Nokia 6700 slide review: Braving the odds

Video player works

Nokia 6700 slide features Real player (as Symbians typically do) and the Video center for playing your video clips in both.

The Video center

With such a small screen though, video playback is not this phone's strongest suit. And to confirm that you'll need to install a third-party player if you want some taste of DivX/XviD video.

FM radio with RDS and Visual radio

The FM radio on Nokia 6700 slide has a nice simple interface and can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. RDS support is included and the Visual radio is also on-board. If internet connection is available, the Visual radio application can download all the local stations and save them to the handset with their names.

FM radio is available

Nseries-grade image gallery

The image gallery was a pleasant surprise - it's the same as the one found in Nokia's N-Series phones and looks great. The speed of photo browsing increases if you press and hold the direction buttons on the D-pad. This allows quick skipping of tons of files if you're not in the habit of sorting out your memory card regularly.

Browsing the image gallery

Unlike, say, the Nokia N85, zooming here is very speedy, thanks to the zippy 600MHz processor. It does slow down a bit when you get over 100% but it will go up to 400% zoom. Zooming is done in small increments (about 10%) and panning is quite fast too.

Zooming in

Camera is impressive, video – not

The Nokia 6700 slide is equipped with a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss lens and a maximum image resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. It sports a dual-LED flash but no lens protection whatsoever. This means that the large glass covering the lens is prone to finger smudges and perhaps the occasional scratches.

Camera interface

As far as settings go, the camera on 6700 slide is limited, although it offers several scene presets, one of which is user defined. There's limited control over light sensitivity (it has low, medium, high and auto settings) as well as some control over sharpness and contrast.

The bar on the right side of the screen hosts a set of shortcuts to select choice of the camera settings. You can add and remove shortcuts so you can have quick access to the settings that matter to you.

The rest of the settings include flash control, self-timer (2, 10, 20 seconds), night mode, automatic panorama mode and multi shot.

There's also an option to capture consecutive images separated by a predefined interval (from 10 seconds to 30 minutes). You can also add color effects (sepia, negative, black and white, vivid) to the images.

Obviously there aren’t any fancy features such as face and smile detection or dynamic range optimizations but the the Nokia 6700 slide delivers some seriously wicked image quality. It easily ranks the phone among the best 5 megapixel cameraphones on the market. The photos have pleasing colors and good contrast with the noise levels still remaining pretty good. The amount of resolved detail is also among the best we have seen on a 5 megapixel phone.

Nokia 6700 slide camera samples

Synthetic resolution

We also snapped our resolution chart with the 6700 slide. You can check out what that test is all about here.

Nokia 6700 slide resolution chart photo • 100% crops

Video recording

As for video recording, the Nokia 6700 slide shoots in VGA resolution at 15 fps captured in MPEG-4 format. Although this is a decent achievement, the quality is quite poor actually. The modest frame-rate takes the fun out of the higher VGA resolution and makes the videos unsuitable for viewing on a larger screen.

Video recorder interface

On the positive side the colors of the videos shot with the Nokia 6700 slide are pretty nice.