I replaced my 3230 with N70 music edition last month. I was looking for an upgrade on the 3230, particularly on sound and camera. 3230 is neat phone but the sound is mono and camera was 1.3. I looked at several phones on the web and compared the features. Sony Ericsson has some neat phones that fitted the bill. Somehow, I have never got around to buying anything but Nokia. Why this is so is due to the resale trends in the market. Dealers point out that only Nokia handsets retain some resale value and nobody really buys any other second hand brands. So if the second hand buyers are ready to trust Nokia over other brands then I see there must be some strong reason there.
About the N70. I did not see a great value in the Music Edition over the standard N70, but the dealer informed that the standard model was not available so I settled on N70 music edition. Other Nokia model I considered were N72 and N73. N72 was too common and N73 appeared to be over the budget.
After one month of use I can say I am largely satisfied with the phone in terms of my primary upgrade reason of sound. Camera is a little disappointing specially in low light. Sony phones score here. Other wise the phone has a decent feature set. Calling and voice reception are standard high quality that one expects from Nokia. build quality is solid. PC connectivity is good with the bluetooth and cable included in the package. Bundled PC suite does the basic job. Music transfer needs some sprucing up on the PC Suite. Its way too complicated. Phones of this class really become useful when you comple them with a PC/notebook. Syncronizing with outlook, Yahoo Go offers push mail capabilities, Opera browser are uses which should prompt a buy. Mobile blogging capabilities are also present but I haven’t got around to use them, so can’t comment there.
About major gripes now. Although the body is bult well, the screen catches smudges and scratches easily which was not the case with my earlier Nokias. As other users have mentioned, the software is too slow specially when you load up the 1 GB media card.
Final word. It will be an attractive buy once the price falls to around 9K. Buy it if you need a reliable cheap, business smart phone but you are not going to use the keypad for input much. Don’t buy it if you are looking for a camera or music phone or something to impress your friends with.