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Media is again well supported in the Nokia 6700 Classic, with a range of audio codecs (MP3, AAC, WMA and so on) playable through the dedicated music player.
Music output is good as well, although the lack of a 3.5mm headphone slot is always going to hamper the Nokia 6700 Classic's chances of becoming your dedicated music player. However, there's the option to stream music using an A2DP stereo Bluetooth connection, which worked nicely, synchronising easily with our Altec Lansing BackBeat 906 headphones.
There's not the greatest range of playback options onboard, and obviously there's not a lot of scope for upgrading the media player on the S40 platform, but you can easily sort via Artist, Album, Playlist and so on, which means it's a more than functional effort.
Similarly video is a fairly good experience as well. The lack of on-board accelerometer and the fact video will always playback in portrait mode (until you head into the menus to force it full screen) shows Nokia didn't intend the 6700 Classic to be your new PMP – rather, it's a portal to watch the odd streamed clip or music video.
Our model has a strange flaw – when we transferred over some video footage in the MP4 format it happily recognised the files and played the audio, but decided against actually showing the video, which was most peculiar. The pre-installed videos are in the same format and worked fine, so we had to go back and convert them in the software before they worked for some reason.
Streaming from the internet via the mobile YouTube icon was a so-so experience, with the framerate and resolution quite underwhelming on the 2.2-inch QVGA screen. However, the connection was fast and stable, so should you simply want to catch the odd Dramatic Gopher, there's nothing stopping you.
However, remember that such things will incur data charges – while the phone is fast, YouTube is still data intensive and there's no Wi-Fi on board the Nokia 6700 Classic, so make sure you've squared it with your network first.
Audio playback on the in-built speaker is startlingly good though, catching us quite by surprise when we fired it up. While the sound is obviously top heavy, like most mobile phones, the bass and vocal tones are rich, and you get the feeling the well-designed chassis helps boost the audio in some way.
You might want to expand the memory on the Nokia 6700 Classic as well, as the onboard storage of 170MB is barely worth looking at. There is a bundled 1GB microSD card, which will be enough for most, but, if you want to keep some music and a bit of video with you, you might want to think of upgrading here.
