Quick Pros And Cons Of Nokia E70

After three years of service, my Nokia 6630 finally decided that enough was enough, so I upgraded to a Nokia E70. After a few hours of playing with it, it seems to have been a good purchase. Below is a quick list of the pros and cons that I've found so far.

Pros:

• Qwerty keyboard. Normal mobile text input methods aren't up to much when using applications like Putty. The qwerty keyboard is comfortable to use, and works out a lot faster than T9 for me.
• Wifi: Free internet access is always going to be better than paying Vodafone for 3G or GPRS.
• Active Standby: The standby screen on older Symbian S60 phones has always been sort of boring. With recent versions of Symbian S60, there are now a couple of shortcuts along with calender entries and recent text messages on the screen.
• Compatible with older car kits. One of the big problems for me is that a lot of the newer Nokia phones don't seem to have cradles compatible with the CK-7W car kit. With the MBC-13L, I can get into the car, throw the phone in the cradle and drive away safely, while having the phone charging and ready to use. If I forget to take the phone out of my pocket, it will still hook up to the car kit over bluetooth.

Cons:

• Small Screen: Compared to phones like the N95, the screen is very small. This becomes a slight problem when using applications like Putty. The default font on Putty is so small, that a microscope is required. Luckily there are more friendly fonts available here.
• Active Standby Plug-ins: According to the manual, there should be an Active Standby plug-ins option
   available in the phone settings, however this seems to have been disabled, presumably by Vodafone. These plug-ins should allow handy things like showing number of waiting voice mail messages and notes entries on the standby screen.
• Lack of automatic key lock. A fairly standard feature in Nokias has been the ability for the phone to automatically lock the keypad after a few minutes of inactivity. There is third party software available to do the job, namely Autolock, however it's still a strange omission.

After I've used the phone for a couple of weeks, I'll probably be able to add more items to both the pro and con sides.