Nokia N70 mobile phone

Nokia's latest mobile graduates with honours.

Nokia's 6680 was a neat phone, but the Finnish firm's latest 3G smart phone improves on it in almost every way.

For a start, it's smaller. The 1.3-megapixel camera has been beefed up to a two-meg version and the difference is tangible, especially when viewed on the 262,000-colour screen.

Camera operation is simple too - just slide down the lens cover on the back and you're straight into still or video mode. There's a 6x digital zoom and a good range of photo editing options, both on the camera and with the supplied PC software. There's also a VGA-quality camera on the front for video calls.

This is the first Nokia phone to support Bluetooth 2.0, which is designed to enable faster file transfer (our highest res pics took around eight seconds to copy to a Pocket PC), greater security and less power drain. Infrared, however, has been thrown into the dustbin of history.

Internal memory has been upped to 22MB, and you can still augment it with a supplied 64MB MMC card. Just as well, as this is the sort of phone that begs to have pics and music stored on it.

It's easy to get your contacts onto it via your PC - just install the software and plug in the supplied USB cable. But unfortunately, it's slow to use, with menus taking an age to appear.
As ever with Nokia's Series 60 phones RealPlayer Media Player is on board, and can handle a host of formats including MP3, AAC, Real Audio and MPEG-4, but not WMA. A built-in FM radio has been added to up its music capabilities.

The 210 minutes of talk time is a bit disappointing given Nokia's usual excellence in this area, and switching between applications is never speedy, but this is a class act from Nokia.