buttons that change when a cursor rolls over them, followed by Cascading Style Sheets (a step back towards elegance, actually) and then the rise of Flash content (often mini apps or novelties that run inside containers on web pages) and now Ajax, a mix of Javascript and XML, adding further application-like functions to web sites.
I’m not a luddite and I like Google Documents and YouTube as much as the next guy, but I understand fully that what’s being attempted in the humble browser window is far from straightforward. Mobile browsers (and the processors and RAM allocations that power them) have always been a couple of years behind desktop browsers and the situation hasn’t changed when considering S60 Web, in my opinion.
In practice, this all means that some sites will work and some won’t, depending on the level of technical ambition. In preparing the gallery of screenshots below, I tried to think about the sorts of sites I use on my PC every day without thinking – how many of these could I accomplish things on using just the S60 3rd Edition FP1 Web browser? The wide screen certainly helped enormously, as did having a decent qwerty keyboard for entering text and URLs, but ultimately I was a little underwhelmed. And I wasn’t helped by the way many sites ‘intelligently’ leap in and display a mobile version of their content with no option to link through to the full site.
Attempting to log in to GMail proved fruitless, generating this error before the site got near my mailbox.
Online banking proved far more successful, I was able to log in, browse around and transfer money.
Searching for an image to use usually means going online and using Google’s ‘Images’ tab. This worked very nicely in Web on the E90, just as on a desktop computer.
Generally browsing round news sites also worked well. Here showing Web’s Page overview feature on Google News and AAS’s own drop-down toolbar.
I was curious as to how the E90 would cope with logging into AllAboutSymbian, handling private messages and forum posts. Aside from a few annoying pop-up warnings from Web, it all went smoothly.
Disappointed that the Nokia E90 couldn’t get into Google Maps because the site refused to serve anything but its ‘mobile’ version, I remembered that there’s a Java-based dedicated Google Maps client….
Given a little bandwidth (in this case at an open Wi-Fi hot-spot), Google Maps for Mobile is stunning. I still can’t work out why people were cheering Steve Jobs at the iPhone launch for showing Google Maps, when any smartphone of any type has been able to do the same thing for several years…. Hey, let’s try and replicate what SJ did and zoom in on the Eiffel Tower…
Mission accomplished. Now back to Web…
Trying out some more Google offerings. Attempting to go into the Ajax-based ‘Documents and Spreadsheets’ resulted in a simple error. Trying to bring up a Google video at least displayed a page. But not video. And you’ll remember that YouTube (and Yahoo) video also doesn’t yet work in the S60 3rd Edition FP1 browser…
What about trying to find and download teaching resources for my wife? No problem, I was able to browse a major education site and pull down the plans and guides I wanted, viewing them in Quickoffice or Adobe PDF reader.
The verdict
As with all ‘flagship’ devices that are announced, there’s been the usual lengthy delay before the Nokia E90 is available in stores, during which people’s expectations rise and rise, hailing the device as salvation from smartphone hell. The E90 Communicator is a capable document handler and, with the default Quickoffice 3.85 and other applications, will almost always let you view whatever you’ve been sent. Moreover, it’s easy to create new documents, to get a rough draft of an idea down, with that large display. With the keyboard being rather stiff, writing anything lengthy is going to be a bit of chore though.
Working on the Web is a bit more hit and miss, with the more dynamic and interactive sites (e.g. Google Documents) being simply too much for the S60 browser, and more traditional content (including banking and shopping) working superbly. It’s possible that there may be minor additions to Web’s capabilities for the final E90 firmware and, of course, web sites themselves are also hopefully working to improve their compatibility with different mobile solutions, but I don’t expect the situation outlined above to change markedly.
So… is it possible to take a Nokia E90 on the road with you instead of a laptop? Certainly, for a day or two, but much longer than this and there will probably be too many caveats and things you’ll have to start batching up ‘to do’ when you get back home, to your PC or Mac.
Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_E90-Web_and_Work.php
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