Yssybyl
5th October 2005, 03:00 PM
Okay, this is kind of cheating as I've had an N70 for a while now, but last week I got a "proper" one, boxed, unlocked and ready to use.
I've used it over the weekend as if I was a "new user" and responding to requests here's a summary of it...
There are two versions: silver/black or the less traditional ivory/aubergine [purple/cream to non sales ppl] and that's the only difference between them. At just under 11cm long and under 5cm wide, it is small enough to fit in your hand/pocket without being too bulky. The box contains a wrist strap which is all but useless imho but I have seen people wearing them on lanyards around their necks and they're not too heavy for this. Before I talk about the phone, the box also has the USB datacable, white iPod style in-ear headphones, battery, CD with PC Suite, and 64M RS MMC loaded with applications [and adaptor in a useful plastic case].
After a 2hour charge, I've had moderate usage of the handset (about 1hr of calls and lots of photos, standby for 4 days and the battery is now at half strength, which isn't bad considering I've been moving in and out of 3G a lot. [The problem with the N90 battery drain has been solved ;)].
As you'd expect from a S60 phone, the idle screen is use customisable - icons and both softkeys can be set, and your calendar appointments for the day are also on the front screen.
The camera can be opened using the back slider or through the UI and is not bad at all for a phone. Handsets are going to go quickly to 3+ MPx, but the N70s 2Mpx is great for the thinness of the the handset. There is a small optical zoom before the digital kicks in and if you want to drop the quality down to 0.3MPx you can zoom in a long way [apologies for not being technical here, I'm not a camera person ;)]. There are several different image capture modes so you can customise for fast moving subjects [i.e. kids!] or night mode etc, set the flash to off/on/auto, set the light balance to bright daylight/cloudy/flourescent etc and change the colour balance to normal/b+w/sepia/negative. All of which means you can get some really funky shots and waste loads of time taking pictures of anything you can get your hands on in negative mode. You can use either the centre button of the 5-way navi-key or the dedicated shutter button to take pics. The slight criticism I have is that if you have the phone on its side and are using it as a camera then it does take a little longer to save the pictures as they are rotated to the "rightway up". You can also take self-portraits with the smaller front camera. A menu option away turns the camera into video mode with either the front or main camera.
The image gallery is a good bit of eye candy, with its spinning thumbnails, customisable slideshow and image edit functions. You can also create custom movies by splicing together your own footage with some of the 5 second clips provided on the MMC [film leader/cartoon style messages/rolling credits] and a host of styles and any of your music. Again, something you could play with for hours and then send the results to your friends. These custom movies can take a while (a couple of minutes) to produce which again can be a pain but it's only to be expected when you're asking your phone to edit a lot of processor intensive stuff!
The music player is good, supporting a lot of formats, and could be really useful with a large MMC if you want to carry a lot of tracks. I've not yet tried the radio as I need to get headphones that aren't in-ear... will let you know what that is like as soon as I do. The visual radio functionality seems a bit pointless but some people might appreciate that more :)
Video calling is good and you can switch between sending a video of yourself to one of the view from the main camera (can sometimes be very useful if you've had a heavy night, but someone insists on giving you a video call :) )
Most things are improved versions from the 6680 - everything seems a bit more polished, even down to the progress bars.
You get a snowboarding game which is reminiscent of some of the early Tony Hawks PSOne games and snakes 3D which is annoyingly addictive, especially when it goes into hex mode. These games sometimes ignore your profile set up so if you want to have a sneaky play at work, plug a headset in even if the profile is set to silent ;). There is also card deck, but I haven't the foggiest how to play any of the games on there [maybe I should read the manual, but seriously who does these days? we buy Nokia and S60 because we know how they work...]
In addition to the S60 browser, a trial of Opera is provided. You also get Lifeblog, word, excel, pdf and power point viewers and a settings wizard which will help you set up your handset for email. There is also instant messaging, which I don't use.
One nifty feature which will no doubt provide great pub time entertainment is the voice command functionality. By default it nabs info from your contacts and a few select applications [voice recorder, bluetooth and your profiles]. With a long press of the right soft key you can speak a name and it will grab the closest match - no need to record voice tags any more. Just add a contact and the app will work it out. It gets it wrong occaisionally, but you get the chance to train it. Hours of endlass fun entering comedy names and putting on regional accents will no doubt follow...
There's also the media key which can be set to open just about anything and provides you with a quick shortcut to your favourite app when you're not on the idle screen.
And push-to-talk... do any UK operators support this?
