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.