Nokia introduced its first Symbian S60 folder phone more than three years ago, and since then have been trying to trim its size. The result is the new N76 that they put forward this year

The N76 is probably not the most attractive phone out there, but you've got to say that it is sleek. Design wise it seems to have everything that the market likes today: an external display that hides behind a mirrored finish, a row of backlighted music buttons on the front, and a metallic finish around the buttons and camera on the back. The thing is, they just don't look right when put together.

The N76 measures 106.5mm x 53mm x 13.7mm (4.2" x 2.1" x .5") in size, which makes it thin for a folder by both smartphone and non-smartphone standards. Because of its thinness, the N76 is very pocket friendly. At 53mm in width, though, it might be a bit wide for smaller hands

Although the external display is active and is TFT, its legibility behind the glossy cover is poor. Legibility is especially limited under direct sunlight. The good news is that it displays 262K colors on a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels. Beneath the external display you will find three easy-to-manage keys controlling the music player and the FM radio. Their legends are illuminated. There are more external keys on the right side of the phone: a dual volume control key, a camera release button, and a key for an instant view of the last image made. A tiny connector for the charger is also situated here.

The N76 has a 2-megapixel camera on its back, which is a necessity nowadays. Its lens is neither autofocus, nor with Carl Zeiss branding, clearly showing that the camera is not the phone’s key feature. You can use either of the displays for a viewfinder, but it is recommended to use the internal one which is bigger and of higher quality. The options are identical to those of the N95, due to the same operating system, and so, the N76 has more features than the N93i. Interesting options are a few scene modes including night photo, night portrait, Sports, Close-up. There's an option for more than one color scenes and white balance, but the latter still lacks manual tuning.

The interface starts for 3 and taking and saving a picture takes only 4. This is faster than Nokia’s top cameraphone, the N95.

The camera is not the best on the market, but works OK. Outdoors, your photos will be underexposed, and with not saturated colors. Indoor images have very low quality, and lots of noise. The flash should be used when it is dark, but it’s very weak and useless.

The final nail in the coffin was battery life. The N76 uses the same 700-mAh battery as the 3G N75, whose battery life was pathetic. Because EDGE takes less power than 3G does, the N76 has more talk time, but music playback time is still stuck at 8 hours 20 minutes

Nokia N76's primary purpose is to entertain users and thus its functions are designed to perfectly meet the needs for multimedia fun. It offers a great music player manageable through external keys and thus controllable even with a closed phone. The player works with MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, and WMA formats. It first indexes music files and then names them according to the available ID3 tags. Songs can be sorted by various criteria and organized in playlists.

The function for displaying the most frequently played and the last played songs is quite interesting. The player has an equalizer and a pair of video visualizations too. The player is constantly active, even if it's not used, which is rather unusual. It cannot be deactivated at all, which might be considered a con by some users as it slows down the phone and occupies precious operational memory.

microSD (TransFlash).
- 26 MB shared memory
- 96 MB SDRAM memory
- ARM 11 369 MHz processor

The Nokia N76 supports SMS and MMS as well as email (POP3/IMAP4) messaging. Users can create their own folders and sort their messages in a number of ways. The composition screen is clean, font size tends to be a bit small, but if you adjust it to maximal size it is just about right. Depending on your network operator, you might be able to run a Symbian version of the Mobile MSN instant messenger application.

The Hong Kong version of the Nokia N76 supports English as well as Traditional and Simplified Chinese predictive text input systems. Users can add new words to the dictionary as they wish. The predictive text system works well: it is fast enough and you can always go back to a word, highlight it, and pick a replacement from the word list again. The only problem here is the lack of learning mode that would learn from the user's word usage and move more commonly used words higher up on the list.