We snap open Nokia's hot new Supernova flip phone, available for T-Mobile's unlimited HotSpot calling service. Find out more in our Nokia 7510 review.
Review summary of the Nokia 7510:
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 The Nokia 7510 is the best looking phone available with T-Mobile's unlimited HotSpot calling plan (to check out our comparison of unlimited HotSpot calling phones click here.), but it still has room for improvement. We liked the swappable color shells, and we hope accessory makers will offer more for some cooler fashion options than red, green and brown. We loved the external display, which appeared like magic beneath the colored plastic. Wi-Fi calling meant that we were never far from a strong network signal, but as long as the phone has Wi-Fi, why not use it for Web browsing, too? The messaging options on the phone were a little basic, and Facebook or MySpace fans will be stock without options. In fact, if you're not on T-Mobile's list of approved services, your e-mail and IM account might not work, either. Still, Nokia has tried hard to create a sweet-looking interface, and they mostly get it right. If only the beauty were more than just skin deep. Release: January 2009. Price: $50.
Pros: Cool design, especially the hidden translucent external screen. Loud speaker for calling and music. Good calling features with Wi-Fi calling and unlimited HotSpot calling plans.
Cons: Some design flaws; we'd like more buttons and better keys. Interface could be organized better to be more convenient. More messaging options would be nice.
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Full Nokia 7510 Review:
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Design – Good
The Nokia 7510 is a very pretty phone, with some cool design features, but there are still some problems we'd like to see fixed. We love the external display, which magically appears from beneath the swappable, colored plastic shell. We've seen this trick before, but its especially clear and convincing on the Nokia 7510. We also like the solid feel of the phone. It's a bit heavy, but it feels sturdy, and not at all cheap. Nokia uses great, high quality screens on their phones, and the Nokia 7510 is no exception. The screen was bright with deep, rich colors. Text looked sharp, although we think Nokia could have chosen a nicer looking font.
The Nokia 7510 pops open at the touch of a button on the side of the hinge. This sounds cool, but the button is in an inconvenient spot, and the phone would get stuck on our fingers while opening.
T-Mobile's menus are usually pretty old looking, like they haven't changed much in the last 5 years. Nokia has added some nice color and some slick animations to improve the look, and they also offer a few different views, so you can have your menu items swing around in a circle, or line up in a grid. Still, we wish that the menus were easier to use. We like having a "People" option right up top, but we also wish that it were easier to jump into the Web browser or the music player. Instead, we had to dig through menus to find these features. For inspiration, T-Mobile should check out Sprint's One Touch phones. Those look great, and let you add your own menu items like a Facebook menu or Google search menu.
Finally, we wish the Nokia 7510 had more shortcut keys. We like to find keys that let us jump right into the phone's camera, or keys to start and stop the music in the media player. The Nokia 7510 has keys for volume, but that's it. Even the soft keys under the screen were inconvenient. The soft key on the right shares space with the phone's "End" key. That means that if we wanted to press "Back" in the photo viewer to see a different picture, we often hit "End" instead, and quit that app altogether.
Calling – Very Good
Calls on the Nokia 7510 sounded very good. The phone can make calls either over T-Mobile's cellular network, or over your own Wi-Fi wireless network. This helps a lot if you have spotty T-Mobile reception in your area, as we do near our home in suburban New Jersey. If you start a call in Wi-Fi then leave your house or your favorite Starbucks, the phone will automatically switch to T-Mobile's cellular network. Best of all, if you sign up for T-Mobile's $10/month unlimited HotSpot calling plan, any call that you make from a Wi-Fi network is free, even if you leave your house and the phone switches to cellular mode. We tested this HotSpot calling on the Nokia 7510 and it worked very nicely. Calls sounded very good, and we couldn't tell when the phone switched networks. The only trouble we ran into was when we left Wi-Fi and the cellular network dipped too low, which left the phone without a network to which cling to. But when we had good T-Mobile reception, everything worked well.
Reception on the phone was disappointing. We usually had 1-2 bars of service on T-Mobile, and the phone even seemed to have trouble finding a strong connection to our home Wi-Fi network. We checked reception on our T-Mobile G1, and that phone seemed to get stronger cellular and Wi-Fi service. This was a problem because the Nokia 7510 had trouble completing phone calls when reception dipped too low.
