Nokia 7610

...mobile I was always a Nokia girl, having had a 5510, 3310 and 7210... then I turned my back on Nokia in favour of the Sharp GX-30. This phone was impressive - it was the first to have a 1 mega-pixel digital camera built into it, as well as having digital video recording facility and an SD card. But it just wasn't a Nokia... It did everything I wanted, but there was something about the usability (is that a word?!) of Nokia phones that I missed. I ...
...to...

The Nokia 7610
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The Looks:

Slightly wider than many phones, the 7610 has a sleek rectangular shape where the top left and bottom right corners are curved. The reason for the wider shape is that the screen takes priority on this phone. The keypad also follows a curved theme, which although looks as though it would be hard to use it's suprisingly easy and if you're one of those people ... more

There's so many mobiles out there that it's often difficult to choose what to go for if you're upgrading, having a change or getting your first mobile. Since my first ever mobile I was always a Nokia girl, having had a 5510, 3310 and 7210... then I turned my back on Nokia in favour of the Sharp GX-30. This phone was impressive - it was the first to have a 1 mega-pixel digital camera built into it, as well as having digital video recording facility and an SD card. But it just wasn't a Nokia... It did everything I wanted, but there was something about the usability (is that a word?!) of Nokia phones that I missed. I got used to Sharp's way of texting for example, but it just wasn't 100% as good as I remembered Nokia's texting to be. It wasn't too long before I started my search for my next phone, and, having found the digital camera impressive and suprsingly useful on my Sharp I wanted a fairly decent camera on my new phone. The Sharp was a flip phone (the first time I'd had a flip phone too), but the finish on it scuffed slightly and it soon looked older than its 6 months - I wanted a phone that looked durable and would withstand occasionally being in my bag with other things or the odd accidental drop. My search lead me to...

The Nokia 7610
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The Looks:

Slightly wider than many phones, the 7610 has a sleek rectangular shape where the top left and bottom right corners are curved. The reason for the wider shape is that the screen takes priority on this phone. The keypad also follows a curved theme, which although looks as though it would be hard to use it's suprisingly easy and if you're one of those people who text without looking you won't have a problem hitting the right keys after just a couple of practices!
The phone comes in two colour combinations - a mainly silver/white combination and a black/red combination. Other X-Press On covers are available though, which can transform the look of your phone, give it that personal feel, or just tidy it up if you've dropped it one too many times! Whilst I'm on the subject, I've found all the Nokia phones I've had withstand a knock or two very well, and although the covers may scratch slightly they're hardly visible - unlike with my Sharp phone, that although seemed great at the start, soon started to become scuffed around the edges.

Navigation:

Nokia's menu systems always seem easy to get around in my opinion. With this phone, there's a dedicated button on the keypad that brings up the menu options - unlike most Nokias where you scroll through the menu options, in this phone they're displayed on the screen as small icons and you select the icon for the area you want to go to. This looks nice on the colour screen and is easy to use and to see what you need. The four-directional button lets you quickly shift to whatever icon you want and pressing the relevant option button on the phone or pressing the middle of the directional button takes you into the menu.

Texting:

As per usual with Nokia phones texting is easy. Having a larger colour display means that plenty of characters can be displayed on the screen at once, and unlike some of the simpler Nokias the texting screen is displayed like a lined notepad. It's clearly displayed how many characters there are left in your text which is also very useful.

Camera:

Perhaps the first thing that drew me to the phone was the fact that it had a built in 1 mega pixel digital camera. Whilst this is nothing compared to the digital cameras on the market, it's pretty good for a mobile. I have a digital camera, but don't you always find that when you're out and see something that catches your eye you end up thinking 'if only I had my camera'? Well, to me, the built in camera is the next best thing to having my proper digital camera with me. One of my previous Nokia phones had a camera, but it wasn't that impressive - pictures were grainy and it was hard to tell what they were, but at 1 mega pixel they're not too bad, and if you really want to improve them they're not too hard to make improvements to on your PC with the relevant software. The only real downside is no flash - this obviously affects your picture taking in poor light.

The digital camcorder is also a bonus. I've never been one for wanting a camcorder of any kind, but my old Sharp phone had one and I soon found myself recording mini clips to share with people, for example when I got my pup and took him to the park for the first time etc. The video recording facility on the 7610 is superior to the Sharp phone in that it can record up to 10 minutes of footage (the Sharp could only handle about 2 minutes). Again, you can't expect the same quality you'd get from a gadget specifially built for video recording, but for a phone it's impressive and sound quality really isn't bad.

Extras:

Having a camera and video recorder, Nokia have kindly thrown in an Integrated Movie Director application which can be used to edit your mini movies. I've not had much of a play with this myself yet, but its a nice touch to the phone.

The phone has an ample 8 MB internal dynamic memory with 64 MB Reduced Size MultiMediaCard (MMC). To give an idea of what this can give you, the phone will let you store 200 photos as well as a few video clips and the likes.

The phone has a built in 'Notes' feature, calculator, converter (converts things like cm to inches, pounds to kilos etc), a voice recorder, clock/alarm, 'wallet' feature (a password protected area that allows you to record your card numbers including loyalty cards and the likes), calendar, to-do list, chat feature, web access, RealPlayer and much more!

The Phone In Action:

Reception quality with this phone has been great for me, so long as I've been in an area with a signal! Ciao asks for a rating of reception quality, however I believe on the whole this depends on your service provider - if there's no signal or a poor signal then no matter what phone you've got there's going to be a poor reception. Sound quality when there is a signal is great - no distortion etc.

Battery life is also not a problem with this phone. I'm probably an average user with regards to making phone calls, and I leave my phone on at all times. The battery tends to last for about 5 days before I need to charge it again, and even then it's never actually completely died on me. Charging the battery from near enough empty only takes a couple of hours, and if you just need an emergency top up if you've forgotten to charge the phone and are about to go out then 10 or 15 minutes of charge will give you more than enough battery life to last for a few calls (obviously this isn't recommended on a regular basis as it can shorten the total battery life in the long run).

The Verdict
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There's so much you can write about a mobile phone, but without realising you can find yourself regurgitating the spec as per the manufacturer's website and reading like an instruction manual. I've tried to avoid that in this review and give more of an overview of the phone and it's uses. It's much more than just something to chat on and I'm certainly impressed with the quality and ease of use of the phone.

Its plus points other than it functioning well as a mobile phone (i.e. for making phone calls on) have to be the camera features and the ease of texting (to pick out just a couple).
The niggles? There's hardly any... though it does sometimes frustrate me that it remembers where you were within a menu and next time you go to that menu it takes you back to that place - to explain: imagine you searched through your contact list to find a certain person's phone number, then, rather than exiting through the address book to the menu then closing the menu etc you just clicked the 'red phone' button which basically cancels what you're doing and takes you back to the blank screen - next time you access the contacts the first thing it'll display is that last number you looked up. It's not a big deal, and it's obviously designed to be useful, but it's taken a bit of getting used to.

As you can see, the niggle I have isn't really worth even worrying about!

Overall I'm very impressed with this phone and will definitely be keeping it for some time! It's convinced me not to leave Nokia again the next time I look to upgrade my phone and it's certainly a phone I'd recommend! (I have not included prices as they vary so often and depend on factors such as trade-ins and contracts etc - prices can easily be found by looking at service providers websites such as www.orange.co.uk, www.vodafone.co.uk, www.o2.co.uk etc).

Worthy of 5 stars * * * * * 

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