A stylish and durable steel body, compact size and smartphone skill, the Nokia 6700 slide looks strong enough to hold its own in a modern world. Touchscreen, Android and whatnot have forced a sea change and many fear Symbian to have lost some of its mojo. It still has its strongholds of course – it seems the Eseries and Nseries will never fall out of users’ favor. But where does that leave an affordable midrange smartphone like the 6700 slide?

Nokia 6700 official photos

Affordable may as well be the key word here. We’re looking at an easy-going, eye-catching phone that wants to have mass appeal. It’s got some big shoes to fill too – its bar-shaped sibling was one of the best appreciated Nokia handsets last year. Adding smart to what was a pretty cool phone already seems like the next logical move. But let’s see if the 6700 slide is the right package for the right market.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
• Tri-band 3G with 10Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA
• Solid metal casing
• 2.2″ 16M-color QVGA display with excellent sunlight legibility
• 5 megapixel autofocus camera with Carl-Zeiss lens, dual LED flash
• VGA video recording at 15fps
• Symbian OS, S60 3.2 user interface
• Built-in accelerometer sensor
• Stereo FM radio with RDS, Visual radio
• Bluetooth (with A2DP)
• Standard microUSB port (charging)
• microSD card slot (16 GB supported, 2GB included)
• Rich preinstalled application package
• Smart dialing
• 2.5mm audio jack
• Great audio quality

Main disadvantages

• No WLAN
• No GPS receiver
• Small display
• No preinstalled document viewer
• 2.5mm audio jack limits third-party headphones choice
• Memory card slot under the back cover

The Nokia 6700 slide brings enough updates to justify its existence – smartphone skill, an audio jack and video-calling are there to address some of the main grudges we had with the 6700 classic. Gaps in the spec sheet are prominent enough though. GPS is perhaps irrelevant to the intended users but Wi-Fi will certainly be missed.

The Nokia 6700 slide views

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way of translating the 6700 classic to a slider form factor something must have gone wrong with the design language. Perhaps the only way to properly say that is we would have liked it better if the 6700 slide looked more like the 6600i slide and less like Wall-E. But whatever, design has always been a subjective thing so we’ll leave the biting comments aside for now.

Instead we’ll focus on the Nokia 6700 slide ergonomics right after the break.

It seems Sony Ericsson Satio is geared for another major update, which should bring over WVGA (864 x 480 pixels) video recording update to the current VGA capabilities. There is some other new stuff as well including direct Facebook and YouTube uploads.

The list of changes continues with threaded messaging, DLNA support and various UI improvements. Unfortunately, there’s no word on the Vivaz homescreen getting officially to Satio.

The official Sony Ericsson blog just announced that the latest update to Sony Ericsson Satio will start rolling to users as soon as this weekend. Availability schedule is region-specific and will continue throughout the next week. Some operator versions might take even longer, but hopes are that the new software version will be available to ALL users within a couple of weeks.

You can get the update through the Sony Ericsson Update Service client.

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From the designers that brought you the Nokia 6700 classic Gold Edition comes the Nokia N97 mini Gold Edition. This gilded gadget brings “smart” into the luxury phone category and brings QWERTY-powered messaging and a touch-driven interface along with it.

As with the 6700 classic Gold Edition, the Nokia N97 mini Gold Edition is the same under the hood as the plain-clothed N97 mini, but it’s the 18-karat gold plated exterior that catches the eye.

That means a 3.2″ nHD resistive touchscreen, 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics and LED flash, a full QWERTY keyboard and a tilting screen. The Nokia N97 mini being Nokia’s flagship Symbian phone of course also has 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and so on in its spec sheet, plus 8GB of built-in memory expandable by a microSD card slot for cards up to 16GB.

The Nokia N97 mini Gold Edition may not be everyone’s cup of tea though. The Nokia 8800 Gold Artewasn’t tacky, because it’s a luxury phone and gold = luxury. Even the 6700 classic Gold Edition made sense - the 6700 classic is like a poor man’s Arte (except the camera, which is still one of the best 5MP snappers out there).

But N97? The mini version too - not that there’s something wrong with it, it’s just that “mini” doesn’t sound very luxurious. Still, we’re sure the Nokia N97 mini Gold Edition will find its place on the market, however limited it may be. But we’re itching to see a new MeeGo (ex Maemo) device and getting us gold trinkets doesn’t scratch that itch.

The Nokia N97 mini Gold Edition will be available in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia (sorry America, no golden N97 mini’s for you) for the modest price of 625 euro. It is expected to hit the market in the beginning of the second quarter of this year.

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Shocking as it may sound, Sony Ericsson will be a little late with getting one of their phones on the market. The Sony Ericsson Vivaz was supposed to hit the shelves in February in a joint launch with the XPERIA X10 but apparently neither of them is going to make it in time.

The Symbian-running Sony Ericsson Vivaz is already available for preorder from Vodafone UK but will actually hit their shelves on 9 March. The phone will be available for free on a 2-year 30 GBP/month contract including 600 anytime minutes and unlimited texts.

There is no UK exclusivity about this deal and other carriers will get the Sony Ericsson Vivaz too, but it’s the first concrete date that we get.

In case you are still undecided about the eventual purchase of the Vivaz you can check out our review. A demo of its impressive panorama feature can be found in our blog as well.

Editorial: This one caused a storm. We guess we need to step up and clear something out. Regardless of what fans might be thinking, we don’t gather at night to burn Sony Ericsson flags and cast curses on the Swedish-Japanese joint venture.

If some of the said fans actually bothered to read the Sony Ericsson Vivaz review, they would know that we quite liked the little fella. Don’t you think that if we wanted to get one back at them, that would’ve been the best place to do it? Not to mention Nick’s blogpost the other day, which says it in plain language: that we are happy users.

But no, god forbid we write about another delay by Sony Ericsson. There might be a point in all this anyway: A Sony Ericsson delay is hardly news anymore.

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