I got my Nokia Lumia 710 when it was time to upgrade and change my mobile phone contract. I bought it from Phones4U, it was free with my new contract and this handset was highly recommended by the sales adviser I dealt with. I was able to try out the phone in the store and I was immediately impressed by the slick design, clean interface and the super responsive touch screen. I have had the phone about 4 months now and I have never been happier with a phone in my life. I use my Nokia Lumia 710 a lot, so its great to have a phone that is easy and intuitive to use and which lets me do everything I expect my phone to do.

The first thing I asked the salesperson about was the camera - as an art student, its important for my mobile phone to have a decent camera so I can take photos wherever I go and as a quick way to upload photos to my blog or Facebook without the added effort of actually going to my pc and transferring files from a camera. The Nokia Lumia 710 has a 5MP camera, with a range of settings options including white balance, exposure and focus mode, letting you adjust it to different conditions. The phone also has a very bright built-in flash, which can double as a handy torch in an emergency, and the photos are very good quality. I have pet rats, and any owner of rats will know that most photos of rats are just blurs of fur and whiskers, but the sports mode of the Nokia Lumia 710 camera has let me take some great photos of some very wriggly animals :D there is the option to edit your photos, upload them to social networking sites, save to your favourites or even open them in other applications.

The video function also works great, allowing you to experiment with a variety of settings and you can take videos with or without flash, and upload your videos to Youtube.

The text messaging interface is clean, and it displays messages in threads to make conversations easier to follow. You can select a text by touching it and copy it to the clipboard to paste in another text or application. MMS messages are also displayed in the same thread and images are automatically opened, so its very clear and easy to understand.

The phone comes preloaded with Internet Explorer and I have been very pleased with how the browser works. Pages load quickly and are easy to navigate, and the sensitive touchscreen means few misclicks. The email functionality is also brilliant, push notifications mean that if you have the Email tile on your home screen you can see at a glance how many unread emails are in your inbox. You can also connect two separate accounts so that the new emails from both will appear on the same screen/tile, making it easy to keep track of multiple email accounts all from your phone. I used to be notoriously bad at reading emails, but since getting my Nokia Lumia 710 I now read and reply to my email multiple times a day.

The OS on the Nokia Lumia 710 is Windows Phone 7. Previous to this phone, I had no experience with the Windows Phone operating system, but I was immediately impressed by the unique design and fluidity of the Metro interface. I like that it's different from the look of all the other smartphone operating systems out there. Where many other companies have tried to mimic Apple in their designs for touchscreen smartphones, WP7 is immediately recognisable and offers a completely different experience to any other mobile phone OS. I really like how customisable the interface is, the home screen is composed of 'live tiles' which can be added, reorganised or deleted and allow for quick access to all your most commonly used apps

The WP7 marketplace is impressive, it has a huge variety of apps which are fast and easy to download, and just as fast to uninstall. Purchases are handled via the Zune marketplace, so you will have to register your credit card info there before you can make any purchases from the marketplace, but opening an account with Zune is easy to do via the Marketplace app, and there is a huge quantity of free apps available to download which do not require a Zune account or credit card.

Overall I'm totally ecstatic about this phone - it offers everything I could want or expect from a phone, and then more. I won't be rushing to upgrade this phone before my contract is up anyway :)

If you have any questions about the Nokia Lumia 710, feel free to ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer :)