Nokia 6700 slide Review

Introduction:

Although the world's leading cell phone manufacturer has already pushed out a few touchscreen handsets, it's touch-sensitive portfolio remains relatively tiny, compared to that of some other companies, say Samsung. For good or bad, in this review we'll be looking at a new non-touch phone from Nokia - the 6700 slide. Our journey won't be boring though, as the Nokia 6700 slide is a smartphone, running the Symbian S60 3rd Edition operating system. Not only that, but it's also really pretty, has very good build quality and owns a 5MP AF camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar optics. So, let's not waste any more time and get down to business.

Here's what you'll find in the box:
•    Nokia 6700 slide
•    Charger
•    2GB microSD card
•    Wired handsfree
•    Way too short microSD cable
•    Extensive user guide

Design:

Most of the Nokia 6700 slide's body is made of aluminum, giving it a solid and high-quality feel. In addition, Nokia has come up with a beautiful design, which looks incredibly stylish. Well, at least our silver color variant is stylish, but the Nokia 6700 slide also comes in many other colors, including red, green and blue, which look somewhat more youthful. The in-hand feel of the phone is what it's meant to be - superb, while the sliding mechanism works flawlessly.



You can compare the Nokia 6700 slide with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The display on the Nokia 6700 slide measures 2.2 inches and has a resolution of 240x320 pixels, which is more than enough for the size. It has a light sensor for automatic brightness handling that we found to work okay. Still, when outdoors you'll have to shield the screen with your hand in order to get a clear view of what's going on.

The keys below the display are nice to use, including the two circular buttons for "home" and "delete" that give the phone a kind of retro appearance. Although a bit on the smaller side, the numpad is well-made and won't give you headaches. Its keys have a well-pronounced click, which makes it easy to feel when you've pressed them.


Surprisingly, there is no volume rocker on the Nokia 6700 slide. On the right side you'll find the two-step camera shutter, the second step of which could work better, and on the top are the 2.5mm headset jack, Nokia charging port and a wisely-hidden standard microUSB port.

A design element that is worth mentioning is that if you want to remove the aluminum back cover, you'll first have to open the microUSB and then press a key that releases the battery door. Although it's a rather unconventional solution, we can't help but admit we like it, as it is a nice touch that gives the phone even more sense of classiness.

The back side lets you look at its pleasant-to-the-eye 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar optics and dual-LED flash.

Interface:

Unlike the Nokia 6700 classic, the 6700 slide is a smartphone, running the Symbian S60 3rd Edition OS (or simply S60 for non-touch phones). Many would say this platform is too outdated now, but it is still quite functional and versatile. Of course, the user interface could definitely use a facelift and the settings need to be simplified a bit, but all in all we are happy to see this OS.

The homescreen has a contacts bar in the upper part, which lets you set a number of favorite contacts that you want to be able to quickly dial or text. Right below you can see your email and calendar notifications and at the bottom there's a bar of six shortcuts to the apps that you use most frequently.

The main menu can have different layouts, but we prefer to stick to the standard 3x4 grid, which may lack the eye candy, but can quickly take you to the submenu that you want to reach.



Using the phonebook is very intuitive, as there are many little options you can take advantage of. For example, when you have selected a contact, you can just press the right direction key and a pop-up menu will appear that will let you dial, send a text or an audio message. If entering every single bit of information you have about a contact sounds like your cup of tea, then you'll be nicely surprised to know that the S60 phonebook includes an overwhelmingly large number of details that can be stored for each contact. In addition, the app is integrated with Ovi Contacts, for those user who enjoy the service.


We experienced some problems with the Nokia Messaging email app. We entered our personal server settings and so on, checked if everything is fine and then... nothing happened. Not even a single email hit our inbox after a few hours. When we tried setting up a Gmail account with the help of the automatic settings - it worked; after a few minutes emails started to flood our inbox. The issue with our personal email was still present though.

Camera:

If you are an experienced Nokia user - note that there isn't anything new with the camera interface of the Nokia 6700 slide. Here are the same old black and white super-small icons on the right for your most used tools. You have a set of basic options like timer, scenes, panorama shot, contrast and white balance.



Image quality is very nice. Outdoor shots taken with the 6700 slide's 5MP camera have a really great amount of detail, while colors are definitely on the realistic side. We had no issues with the exposure of objects too, except for just a few instances. We are happy to that even though the camera button is not the most comfortable one and the phone trembles a bit while you are pressing it, images are very sharp, with no blurriness in sight. A useful hint here is to always make sure you've cleaned the plastic cover of the camera lens, because otherwise you can experience a lot of blurriness.


Indoor shots are fine, as long as there's enough light, but still far from breathtaking. As it gets darker however, objects become blurrier, while the dual-LED flash is not really good at its job of illuminating stuff.


At first we thought it's okay for the Nokia 6700 slide to be capable of recording video in 640x480 pixels, but once we got down to that, we were unpleasantly surprised to find that the clips are quite choppy. Image quality is fine at a data rate of about 2100 kbps, but the frame rate is just 14 fps, which ultimately leaves us with a mediocre video capturing performance.

Nokia 6700 slide sample video at 640x480 pixels resolution

Multimedia:

As mentioned earlier, the Nokia 6700 slide comes with a wired handsfree that can be plugged in the phone's 2.5mm jack. While the sound that's heard through it isn't necessarily bad, it did feature too much lows and less than needed highs. What's worse is that neither of the available equalizer presets is capable of improving the balance, thus leaving you with an average music experience. Don't get us wrong though, we have heard plenty worse. The loudspeaker is quite powerful, but when on the highest level it's on the edge of being intolerably sharp.



When it comes to playing video files, the Nokia 6700 slide performs like almost any other Nokia out there. It manages to play MPEG-4 coded files with resolution of up to 640x360 pixels. There is no out-of-the-box DivX or Xvid support, but you can get this by installing some additional software. After all, the Nokia 6700 slide is running a smart platform. Image quality on the relatively small 2.2-inch TFT display is fine, nothing special though and the viewing angle is not very good.



Software and Connectivity:

There are quite a lot of quality apps for the Symbian S60 3rd Edition operating system, but you'll find only a portion of them in Nokia's Ovi Store. The storefront itself has a pretty decent interface and presents you with various additional content like user reviews, related apps and screenshots. One drawback of the app is that app screenshots could be a bit bigger, because their small size is sometimes not enough for the user to get an idea of what the app looks really like.



The internet browser is same as always meaning it's pretty capable. There is a page overview option to let you navigate easily in larger pages and there's also Flash Lite support. This enables you to see various Flash elements on websites and watch YouTube videos with good quality directly in the browser. You can also take advantage of the accelerometer to quickly switch from portrait to landscape mode and vice versa.



Unfortunately, the Nokia 6700 slide does not have Wi-Fi, in addition to its HSDPA 10.2 Mbit/s and HSUPA 2.0 Mbit/s 3G support.

Performance:

We are perfectly pleased with the call quality of the Nokia 6700 slide. Voices are very realistic, and loudness is just about enough. Well, we feel that if you end up being in a very noisy environment, you might want your caller to repeat certain words, but on the overall it is fairly easy to hear what you're being told. Everything is fine on the other side too, as we did not receive any complaints from our callers. They rated us a 9 out of 10. We felt the same way on our end.

The Nokia 6700 slide's 860mAh battery is rated by the manufacturer at 4 hours of talk time and 13 days of standby time. Not very impressive but given you don't set the display to the maximum level, we believe the 6700 slide will perform satisfactorily in this respect.

Conclusion:

Although most manufacturers are heavily attacking the touchscreen segment of the cell phone market now, Nokia - the world's largest cell phone manufacturer - is still relying mainly on its non-touch business. Devices like the Nokia 6700 slide prove that. And the 6700 slide is definitely not a phone to be overlooked.

First off, its appearance is a breath of fresh air in these days of touchscreen slates. In the mainstream range, we are constantly being introduced to new handsets that are just more of the same, and some of them are downright uninspiring. Although its relatively simple design, the Nokia 6700 slide manages to stand out from the crowd and take the slider form-factor to new heights. Of course, it's not groundbreaking, but at this point we do not need to hear any more false statements of "shaking the industry" or "setting new standards", we just want to see something different and sweet that is made with quality in mind. The 6700 slide is just that.

The second reason why you shouldn't dismiss the Nokia 6700 slide right away is because it's smart, and it has quite a lot of Symbian S60 3rd Edition apps to offer.

Third and fourth reasons are the high still image quality and stellar voice quality during calls.

It does not feature DivX and Xvid codec support right out of the box, but this can be easily fixed by installing some third-party software. Another thing is the outdated interface that could really use a refresher. It would have also been better if the sound quality of the headset from the box was a bit higher, because the Nokia 6700 slide only has a 2.5mm jack, which makes it a bit harder to find another. Anyway, these are certainly not deal breakers.

Still, if you are not really into the Nokia 6700 slide, here are some alternatives you might want to check:

LG New Chocolate BL20 - LG's ultra-stylish slider is a worthy competitor to the Nokia 6700 slide. This is in terms of design however, when it comes to features, it lacks behind.

Samsung Ultra S S7350 - An ultra slider by Samsung, the Ultra S is a good-looking and capable handset, which however, is not smart. Still, it has a significantly larger screen at 2.6 inches and slightly better video recording.