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?