Nokia 6670

Available now
23rd September 2004

The Nokia 6670 is essentially a slight reworking of the Nokia 7610 handset and is similar in almost every way apart from a reworking of the keypad and an some minor cosmetic changes to make the phone more acceptable to business users and those who don't want a "funky" looking handset.

To recap the specification, the Nokia 6670 is a 1.0 megapixel camera phone with Bluetooth, removable MMC memory, a fairly decent 176x208 pixel display, tri-band GSM and GPRS. There's good media playback capabilities on the 6670, including MP3s and video (at the time of writing we don't know if the 6670 has mono or stereo playback). The 6670 runs the Symbian Series 60 operating system and measures 109x53x21mm and weighs 118 grams. Talktime is up to 4 hours with a maximum of 10 days standby.

What are Nokia trying to achieve with the launch of the 6670 though? Clearly they've taken some feedback about the love-it-or-hate-it keyboard on the 7620 and come up with something more conventional, but they've kept more-or-less the same case design which has clearly led to layout problems. Unlike the elegant Nokia 6600 layout, the 6670 looks a bit of a mess.

However, the specification is good, and the Nokia 7610 is well liked by its users. Why though it has taken Nokia 6 months to work out that they needed to come up with a different physical package is a mystery. However, have Nokia judged the market properly with the 6670?

We think that Nokia hasn't been paying attention to market trends here. The 6670 is being pitched at businesses, but camera phones are becoming deeply unpopular with many large companies due to issues of security, cost and support. Indeed, Nokia have addressed the camera phone issue with the release of the 6810 and 9300 models. It's not a particularly attractive phone either, and still doesn't look like the sort of thing that corporate customers would want to issue.

However, we believe that the camera on the 6670 is good enough for business use, so if someone has a genuine requirement for a digital camera in their work, then the 6670 may make a good substitute for small-scale snaps. The large screen on both the 7610 and 6670 is a bonus too. But overall, we think that the 6670 may appeal to consumers more than businesses - it's only a shame they couldn't package it up in the 6600 series case.

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