Nokia 6070

I've had two of this model of Nokia. I did once try a phone made in Japan but didn't like its text facility. The Nokia is really good for texting and not just normal SMS but MMS Picture-messages are well handled.

The keypad is large enough for anyone sausage-fingered. Easy to press for thin or small hands too. The keyboard is very important to me, being a pianist. The Nokia has well spaced keys and you don't have to "hit" them to make them work; You press them hard enough get a tactile response and know when it's "taken" so you make few mis-keying errors. Thumbing or using two hands is equally good.

The camera is a bit basic with rather poor facilities for zoom but it does a job and takes a photo that is good enough to send for fun. Not good enough definition if you wanted to show someone something small or with detail.
What annoyed me more than anything was that it's not possible to USB transfer photos from the camera to your PC - someone has organised it very carefully to ensure that the only way you can get the photo (jpg) off the camera is to send it to an email address and that costs about 25p to 35p depending on size. That of course makes money for the Network Service Provider.

Consultation with Nokia about a usb cable and software still failed to successfully connect the phone to the PC.
A Support Forum on the web even removed one of my postings that was critical of Nokia because they censored me for "having a go" at the company. So I then knew that it was a waste of time trying to get photos off the phone and even if I had got the USB working it would only have given me the chance to amend the address book and a few other settings. I gave up trying after that. So I realised then that the only way to get a good camera-phone with the proper facilities was to buy another model or make of phone.

The phone side of this 6070 was excellent and that's why I give it a top rating. Sound quality digitally superb.

Operation was very good with a really well thought-out menu system. It's so obvious to someone of my advanced age when a menu driven system is right and this one gets top marks.

The FM radio is good. The hands-free set that came with it is also good.
Battery life is usefully very long indeed.

Web and WAP side of it works very well once I got it set up (that's a pain on all phones and all networks in my experience). I never managed to make it do GPRS Email though and gave up in the end, just went for Webmail on Yahoo Google and MSN via the webpages which seemed to work ok and wasn't too expensive to use.

The phone is a nice weight. It doesn't easily fall out of a shirt pocket and if it does hit the deck when you dive out of the car forgetting that you just dropped it in your lap while you fumbled for your sunglasses it doesn't easily come to harm, so it must be of durable build with its half metal half plastic outer shell.

Choice of ringtones is superb and I downloaded a few more, one of which was an excellent ringing tone that sounds like an American Newspaper office and called "agency" and that's a midi file which is astoundingly realistic.

Silent mode is quick to switch in and out. The manual is good and easy to follow; well thought-out too. Can't say that of many top phones these days.

As with all Nokia phones removing the back to gain access to sim card or battery is a nightmare but once you solve the puzzle you can do it next time OK.
All in all a really great phone.