Mobile Phones Download

The Nokia 6700 Slide is an updated version of the 6500 Slide. Or alternatively, it's a slide version of the 6700 Classic. But whichever way you put it, there's no escaping the fact that both the 6500 Slide and the 6700 Classic were notoriously unreliable phones. But wait, there's more. In their wisdom Nokia have replaced the Series 40 operating system with Symbian version 9.3, making the 6700 Slide a smartphone and bringing three unreliable technologies together in one giant melting pot of innovation. What could possibly go wrong?

First things first. Let's wipe the slate clean and assess the 6700 Slide on its own terms. It's a very nice looking slide design phone. Nothing remarkable about it. It's not ultrathin or anything notable, but it looks and feels well made. Like all Nokia slide phones it's surprisingly heavy and suffers from a slight wobble, but otherwise feels solid. The display is quite good for a slide phone, with 16 million colours and a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. However, it's only 2.2 inches in size, so it doesn't come anywhere near the size of the current generation of touchscreen phones. This tends to limit the kind of apps that you can run and leads us to question why Nokia decided to equip the phone with a Symbian operating system.

The phone is priced as an entry-level smartphone or a mid-range "dumb" phone, so we don't expect too many features. So it's a nice surprise to discover just how good the camera is. At 5 megapixels, with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus and dual flash, this is one of the best camera phones in its price bracket, and is on a par with the more expensive Nseries Nokia phones. The video camera is superb too, and is capable of recording in VGA resolution (640 x 480 pixels) at high quality. The phone is even equipped with a video editor, and there's a secondary video camera for making video calls.

For music, the phone uses the Nseries music player, which is fully featured and can handle all popular digital music formats. The 2GB memory card supplied with the phone is enough to store around 500 MP3 tracks, and if you want more you can upgrade the card to a maximum of 16GB. There's also an FM radio with RDS. Disappointingly, the headphone connection is a Nokia 2.5mm jack, so you won't be able to connect any headphones that require a standard 3.5mm connection.

The phone has a very fast internet connection, with HSPA providing downloads of up to 10 Mbps and uploads of 2Mbps, so data transfer is very fast. However, the small screen size and lack of touchscreen functionality hardly makes for an engaging web browsing experience, and with only a standard alphanumeric keypad, serious emailing is out of bounds. The limited range of apps once again brings into question what this phone is for.

Apart from the fast 3G connection, connectivity is rather limited, with Bluetooth and USB being the only options. Memory is also severely restricted, with just 60MB of onboard memory, much of which gets eaten by the operating system. The battery is also rather small and battery life is relatively poor as a result.

The Nokia 6700 Slide is a very strange beast. What appears to be a straight forward mid-range slider with a good camera reveals itself to be a Symbian-powered smartphone with lightning fast 3G data transfer. But with a small screen, conventional alphanumeric keypad and small memory, the power of the phone is severely limited. When you add in the general tendency that Symbian has to freeze or shut down completely, plus the many, many problems experienced with the phone's predecessors, it's very hard for us to recommend the phone to you. But it does look nice. And it's a Nokia.

Features of the Nokia 6700 Slide include:

• 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, dual LED flash and 8x digital zoom
• Video camera (640 x 480 pixel resolution, 15 frames per second, MPEG4, 3GP formats, 4x digital zoom) with video editor
• Secondary camera for video calls
• Display: TFT, 16 million colours, 240 x 320 pixels (2.2 inches) with ambient light sensor
• Nokia Nseries Music Player (MP3, WMA, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+ formats)
• Stereo FM radio with RDS
• Integrated handsfree speaker
• Ringtones: AAC and MP3 & Video ringtones / 64-voice polyphonic (MIDI) ringtones
• Voice recorder
• Voice controls
• Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email with attachments (POP3, IMAP4 & SMTP protocols), Nokia Xpress audio messaging
• Themes: wallpapers, sounds, screensavers, and backgrounds
• Calendar, To-do list, Notes, Alarm clock, Stopwatch, Countdown timer, Calculator
• Nokia Web Browser 7.1 with Mini Map
• Memory: 60 MB plus 2GB microSD card (up to 16GB supported)
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, micro USB 2.0
• WAP 2.0, GPRS, EPGRS, 3G HSPA (max download 10Mbps; upload 2Mbps)
• Quadband (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) plus triple band 3G HSPA
• Size: 95 x 46 x 16 mm
• Weight: 110g
• Talktime: 3 - 4 hours
• Battery standby: 250 - 300 hours