Nokia 6700 Classic

Forget large screens, forget touch support, banish all thought of multiple, customisable home screens from your mind. The 6700 Classic will have none of it. Instead this is a straightforward-ish mobile phone with some extras tacked on.

There aren’t quite enough extras to make us brim over with excitement, though especially considering that as we write the phone will cost you £320 SIM free from the Carphone Warehouse and £220 on O2 Pay As You Go. It is free on some contracts unsurprisingly.

Design-wise the 6700 Classic is a mix of the good and the irritating. The phone is very comfy for the hand at 109.8x45x11.2mm.

The 2.2-inch screen is clear and bright, its 320x240 pixels doing a very good job of delivering information. The under-screen buttons are built on a single piece of plastic, and are easy to hit. The D-Pad is large and easy to use. And its up, down, left and right directional presses can be customised.

You might want to assign one of these direction presses to launching the camera. There is a side button but this only activates the camera when you are on the phone’s home screen, making it difficult to take quick-fire shots when you are in another app.

The number pad is flat, and has a chrome finish. This looks sparkly but it attracts fingerprints. As the numberpad is flat it is possible that speed-texters may find it is not responsive enough for their needs.

The chrome finish extends to the backplate which is again ultra-shiny but attracts fingerprints. After half an hour of use we found the need to continually wipe the phone clean of hard to remove smudges started to become a bit of a pain.

The technically minded might like to know that this phone runs S40. That’s not quite as advanced as the S60 we see in many Nokia handsets, but is has a familiar look and feel and Nokia fans ought to find it easy to get to grips with. The one immediately notable innovation we’ve not seen before is that you can put a short alert on the home screen. There is room for about eight words to display on screen, although the note itself can be considerably longer – you just select it to see the whole text. It is potentially useful if you are the kind of person who needs a kick to remember the one important thing you have to do each day.

This is a 3G handset with HSDPA support. The 10Mbps the phone supports is super-fast, and while you won’t find it offered by any operators in the UK you should be able to get the fastest speed available where you are.

There is also A-GPS. Nokia Maps is pre installed, and we installed Google Maps for good measure. Go to the Apps folder and look in the Collection folder and you’ll find links to FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr (websites not clients), as well as Opera Mini for Web browsing and some other goodies such as the Ovi photo sharing app. Other apps include an FM radio, voice recorder, alarm clocks, unit converter, stopwatch and countdown timer, a motley selection of the usual suspects, in fact.

Very sadly there is no Wi-Fi. We are starting to think that even in mid-range handsets this it is a must, so we’re a bit miffed with Nokia for leaving it out.

There is no front camera for two-way video calls, but there is a main camera lens on the back. It shoots stills at resolutions to 5-megapixels and it did well under household lighting and outdoors. Get into dim lighting conditions, though, and it is a bit less rewarding. The exceptionally small LED light doesn’t illuminate things unless you are on top of them.

We also found that side button – the one that only launches the camera from the main screen – to be a bit small and fiddly for actually taking photos. Fortunately the centre of the D-pad also shoots. Beware the shutter lag, which makes photographing moving objects a bit iffy. Master all that and actual pictures can be crisp and sharp, with good colour reproduction.

There is a generous 170MB of built in memory and the phone comes with a 1GB microSD card to boost that further. It is a pity that Nokia has decided to supply a one-piece headset which connects via a microUSB slot on the bottom of the casing. That slot doubles up for PC connection and the phone can be charged via that connection. There is also a separate mains power cable that uses Nokia’s tiny teeny round plug.

The in-ear buds are the type we find extremely uncomfortable to wear and which have a tendency to fall out of our ears. That rather marks the 6700 Classic as poor for music listening, which is a real shame as sound reproduction is quite good, volume loud and battery life good. Nokia says you will get up to 5 hours of GSM talk and 416 hours of standby.

Despite the lack of Wi-Fi and fingerprint magnet chassis we can’t help liking this phone. Nokia knows how to do simple understated phones, and anyone using a Nokia 6300 would certainly consider this a worthy upgrade.