Nokia N70

Discontinued
27th April 2005

The Nokia N70 is almost identical to the recently announced Nokia 6680 in every respect, except that the N70 comes with a 2 megapixel digital camera and greater support for sharing the photos you take with others.

Apart from the upgraded camera, the N70 is extremely difficult to tell apart from the other 3G handset. With the same size screen at 176x208 pixels in 262,000 colours, a similar keypad layout and sliding function to protect the camera, similar media playback capabilities, Symbian Series 60 operating system, MMC expandable memory, Bluetooth, email client and web browser. Although there are differences here and there, essentially the N70 seems to be exactly the same handset, just with a different camera. It looks a little smarter though.

OK, there seem to be some useful enhancements in picture printing and transfer technologies, and integration with Nokia's Lifeblog system (does anyone actually use it though?), and it's a tiny bit lighter than the 6680, but it's really only a slight upgrade to the existing handset.

This doesn't mean we don't like the Nokia N70 - it addresses most of the shortcomings of the Nokia 6680, but that's a pretty good handset too, so the N70 comes out of this fairly well. However, being announced so soon after the 6680 is a very strange move by Nokia and possibly a dangerous one at that because it might make stocks of the 6680 difficult to shift.

Still.. it's not a perfect phone. The 176x208 pixel display is not as good as many other 3G phones, but really everything else is pretty much up with the class leaders at the moment. However, by Q3 2005 we'll be seeing more 3G phones coming up which will challenge the N70 in specification terms.

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