Nokia's new 7710 has a larger-than-life screen, but that's not all it takes to succeed as a communicator: Jørgen Sundgot offers up an in-depth review.
Having recently launched its 9500 and 9300 Communicators, one could certainly argue that Nokia is making a bold move by introducing the 7710 shortly thereafter, given as how it shares most of the functionality with the two former mentioned - yet with a twist. Sporting a spacious touch screen, the 7710 is Nokia's first crack at stylus-driven interaction, and although they've got navigation down pat for the most part, I found more than a few snags in other departments.
A gleaming first impression
Pitched as a multimedia device, the 7710 takes its place alongside some of the largest communicators out there at 128 x 70 x 19 mm and 189 g; in other words, on the verge of portability. Its looks are highly appealing, and the unusual landscape form factor is surprisingly comfortable and lends itself extremely well to two-handed use. One-handed, however, is entirely out of the question.
Flanking the centered display on either side are navigational buttons, with the left side offering a five-way navigational pad, a button to activate the contextual menu and one to bring up the main launcher interface. On the right, the upper button lets users choose between three levels of system-wide zoom; the middle changes views; and the lower acts as an Escape or Back key. All of these provide excellent feedback, unlike the call and hang up keys which are placed adjacent to a voice dial slash speaker phone toggle atop the unit, all of which are difficult to distinguish and offer poor feedback.
The main attraction of the 7710 is, of course, its spacious display with a resolution of 640 x 320 pixels in landscape orientation. Boasting 65K colours and adjustable brightness, its performance indoors is impeccable - quite the opposite of outdoor use, in which the display is close to unreadable. Needless to say, it's also power hungry: reducing brightness from 100% to 50% will increase battery life by as much as up to 15-20%.
As for connectivity, typical Nokia quality signifies voice quality and signal reception, but a broader number of supported technologies would have been appreciated. Tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE 900/1800/1900 MHz coupled with Bluetooth makes for a nice foundation, and particularly so with support for the HID profile which enables compatibility with Nokia's Bluetooth keyboard; a perfect match for the 7710. Fax support and IrDA are lacking, however, as is Wi-Fi, but this is mitigated to some extent by the inclusion of EDGE. From a practical perspective, chances are also high that the processor would prove to be an insurmountable bottleneck towards a faster user experience had Wi-Fi been included.
Going downhill
In fact, the processor of the 7710 isn't only insufficiently powerful for Wi-Fi use, but also disappoints in general use as compared to recent Windows Mobile communicators, or even Nokia's own recent smartphones and communicators. With 90 MB of non-volatile memory and a hot-swappable MMC card expansion annoyingly located under the battery cover, memory is never an issue, but having to wait between one and three seconds for an application to open is at best finger-tappingly frustrating.
The 7710 also suffers from poor battery life despite harbouring a massive, exchangeable 1300 mAh Lithium Ion battery. In excess of two and a half hours of intensive use (calling, browsing and performing other tasks) will leave it dead in the water, rendering Nokia's claim of up to 12 hours of talk time outright laughable - not what we would have expected from a company that has a good track record in this department. Also, it should be noted that recording video with the integrated 1.3 Megapixel camera, which produces excellent results whether for stills or motion pictures, is perhaps the best way to drain the battery quickly.
Moving on to software, the 7710 is powered by the slick and informative Series 90 platform, which is controlled both by a combination of touch screen input and key navigation. A main launcher view offers quick double-tap access to applications, which open to reveal three soft tabs placed at the right side of the screen offering quick access to main functions. For more advanced functionality users must often resort to a drop-down contextual menu - the logical hierarchy of which varies greatly within applications. Most all functions can be controlled by means of the navigational array without the stylus, but the latter is certainly faster if you're looking for functionality tucked away in the menu.
A true multitasking environment, Series 90 lets users leave an application at any time to open another, and return to find the application just as they left it, something which gives this device a leg up on UIQ-based devices such as Sony Ericsson's P910 or Motorola's A1000. Similarly competitive is text input, with the 7710 both offering a virtual on-screen keyboard in two sizes as well as superb natural handwriting recognition - both of which are at least on par with competing platforms, if not better.
Not for multimedia, nor for the enterprise
The 7710 comes with a number of pre-installed applications, but unfortunately the vast majority of these are feature anemic. Exceptions include the superb, Opera-based web browser along with PIM and Office applications, thus making the 7710 fall short on its premise as a multimedia device due to limited MP3 playback functionality and ghastly full screen video performance. Similarly, enterprise users are unlikely to see their needs met due to very limited e-mail support and dog-slow desktop PIM synchronization.
Other snafus abound, such as the inability to synchronize notes and e-mails with desktop PIM applications; lacking support for Outlook categories; molasses-like rendering of thumbnails in the Images application; Bluetooth activation requiring a visit to the control panel; the complete inability to copy or paste text; and e-mail not even supporting the subscription of IMAP subfolders. On the upside, the 7710 does support scheduled e-mail fetching, and despite a litter of minor snafus proves itself to be an excellent first crack at a touch-screen based platform.
Availability
The Nokia 7710 is at the time of press available in most European countries, selling in the $850 USD, or 675 EUR, range.
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