I've waffled on long enough as I'm not sure what people want to hear most... I think it's great. Go play with one as soon as they're in the shops and you'll fall in love with it too.
Photos to follow....
I've used it over the weekend as if I was a "new user" and responding to requests here's a summary of it...
There are two versions: silver/black or the less traditional ivory/aubergine [purple/cream to non sales ppl] and that's the only difference between them. At just under 11cm long and under 5cm wide, it is small enough to fit in your hand/pocket without being too bulky. The box contains a wrist strap which is all but useless imho but I have seen people wearing them on lanyards around their necks and they're not too heavy for this. Before I talk about the phone, the box also has the USB datacable, white iPod style in-ear headphones, battery, CD with PC Suite, and 64M RS MMC loaded with applications [and adaptor in a useful plastic case].
After a 2hour charge, I've had moderate usage of the handset (about 1hr of calls and lots of photos, standby for 4 days and the battery is now at half strength, which isn't bad considering I've been moving in and out of 3G a lot. [The problem with the N90 battery drain has been solved ;)].
As you'd expect from a S60 phone, the idle screen is use customisable - icons and both softkeys can be set, and your calendar appointments for the day are also on the front screen.
The camera can be opened using the back slider or through the UI and is not bad at all for a phone. Handsets are going to go quickly to 3+ MPx, but the N70s 2Mpx is great for the thinness of the the handset. There is a small optical zoom before the digital kicks in and if you want to drop the quality down to 0.3MPx you can zoom in a long way [apologies for not being technical here, I'm not a camera person ;)]. There are several different image capture modes so you can customise for fast moving subjects [i.e. kids!] or night mode etc, set the flash to off/on/auto, set the light balance to bright daylight/cloudy/flourescent etc and change the colour balance to normal/b+w/sepia/negative. All of which means you can get some really funky shots and waste loads of time taking pictures of anything you can get your hands on in negative mode. You can use either the centre button of the 5-way navi-key or the dedicated shutter button to take pics. The slight criticism I have is that if you have the phone on its side and are using it as a camera then it does take a little longer to save the pictures as they are rotated to the "rightway up". You can also take self-portraits with the smaller front camera. A menu option away turns the camera into video mode with either the front or main camera.
The image gallery is a good bit of eye candy, with its spinning thumbnails, customisable slideshow and image edit functions. You can also create custom movies by splicing together your own footage with some of the 5 second clips provided on the MMC [film leader/cartoon style messages/rolling credits] and a host of styles and any of your music. Again, something you could play with for hours and then send the results to your friends. These custom movies can take a while (a couple of minutes) to produce which again can be a pain but it's only to be expected when you're asking your phone to edit a lot of processor intensive stuff!
The music player is good, supporting a lot of formats, and could be really useful with a large MMC if you want to carry a lot of tracks. I've not yet tried the radio as I need to get headphones that aren't in-ear... will let you know what that is like as soon as I do. The visual radio functionality seems a bit pointless but some people might appreciate that more :)
Video calling is good and you can switch between sending a video of yourself to one of the view from the main camera (can sometimes be very useful if you've had a heavy night, but someone insists on giving you a video call :) )
Most things are improved versions from the 6680 - everything seems a bit more polished, even down to the progress bars.
You get a snowboarding game which is reminiscent of some of the early Tony Hawks PSOne games and snakes 3D which is annoyingly addictive, especially when it goes into hex mode. These games sometimes ignore your profile set up so if you want to have a sneaky play at work, plug a headset in even if the profile is set to silent ;). There is also card deck, but I haven't the foggiest how to play any of the games on there [maybe I should read the manual, but seriously who does these days? we buy Nokia and S60 because we know how they work...]
In addition to the S60 browser, a trial of Opera is provided. You also get Lifeblog, word, excel, pdf and power point viewers and a settings wizard which will help you set up your handset for email. There is also instant messaging, which I don't use.
One nifty feature which will no doubt provide great pub time entertainment is the voice command functionality. By default it nabs info from your contacts and a few select applications [voice recorder, bluetooth and your profiles]. With a long press of the right soft key you can speak a name and it will grab the closest match - no need to record voice tags any more. Just add a contact and the app will work it out. It gets it wrong occaisionally, but you get the chance to train it. Hours of endlass fun entering comedy names and putting on regional accents will no doubt follow...
There's also the media key which can be set to open just about anything and provides you with a quick shortcut to your favourite app when you're not on the idle screen.
And push-to-talk... do any UK operators support this?
I've waffled on long enough as I'm not sure what people want to hear most... I think it's great. Go play with one as soon as they're in the shops and you'll fall in love with it too.
Photos to follow....