I’ve contacted Amazon for a return on my Nokia E70. As much as I wanted to love this phone, there are things I can’t tolerate. They’re the same problems that caused me to return my Nokia 6682, over a year and a half ago, and I’m disappointed that Nokia hasn’t fixed them yet.

Menu navigation is too difficult. I suspect this is a combination of certain stylistic elements of Symbian — you can’t use numbers to navigate pop-up menus — and what seems to be Nokia’s indifference to user interface workflow. It takes way too many clicks of the mouse to get anywhere.

Responsiveness is sub-par. Even without any running programs, it takes a few seconds to unlock, display the application menu, or open an already-downloaded email. A smart phone should be snappier than this; even my Cingular 2125 ran faster after I dropped it on its head. There have been multiple occasions where I pressed “Answer” while the phone was ringing, but the UI didn’t respond in time to answer the call (and someone went to voicemail). My last phone did that. Again, that only started happening after I dropped it. Twice.

Not enough RAM to multi-task. This makes me the angriest. I replaced the 6682 because it only had 8MB of RAM, which wasn’t enough to read email and use the web browser at the same time. With the E70, there’s only 20MB of RAM, and I still run out of memory when reading email and using the web browser. To me, it seems unreal that Nokia’s engineers could consider this phone suitable for the power-users they’re clearly targeting.

Two Nokia phones, and two let-downs. As before, I’m going for a Windows Mobile phone, the HTC S710 (with 64MB of RAM). It doesn’t have all the cool applications, or just the intrinsic beauty and style that remains almost exclusive to Nokia’s phones. But I know that it won’t mangle Outlook’s meeting requests, fight with my Bluetooth headset, or ask me which wireless network to use every time I open Gmail (there’s only one option).

Three cheers for Amazon, who have confirmed that I won’t pay a restocking fee for returning my phone. Can’t even get that from Cingular, unless I’m willing to sign away my marketplace freedoms for another two years.

I’ve been pretty tough on the Nokia lately, but I’ve found some things that I really appreciate. I felt I owed it to those perky Finns to enumerate these things.

Mail for Exchange. I found Mail for Exchange on the Nokia website, and while it took a few minutes to get configured, it works flawlessly. Certainly an easier process than setting up Blackberry Connect, which I still can’t get to work. It synchronizes my calendar and email directly through our corporate Outlook server. Before, I had to sync with my laptop through a USB cable; now I don’t need anything but GPRS service. Some (but not all) of my gripes about Symbian’s email support is rescinded. I still think their POP3 client (used for Gmail) bites the big one.

Voice dialing. On my Cingular 2125, this involved manually setting a “voice tag” for each contact on my list. It was tedious, and I didn’t do it. The Nokia has synthesized a voice tag for everyone on my list, and all I have to do is speak. It’s very accurate, even with names like “Glyph Lefkowitz“. This almost makes up for the fact that the Nokia lacks predictive contact searching, and won’t share the address book with my Garmin GPS.

Fold-out keyboard. It’s part of the design, so it seems silly to mention it, but the keyboard really is great. The right kind of tactile feel, perfect key sizes, and punctuation characters deftly laid out. If I do send this phone back and get the HTC S710 instead, I know that the keyboard will feel like a downgrade.

Web browser. Nokia’s definitely wins over IE Mobile in the browser competition. I don’t know what it’s like on WM6, but on WM5, it doesn’t support frames (no Outlook Web Access) and frequently chokes when rendering large pages. The Nokia browser renders cleanly, shows you images of sites in the history, and lets you zoom out for quickly navigating large pages.

As I’m getting more familiar with the phone, I’m liking it more. It’s also getting slower, though, so I suspect I’m going to need to uninstall some cruft sooner or later.

Remember how excited I was back in May that Cingular was giving me free GPRS roaming while I was in Italy? I do. I remember asking, repeatedly, if the customer service rep was sure that I wouldn’t pay anything to use data while abroad. She assured me I wouldn’t, and I was very happy.

Well, they just threw a $1,000 bill at me for GPRS roaming charges. Guess whose customer service center is getting a nasty phone call tomorrow morning?

I hate to say it, but my first impression of the Nokia E70 has been decidedly negative.

Nokia’s standard email client is pathetic compared to Microsoft’s. I don’t understand how this is possible; it’s like it hasn’t changed in the 1.5 years since I last got a Nokia phone. (It was a 6682, ran a much older version of the OS, and I sort of assumed things must have improved.)

First, when the phone boots, it doesn’t automatically connect to check your email. Maybe in Europe this is important, because travelers don’t want to use expensive GPRS roaming the moment they switch on, but I can’t find a setting that’ll let me change this behavior.

Next, it won’t download message bodies from an IMAP server — just the headers. So the workflow is this:

1. I turn on the Messaging program manually.
2. It asks whether I want to connect to “Arcadia”.
3. I have to confirm (every time) that I accept Arcadia’s invalid certificate.
4. I get an alert that there are new messages.
5. I click on a message, then wait while it connects (again) to download the message.

There’s just way too much involvement required on my part and it’s incredibly slow. I’m trying to love this phone, but I suppose I’ve gotten used to the way Windows Mobile handles email, and I made the (faulty) assumption that it was a “solved problem” for handset developers.

As a side note, I feel I should mention the silliness going on with their web site. If you search for a phone model on Google, you get a very nice URL in return: http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/E70. Immediately recognizable. But when you click it, you get a “Sorry, not found” message. No redirection. Just a big “Oops” page.

The correct URL, after an apparent reorganization of their site, is http://www.nokiausa.com/link?cid=EDITORIAL_185360. So they’ve gone from easy-to-understand URLs that everyone can remember, to cryptic database tags that nobody will bother to read. And in the process, they’ve broken every Google hit they have. What were they thinking?