Intrigued by Verizon Wireless' new Nokia flip phone? The stylish device packs impressive features into a thin, slick shell. Check it out in our full Nokia 7205 review.
Review summary of the Nokia 7205:
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 The Nokia 7205 is a stylish, beautiful clamshell with an impressive set of features and even some real innovative ideas, especially the dymanic Habitat standby screens. Unfortunately, nothing on the phone worked quite as well as it should have. We liked the external OLED display, but we've seen better on other Nokia phones, like the Nokia 7510 on T-Mobile. The Habitat idea is an interesting way to keep recently used contacts and messages close at hand, but the system wasn't very intuitive, even though it looked very cool. Like most Nokia phones, the Nokia 7205 uses a brilliant, colorful display, but this was mostly wasted on a clumsy menu system and poor video performance, not to mention a Web browser that can hardly handle a mobile Web page, let alone a full HTML site. Music controls were limited, video was disappointing. The phone is saved by its style and great call quality. Calls sounded very good, and the phone has all of our favorite calling features. As a slim, simple phone, the Nokia would be a great choice. But as an advanced, somewhat pricey multimedia powerhouse, it comes up short. Release: March 2009. Price: $100.
Pros: Very stylish, with a zen-like interface. Very good call quality with plenty of calling features. Impressive GPS navigation performance.
Cons: Habitat interface not as intuitive as competitors like MyFaves on T-Mobile. Music and video playback were disappointing. Browser was very basic. Messaging features were lacking.
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Full Nokia 7205 Review:
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Design - Good
The Nokia 7205 Intrigue is a very slick Nokia clamshell on Verizon Wireless. Nokia hasn't released too many CDMA phones for the U.S. market recently, but this little flip phone shows the voluminous manufacturer still has the chops to make a super thin, stylish phone for a CDMA network. The Nokia 7205 is glossy black with a subtle gradient shading on the bottom of the keyboard. This was a cool paint job, but the phone's standout design feature is the invisible, passive matrix OLED (PMOLED) screen that hides beneath the black plastic on the exterior of the clamshell. We liked this trick better on the Nokia 7510 on T-Mobile, since that phone had better effects and smoother animation for the external display (to check out a comparison of recent Nokia clamshell phones, click here). The Nokia 7205 does have touch controls for the music player around the external display, but in practice these weren't very helpful.
Inside, the Nokia 7205 uses an interface design that Nokia and Verizon Wireless are calling a "Habitat." Basically, the design works something like T-Mobile's MyFaves homescreen, but instead of displaying a set list of contacts, the phone generates strange, animal inspired icons for each call that you make. You can select an icon, perhaps a bird or a hornet silhouette, and check out the call history and recent messages from that contact. The interface looks cool and imaginative, but it felt half-baked. Outgoing calls showed up, but not incoming calls. Some times the animal icons duplicated themselves, so our home number and a misdialed call were both represented by a bird (a dove, perhaps?), while others showed a butterfly, or other animals.
Nokia doesn't disappoint with the internal display. The 2.2-inch, QVGA screen is rich and colorful. Pictures pop, and the interface, which is set by default to change colors through the day, is rich with color and detail. We're not fans of the menu design. Menus were confusing, and most of our favorite features were hidden beneath layers of options. The music store is a top-level option, but the music player is hidden beneath the Media Center menu. Ringtones are a top-level icon, but to get to VZ Navigator, you have to dig through Media Center: Browse and Download (and not Extras, which would make some sense at least) and then find the app. No way to move this or assign VZ Navigator as a shortcut, either.
Calling – Very Good
We found the Nokia 7205 to be a great choice for making calls. The phone had very good sound quality. Calls sounded clean and clear, and noise was kept mostly to a minumum, except under the windiest conditions. There was plenty of aural feedback so we could hear ourselves talk, which helped with call clarity. For reception, the phone held a strong 3-4 bars of 1xRTT service and usually a bar or two less of EV-DO Rev. A service. This was on par with other Verizon Wireless phones we had in house. Battery life was also pretty good. We managed a call that lasted more than 5 hours, better than Nokia's promise of 4 hours of talk time. Pretty good for a phone on a super-fast 3G network.
For calling features, we were let down by the address book, which lacked the assortment of fields we like for storing addresses and contact info. There were plenty of fields for phone numbers and e-mail addresses, but we couldn't send an e-mail directly from our contact listing. The Nokia 7205 is one of the growing number of Verizon Wireless phones with Visual Voicemail. Verizon's Voicemail app is great, at least as good as the visual voicemail on the iPhone. We wish it would run continuously in the background so we didn't have to load the app every time to check messages, but the phone did a nice job alerting us when there was a message waiting, so this wasn't much of a problem.
Conference calling was easy enough, we joined a conference by pressing the "Send" key. We wish there was some visual cue that our 3-way call was working, but it always worked, even without the feedback. The speakerphone could have been louder. It seemed to play music louder than it broadcast phone calls, and we like our speakerphones to be very, very loud. The phone also features speaker-independent voice dialing from Nuance. We love this software because it allows us to speak our contacts' names, or simply say a phone number aloud, and it was accurate every time.
Messaging - Good
The Nokia 7205 Intrigue had very few messaging options, and most of these were barebones features that relied heavily on the ugly, archaic WAP Web browser. Text messaging looked good, and the phone could fit about 2/3 of a text message on screen at one time, which was fine. The font wasn't stylish, but it was legible.
Instant messaging and e-mail were both abysmal. First of all, both features will only work with a few services. AOL, Windows Live and Yahoo users are in luck (and Verizon.net users for e-mail). Everyone else will have to play in a different sandbox. The IM app looked years old, the same tired app Verizon Wireless bundles onto their cheapest multimedia phones. The e-mail setup was even worse, as it required firing up the WAP browser every time, and it looked terrible. We appreciate that Verizon Wireless includes direct links to some popular social networking, but once we actually logged onto our Facebook and MySpace accounts, the actual mobile pages looked thin and skeletal, like they were being loaded onto a graphing calculator. This might be acceptable on a low-end phone, but on a stylish, $130 multimedia clamshell running on the fastest network Verizon offers, we expect a lot more.
Typing on the Nokia 7205's keypad was also a chore. The phone is very narrow, and the keypad doesn't get much room. Because of the glossy finish, the keys were very slick and slippery, and not easy for typing. Also, we didn't like the cross-like 4-way button. It was too thin, and though the button actually gave us some leeway to miss a little bit, we often found ourselves pressing a direction instead of the center, or vice versa. On a few occasions, this meant we accidentally sent an incomplete text message, instead of performing the editing we intended.
Multimedia - Good
On paper, the Nokia 7205 is a much better multimedia phone than in reality. With external playback controls hidden under the exterior screen, fast networking for access to the V Cast music and video stores, not to mention this is a Nokia phone, and Nokia makes some of the best music and multimedia phone around. Unfortunately, the Nokia 7205 isn't one of them. Verizon Wireless is fairly inflexible when it comes to music. The phone couldn't find our music tracks unless they were tucked into the proper folder. Even then, encoded information like song titles and album artwork didn't come through properly.
Of course, media downloaded from the V Cast store, at $2 for songs and $2.50 for music videos, played properly, but we were disappointed with V Cast. The music store is still sluggish and inefficient. To download an entire album, you have to select each song individually and wait for it to load. Videos were even worse. Quality was lacking, which was especially disappointing, considering the exorbitant price tag. For $2.50, one would at least expect the musician's lips to sync with the song lyrics, but videos on the Nokia 7205 couldn't keep up. In full screen mode, videos looked blocky and pixilated, hardly worthy of the high quality screen.
The external music controls were nice once we got our music playing, but we couldn't start the music app by pressing the play button. The phone would beep, but nothing happened. We also wish there was more control to shuffle through our music library without opening the flip. The Nokia 7205 uses a sub-standard 2.5mm headphone jack, and we prefer a regular 3.5mm connection so that we can use our favorite cans with our phone. Still, the phone had no trouble pairing with our stereo Bluetooth speakers.
Camera - Good
The 2-megapixel camera on the Nokia 7205 took pictures that were acceptably good, though all the pictures we took were a bit too blurry for our taste. Still, colors were strong and accurate, except where they were overexposed. At best, images looked almost print-worthy, and would do fine on a Facebook page or MMS message. At worst, we saw plenty of noise and blown out white highlights.
We wish it was easier to get our pics off of the Nokia 7205. We like to save our images to a microSD card, then use a card reader or Mass Storage mode to copy the pics to our PCs. The Nokia 7205 did not let us save pictures to a microSD card automatically, which dramatically cut down the number of pics we could take. Then, when it was time to move the pics to the memory card, we had to select each individually and wait for the image to copy. This was a bothersome setup, to say the least.
Web browser - Mediocre
The Web browser on the Nokia 7205 was easily the biggest disappointment. Instead of the excellent Nokia browser, the Nokia 7205 gets Verizon's standard Openwave app. The poor Web browser could hardly handle a long, mobile version of CNN's page, let alone a full Web page. In fact, when we tried to load our own site, not only did the browser run out of memory, it didn't even allow us to enter another URL to try. We had to quit the browser and restart. Mobile pages also looked lousy on this phone. Pictures looked good, but came through as tiny thumbnails. Text looked horrible, blocky and jagged.
GPS Navigation – Very Good
The Nokia 7205 gets the best version of VZ Navigator we've used. There are still problems, but we like the new voice recognition features. We've seen similar features on TeleNav's navigation app. Basically, instead of typing your street name or zip code, you can hold down the "Send" key and speak the names and digits instead. This worked very well most of the time. The phone messed up our city name, but had no trouble with our street, state or ZIP code. The GPS sensor on the Nokia 7205 was also fast and responsive. The phone found us quickly and tracked us accurately as we traveled from New York City into the New Jersey suburbs.
Our main gripe is with VZ Navigator's various map screens. There is one screen for zooming, another for tracking your route, and another for actual turn-by-turn directions. The app needs a polished, consolidated interface. We also wish that the external screen would do more. While the flip was closed, VZ Navigator would still talk to us, telling us when to turn. But the external display showed no more information than the app name, and we already new we were running the Navigator program. We'd like some actual directions or a distance countdown on the external display, instead.
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