Nokia 7710

Posted by T3 Online on Wed 31 Oct 2007

Now showing in widescreen.

Never ones to shy away from distinctive styling, Nokia is aiming to cut a dash in boardrooms across the land with its latest smart phone. It has an ultra-wide screen (80 x 40mm), embedded stylus and a feast of applications. However, with relatively dinky devices like i-mate's Windows-powered JAM on the market, the 7100 looks like a muscle-bound lummox. It's powerful sure, but chunky and, like an erection at a wedding, not particularly welcome in the pocket.

That said, there's plenty of functionality on board to (almost) justify the size. There's a one-megapixel camera, and while it may only have a 2x zoom, it comes with a suite of image-editing facilities, even enabling you to draw pics with the stylus. The sound quality from the single speaker is surprisingly good, especially with FM radio, and the RealPlayer media player does a good job with video as well as music. There's also 90MB of on-board memory plus a 128MB MMC memory card, Bluetooth (though no infrared) and the option of a push email service using Smartner.

But much of it feels a little under-specced. Many high-end phones now have superior megapixel cameras, sharper screen resolutions and crucially, they run a lot quicker. The Symbian Series 90 OS seems to take ages to access functions, and although there's a full Internet browser, it's over an enhanced GPRS connection, so it's hardly speedy compared to 3G.

As a smart phone, the 7710 is pretty clever, but with a few main specs seeming a trifle light, and that unnecessary bulkiness putting it into competition with higher-performing PDAs, this is unlikely to be at the top of anyone's must-have list.