Nokia 6700 slide review: Braving the odds

A stylish and durable steel body, compact size and smartphone skill, the Nokia 6700 slide looks strong enough to hold its own in a modern world. Touchscreen, Android and whatnot have forced a sea change and many fear Symbian to have lost some of its mojo. It still has its strongholds of course – it seems the Eseries and Nseries will never fall out of users’ favor. But where does that leave an affordable midrange smartphone like the 6700 slide?Affordable may as well be the key word here. We’re looking at an easy-going, eye-catching phone that wants to have mass appeal. It’s got some big shoes to fill too – its bar-shaped sibling was one of the best appreciated Nokia handsets last year. Adding smart to what was a pretty cool phone already seems like the next logical move. But let’s see if the 6700 slide is the right package for the right market.
Key features
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
Tri-band 3G with 10Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA
Solid metal casing
2.2″ 16M-color QVGA display with excellent sunlight legibility
5 megapixel autofocus camera with Carl-Zeiss lens, dual LED flash
VGA video recording at 15fps
Symbian OS, S60 3.2 user interface
Built-in accelerometer sensor
Stereo FM radio with RDS, Visual radio
Bluetooth (with A2DP)
Standard microUSB port (charging)
microSD card slot (16 GB supported, 2GB included)
Rich preinstalled application package
Smart dialing
2.5mm audio jack
Great audio quality
Main disadvantages
No WLAN
No GPS receiver
Small display
No preinstalled document viewer
2.5mm audio jack limits third-party headphones choice
Memory card slot under the back cover
The Nokia 6700 slide brings enough updates to justify its existence – smartphone skill, an audio jack and video-calling are there to address some of the main grudges we had with the 6700 classic. Gaps in the spec sheet are prominent enough though. GPS is perhaps irrelevant to the intended users but Wi-Fi will certainly be missed
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way of translating the 6700 classic to a slider form factor something must have gone wrong with the design language. Perhaps the only way to properly say that is we would have liked it better if the 6700 slide looked more like the 6600i slide and less like Wall-E. But whatever, design has always been a subjective thing so we’ll leave the biting comments aside for now.
Instead we’ll focus on the Nokia 6700 slide ergonomics right after the break.