The address book on the Nokia 7510 is looks great. Nokia uses a lot of nice gradient colors and polished looking graphics to improve the look of the standard contact list. There were also plenty of slots to enter information. This won't be enough for serious business users, but casual callers will be happy.
For calling features, the phone has a voice dialing app, and you can access this by holding down the tiny volume keys on the side of the phone. First, though, you have to go through Nokia's voice training program. Once we trained the phone, it had no trouble recognizing the names in our address book. Still, we like to dial a number by speaking it to a phone's voice recognition software, and the Nokia 7510 couldn't handle that task.
The Nokia 7510 has a loud speakerphone that sounded nice and clear during our calls. For battery life, we got about 4.5 hours of talk time out of the phone, switching between the Wi-Fi and cellular network during a series of test calls. That's more than the 3 hours that Nokia promises, but for a phone that isn't meant for heavy data traffic, we'd like to see much more battery life.
Messaging - Good
The Nokia 7510 features a nice assortment of messaging options, but they mostly require you to use a specific set of services, and T-Mobile is a little behind the times when it comes to guess what people are using today. Text messaging worked nicely, and we had no trouble sending picture messages with the built-in 2-megapixel camera. Typing was a little difficult on the phone's small, slippery keypad. Looking at all the space around the number keys, we think Nokia could have made the keys larger and still come up with a cool-looking phone.
For instant messaging, the Nokia 7510 supports AIM, Yahoo, MSN or ICQ. That's a nice selection, but these days we're mostly using Gtalk, Facebook and Twitter for our quick messages. We'd like to see a built-in app that handles these social networking services. For e-mail, the phone has a nice list of services that will work, including Gmail, Yahoo and AOL, and many cable internet providers, including Comcast and even Verizon. There is support for Apple's .Mac service, though it didn't recognize our newer Apple MobileMe account. We'd like to be able to add our own e-mail service, if it isn't on T-Mobile's list. We also wish that the e-mail program would notify us when new messages arrive, but instead we had to keep opening up the e-mail app and checking for ourselves.
Web browsing - Mediocre
The Nokia 7510 should be a much better phone at Web browsing than it actually is. The phone has Wi-Fi, but T-Mobile doesn't give the Web browser access to the Wi-Fi network. Nokia's other phones (including the European version of the Nokia 7510, incidentally) get a much more advanced version of the same browser, but the Nokia 7510 was hardly able to open up a Web site designed for mobile phones, let alone a real Web page. The Web browser crashed on our own site's front page, as well as any other full-HTML page we tried to load. And when it crashed, it took down the entire phone, causing the Nokia 7510 to restart from scratch. T-Mobile has included the newest version of their tzones home page. It looks nice and polished and offers some basic access to news and information. But if you're looking for the real Internet on your mobile phone, you'll have to look somewhere else.
Camera - Mediocre
We were pretty disappointed by the camera on the Nokia 7510. Nokia has been talking up their so-called NIPS technology on the phone, which they say should improve low-light performance. In the sample shots we took while testing this phone, we can say that low-light performance was better than we expected it to be, but the picture overall were still not very impressive. Perhaps they might work as tiny avatar pics on Facebook or MySpace, but these aren't going to be good for desktop wallpapers or printing. Pictures looked very grainy, and most of the fine details we look for were lost.
Music - Good
Before we listened to music on this phone, we downloaded the newest version of Nokia's PC Suite software, which is available free on Nokia's site. Using the PC Suite, we were able to transfer our MP3 tracks to the phone. The transfer was very slow, much slower than transferring music to an Apple iPod or Apple iPhone. Also, our album covers didn't make it through the transfer. Still, this was much easier than having to drag and drop our music into some strange folder.
Once it was loaded on the phone, music sounded very good, and it was easy to use the simple music player. We were very impressed by the phone's speaker. Not only was it nice and loud, it also sounded pretty clear. We didn't get lots of heavy bass from the phone, but for listening to Coldplay, the speaker did a nice job filling a small room with sound. Too bad the phone uses a sub-standard, 2.5mm headphone jack, instead of a regular 3.5mm plug. This meant we couldn't use our favorite headphones. Also, we complained before that the Nokai 7510 doesn't have dedicated music keys. Once the music way playing, it was a pain to have to dig through menus to get to the media player. When we're playing music on a phone, we like to have controls pop up on the top-level screens so we can see what we're playing, and shut it off quickly when the music gets annoying.
Price and availability
The Nokia 7510 is available now from T-Mobile for $50 with a contract agreement.
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