Nokia N71 review

Shooting images with the main camera can be frustrating. Without a dedicated shortcut button for the camera, you have to activate it through the main menu. The most obvious consequence of this is that you might miss some candid shots.

The camera itself has plenty of settings, which you can mostly access by flicking through a horizontally scrolling menu bar that sits under the viewfinder image on the main screen. One exception to this is the 'time lapse' mode. You can choose to take pictures automatically in a sequence after a set period of time has gone by, and the settings range from two shots a second up to one shot every 15 minutes. You can take as many pictures as you have available memory to store them. The 20x digital zoom sounds good on paper but at the top end, images are far too pixellated to be worth bothering with.

Nokia includes its own Web browser, which can push pages into a vertically scrolling window or show them in their full wide glory. The trouble with the wide option is that you need to do a lot of horizontal scrolling to read much. The option that requires only vertical scrolling should be fine for most purposes.

The music player turns out high-quality sound and is very easy to control. The loudspeaker is good enough for sharing a few tunes with friends, and the headphones are fine for using on the daily commute.

Nokia does the decent thing and provides a converter from its Pop-Port connector to a 3.5mm headset. Our own high-quality headphones improved the sound still further. The FM radio needs a headset to be connected to act as the aerial, but doesn't care which option you use. As long as you leave the headset connected, you can listen through the loudspeaker if you prefer.

You get the software and cable needed to synchronise with a PC, and there is an army of additional software, from a calculator and unit converter to RealPlayer and Nokia's own movie creator (covered in more detail in our review of the Nokia 3230).

Performance
Video and voice calls were both fine with the N71, and the big screen proved useful during video calls. Overall audio volume is loud and the music player and radio both delivered nice quality audio. The camera took acceptable quality photos.

Battery life was not outstanding but we still got more than eight hours of continuous music on a rundown test and in everyday use managed several two-day stints of average to heavy usage between charges.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield