Camera Phones Plaza

Now then, now then. Nokia has flipped. Well, we think so, anyway.

The N71, yet another handset in the N range of multimedia rich phones, is a flip (or clamshell) phone. Nokia doesn’t do these very often – the 3G N90 with the Carl Zeiss camera lens and the non 3G 6131 are the two most recent examples, but they are mere droplets in the vast ocean of Nokia handsets. So we had somewhat baited breath waiting for the N71 to land on our desk.

When we took the Nokia N71 out of its box, our first reaction was raised eyebrows. ‘Are you sure this is a clamshell?’ we asked ourselves, and exclaimed, ‘it’s huge!’

As we see it, the plus points for clamshell phones are: they are small and so ideal for tiny pockets; they look cool as they have a smooth opening mechanism and are easy to open one-handed; just as with sliders, you can control a lot of features without opening the handset; and inside there is room for a large screen and a big keyboard.

And the camera controls, once you’ve got the thing running, are very straightforward. You use the softkeys and the navigation key to access the camera settings, and working your way through them is fast and easy.

A novelty we really like is the range of options for auto shooting a sequence of images. Shooting a sequence – or ‘burst mode’ – is not exactly rare on phones, but in this case you can set the time lapse at intervals between 2 frames a second to one frame every 15 minutes. It’ll carry on shooting for as long as storage memory holds out.

Battery life was a bit of a let down. We listened to music non stop for as long as possible, which turned out to be eight and a half hours. We maxed out the screen brightest and power save settings during this test, and if you minimise them instead you’ll get longer life, but still we’d have liked a bit more from the battery.

We didn’t find the Nokia N71 an especially great handset. Hampered by its size it really needs to offer some extraordinary features by way of compensation, and while we like the sequence shooting mode, that isn’t on its own enough.

Read full review here.