nokia still got it? (Nokia 7610)

Member Name: jiffk

Product:	Nokia 7610
Date:	03/11/04 (761 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: style and looks, shared memory, excellent features and simbian OS means application options are endless

Disadvantages: might be a bit pricey for some, might be bigger than some people like

I took me a while to decided on the nokia 7610 as there’s so many phones out their with very similar specifications, but my list was pretty clear. I wanted something not too big, with bluetooth and a half decent camera. I also wanted a phone with a simbian os if possible as I had quite a few useful apps id found off the internet that I wanted to start using.

The thing that put me off about the 7610 initially was its size, it is quite a big block when you look at it but when you start to use it you realise its really not all that much bigger than most the clamshell phones as it has an internal aerial.

There’s not too much on the phone when you first get it, just a few apps and boring video clips to show off the real player, but once you start to personalise it and get more software and games etc it a lot more fun. One of the first things I did was connected it via USB to my computer, which worked first time and was very simple. The software that comes with it has all you could possibly need to manage your 7610 and transfer files to and from it. I started off by putting a few games on it, a couple of themes and episode or two of the Simpson’s! The phone comes with a 64 mb media card that’s extremely useful for storing pictures of videos copied from the pc or recorded on the phone itself using its 1 mega pixel camera. If your like me and like to have the odd movie carried around with you then you can buy a bigger card (I believe some places sell up to 1gb!!).

Talking of the camera I have been very impressed by the quality of the photos it produces, obviously they’re not amazing in all conditions but for the purpose of MMS it captures colours and shades very well. This is all helped by the amazing quality of the screen. There are phones out at the moment with 262k colour screens (this being only 65K) but the quality of the screen on the 7610 is so high I wouldn’t say it makes a difference at the moment.

There is nothing I don’t love about this phone now, everything about the nokia interface design is perfect. I’ve had a couple of phones in the past few years by Samsung and sagem and theres always been problems about the interface, text message storage and phonebooks that have always grated on me but the 7610 gets them all right.

The phonebook can store just about any information about each entry as you like thanks to the shared memory of the phone the only limit is the 8 meg of onboard memory. For example, picture, voice tag, mobiles, land lines, business numbers, birthdays or address’s.

The text messaging is so much better than anything I have ever used before. Again the amount of texts stored is dependant on the shared memory. At my current rate I should be able to store another 2000 texts !!! The dictionary is usually right and you can always add words to it as you find missing ones. There is also a very useful counter that tells you how many characters you have left and in brackets how many messages are need to send the whole thing, so you can run over the character limit and not worry about it. Lots of folders and the ability to send and receive emails also make this section very powerful.

My only disappointment with the phone so far is the bluetooth, it seems to be a bit temperamental but I’m inclined to think it’s the headset as it keeps crashing and seeing as the rest of the phone is so perfect it seems unlikely that they would have tripped up on such a major feature. To end on a high the range of the bluetooth is very good and with line of sight I would say it easily reachs the quoted 10m’s. Through walls the range drops but you could still put the phone in the boot of your car and still make phone calls from the drivers seat.

All in all I’m still finding new programs and games to make this phone even better, but this is one of the best phones I have used or seen in action in a long time.

Summary: