Nokia E70 smart phone

Nokia's eagerly-anticipated E70 phone revives one of the company's cleverest designs, stuffs it full of bleeding-edge features, and aims it squarely at the enterprise market for the first time. It's one of the most versatile designs on offer, and appears at a time when enterprise email has matured. Unfortunately, the promise of …

[Tim Cuthill]

Nokia=Microsoft redux

...and about time too. I've ben wondering when this would happen. Nokia have been heading down the Microsoft circa 1996 route for some time.

You're the biggest player, you're hugely successful, you have a massive userbase and then you get an attack of Corporate hubris. You forget about your userbase, you listen to the techs and marketing types and you release complete shite.

Let's see. Win 95 to XP took about 5 years. I'll look at Nokia in 5 years time. Simple.

Now, what else is going on? Ohhh lookie, Windows mobile 5 for SmartPhones. Gates must be pissing himself.......

[moylan]

nokias woes

while i have no doubts that nokia will fix the software bugs on this phone i think they have problems.

* software

the software built into s60 phones is so limited as to be almost useless.

general - no global search like palm, makes the 2 most useful apps for me on s60, agenda and notepad impossible to use when you can't search all the information you have in them.

notepad - sorts in date order not alphabetical order. like i remember when i put stuff in and not the title i gave it.

syncronization - they chose microsofts active sync. idiots. if i wanted to sync to outlook i would have bought a pocketpc. some of the people who chose/champion s60 are deliberatly avoiding microsoft. so like a lot of s60 users i know we don't sync our phones with anything.

as for activesync, it's a piece of flaky crap that gives nothing but trouble when i use it at work developing pocketpc software.

it would have been more useful if i could sync my nokia n70 with the palm desktop or google calendar. (there is software for google calendar but it's still alpha last time i checked)

no text editor - not as much as a problem since easyedit was released recently but the ability to create modify text files on a phone that can run python is essential.

* supply

a personal quest of mine at the moment is to get a nokia 770 in dublin, ireland.

i have no credit card (paying off my old one) so can't buy online. do any shops in dublin sell the 770. nope, tried about 20 in the city centre. most hadn't heard of it.

can i use nokias site to find one. nope, it points to a list of shops that don't stock it.

can i ring nokia to tell me who the hell has one. nope it points me back to the shop list.

there is a group called club nokia but i have to register with them first and the last time that happened i was getting junk sms every day or so with no opt out so that's not an option.

on the positive side for nokia i've tried pocketpcs such as xda, xdaii, imate jasjar amongst others and they are far far worse. how long that remains so is another story...

[Mark Lockwood]

E70 Software

I must admit, I'm itching to use this phone. I've got two of them in my cupboard which are currently useless. We want the phones as a Blackberry with a full keyboard, to replace a few Siemens SK65's (another great phone design with flaky software)

Nokia have finally released the Blackberry client, but the firmware on the phones is too low to install it. No supplier or Nokia Care Centre has any phones with a high enough firmware, so my phones are left gathering dust.

At some point, Nokia must allow end-users to flash their own phones. Until then, we are all at the mercy of their supply chain and their deminishing reputation.

[Jeroen Bekebrede]

Happy user

I'm quite a happy user of this phone. OK the screen change orientation is not fast but the 2 seconds it usually takes with my phone is nothing to write home about.

WiFi is very stable on my phone. I succesly connected to different networks at home, work and trainstations.

Yesterday I ordered pizza online and browsed pictures sites succesfully.

Leaves the problems with the Nokia web browser and copying worksheets. I do have the out of memory errors sometimes and its irritating. But i'm sure this can be solved one way or another by installing third apps or by an update of the Nokia webbroswer. I read it also helps to disable the cache and to delete your cookies.

Copying worksheets is indeed a problem. I'm yet trying to figure out if there is really no way to copy entire worksheets.

But all in all these are not huge problems and I find it so far the most comfortable pda to make word documents, besides my old Psion Series 7.

[Anonymous Coward]

Symbian OS is a disaster

Symbian phones are unstable (most of them reboot itself at least twice a week), memory leaking and with unwieldy User Interface. On top of it Symbian Signed making it a closed platform, killing most of 3d party application devlopment and destroying backward compatibility. Who need smartphone which can only use preinstalled applications ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No VoIP review :(

It looks like the reviewer missed out to see the VoIP feature of E70. There was no mention of it.. Has anyone got any info on that?

[Christian Dannemann]

Nokia E70, VoIP and Wifi

I have had my E70 for a couple of weeks now. The VoIP client itself takes some time to set up, but has excellent speech quality once you got it working. (I've got mine connected to my asterisk server).

The Wifi implementation is not so good - and that is very nicely worded. After a couple of minutes, the VoIP client doesn't register any more because the WiFi connection doesn't work any more - even though the phone claims it is still connected. You can check that it's the WiFi connection by using VoIP over GPRS - everything is fine (quality of course bad, but the client stays registered).

Nokia has to do something about the WiFi implementation on this phone - the E61 has exactly the same problem. I sent mine back to Nokia to fix it!

Christian

[Pieter Hintjens]

I've used an E70 for 3 months now

I've had all three of Nokia's gull-winged phones, and still use a 6822 as a backup phone.

Download Opera Mini for surfing most websites, and use the Web browser for gmail, which it handles perfectly. Gmail + the E70 are a neat mobile email solution that I now use for 50-70% of my email (leaving the longer emails for when I get back to my desk).

I've found wifi to work very well, after some initial pain getting the security settings to work. It did take me several hours to get the wifi working on my secured access point but once it worked, it was flawless. And surfing open wifi points is a cinch.

The OS is too slow and complex for my tastes. It takes 5-7 seconds just to open a new memo. That's unacceptable. The keyboard action is too stiff, more work than the 6822. I like to type a lot of memos but it's not practical this phone, despite the generous screen. Why can't I reduce the size of the screen fonts, for instance?

The format of the phone is excellent; it's a bit heavy but provides me so much in that package that I don't mind. Good camera, good video recording, USB connectivity, expandable memory... all nice features. I tried connecting a Bluetooth keyboard (a laser keyboard) but no joy, even after downloading a BT keyboard driver from Nokia.

The software is... second class. Pretty, but flawed in many ways. Switching applications does not work well. Applications run out of memory. I've crashed the phone by exiting a Java application at the wrong moment. The way photos and documents are managed is totally uninuitive. Basic functions like editing a memo take too long. There's no way to display the phone numbers for contacts in the summary, an essential feature. The email manager (which lets one download emails) has no way of deleting emails. And so on. The phone has options like VoIP that are so complex I've not managed to configure them. This is a very bad sign. Why does the phone contain functionality that people cannot use, but cut-back on basic functionality everyone needs? Not a good sign.

I can see many possibilities for such a format, if the software were more intelligent. For example, how about an email system that detects open wifi networks without any prompting and silently downloads and uploads emails as it can, then alerts you when new email arrives.

There are two ways this format can go, IMO. One is to return to a simpler and more sane OS, something like PalmOS. Two is to move to Linux and open source the applications so that the developers of the world can fill in the gaps left by Nokia's QC department. To continue with more buggy and complex software will drive away users. I might buy one more gullwing after this, but if Nokia can't deliver my core requirements, I will probably return to separate devices: AlphaSmart Dana for taking notes, a Palm for my agenda and wireless surfing, and a small, simple, fast phone for voice.