Nokia N79 review: Swiss Army knife

Connectivity duly covered

Connectivity is one of the key features of Nokia N79. The phone supports all contemporary data transfer means, wired and wireless alike.

The versions of both the USB and the Bluetooth are 2.0 and the latter naturally also sports A2DP. Wi-Fi with UPnP support is also at hand. A nice improvement coming with the FP 2 now allows for adding hidden wireless networks with the nice WLAN scanner right on the stand-by screen. This was also available in previous Nokia handsets but took a lot more time, as the WLAN wizard had to be used.

All kinds of network connectivity are also on board - GPRS, EDGE and 3G with HSDPA.

By the way if you are interested where you can find UMTS 2100Mhz or you are not sure whether it's supported in your country, you should definitely check out our Worldwide Network Bands distribution database.

Finally, the Nokia N79 has a memory card slot, which can at times provide the fastest data transfer rates.

Symbian web browser rocks

Nokia N79 comes complete with an elaborate browser to make use of the great connectivity set. The browser has excellent page rendering and works in both portrait and landscape mode. Zoom levels are easily controlled and font size can be modified to fit as much content as possible on a single page.

The page rendering of the web browser is really good

The virtual mouse cursor earns the browser another point. It is easy to control and generally works great. A mini-map can be activated to help finding your way around large sites where lots of scrolling is required.

While the optical joystick in Samsung i7110 and i8510 INNOV8 is the highest we have seen a Symbian browser go, the Nokia N79 is close to that standard.

Time-management supreme

Smartphones can hardly be accused of lacking time-management skills. Even if you do happen to miss an application you need on your Nokia N79 - there is plenty of third party software out there. However for most everyday use you will hardly need anything more than the package you get straight out of the box.

The calendar has the typical three different view modes - monthly, weekly and daily, and four types of events available for setting up - Meeting, Memo, Anniversary and To-do. Each event has unique fields of its own, and some of them allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.

The calendar view modes and the events available for setting up

Mobile office is also very well geared, with preinstalled applications able to open Word and Excel, PDF and PowerPoint files seamlessly. Unluckily, editing documents is not supported by the included Quickoffice version. If you would like editing enabled you will have to get the complete application from the Nokia Download center for a fee.

The mobile office is pretty well geared, but unfortunately it has no support for document editing out of the box

The other office application is ZIP manager, which allows extracting archived files straight on your phone.

Some of the other included organizing and time-management applications are a great unit converter, calculator and voice recorder, as well as the Notes application.

Unit converter, calculator and voice recorder also come preinstalled

The alarm application allows you to set up as many alarms as you want, each with its own name, trigger day and repeat pattern. If this seems too complicated, there is a quick alarm setup where all you do is set the time and you're good to go. This is quite convenient for, say, setting up your wake-up alarm. In addition, the number of alarms is not limited.