By June 4, 2012

Nokia Lumia 710 Review

lumia710 Nokia have been and quite possibly still are one of the most influential manufacturers of mobile phones to date, so when they announced that they were struggling this surprised me a lot, as they were at one time (before Apple’s dominance) the number 1 mobile phone company in the world! But then they announced that were partnering with Microsoft to make Windows Phone their ‘Flagship’ Operating system, I was quite worried for them at this point because of the Windows platform being so young at this point.

Then there was the huge announcement of 2 brand new Nokia Windows Phones! My worry started to fade as what I saw was the Lumia 800 which is their flagship device for the moment and the phone that I have here.the Lumia 710, this basically is just a slightly smaller, thicker, cheaper version of its sibling as it has the same processor and operating system but in cheaper packaging.

How did the little sibling perform during testing?

To find out you will have to read on, but only after you’ve made sure to watch the unboxing video of this lovely little phone.

The 10 Second Review:

  • Product: Nokia Lumia 710
  • Price: from £150 pay as you go, from free on £18.50 tariffs and from £230 Sim Free.
  • Summary: A lovely phone that is very nicely built but honestly I believe that it would be so much better with the ability to expand the storage! But overall a very good windows 7 phone.
  • Best of: Great Looks, Nokia Applications, Screen quality, camera
  • Worst of: Limited OS, Slightly annoying settings menu, not enough quality apps in the marketplace.
  • Buy From: Various
  • Also Consider: ZTE Tania, HTC Radar, Nokia Lumia 800

 

What’s in the box?

  • Nokia Lumia 710
  • MicroUSB Sync/Charge cable
  • Headset
  • UK 3-Pin charger
  • Quick Start guide
  • Warranty and safety information
  • Cyan Spare battery/back cover

 

Nokia Lumia 710 Specification:

  • Dimensions -119 x 62.4 x 12.5 mm, 81.1 cc
  • Weight -125.5 g
  • Display – TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colours
  • Screen – 480 x 800 pixels, 3.7 inches (~252 ppi pixel density)
  • Corning Gorilla Glass
  • 3.5mm headset jack
  • Memory – 8 GB storage, 512 MB RAM
  • HSDPA 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
  • Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
  • Bluetooth – v2.1 with A2DP, EDR
  • MicroUSB v2.0
  • Camera – 5 MP, 2592?1944 pixels, autofocus, LED flash.
  • Video -  720p @30fps
  • OS – Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5 Mango
  • CPU -1.4 GHz Scorpion
  • Accelerometer, proximity, compass
  • SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email, IM
  • Stereo FM radio with RDS
  • GPS with A-GPS support
  • Colours – Black, White (front)/ black, white, cyan, fuchsia, yellow (back)
  • Battery – Standard battery, Li-Ion 1300 mAh (BP-3L)

 

Highlights

  • Really nice design with the changeable back covers
  • Snappy 1.4Ghz processor
  • Nokia applications are really quite good
  • Nice solid build quality
  • Surprisingly good camera

Lowlights

  • Limited operating system
  • Slightly annoying settings menu
  • Marketplace is very scarce of great applications and games are way overpriced
  • Without the Nokia apps it would simply be ‘Another windows 7 phone’

 

Review

There are a growing number of Windows 7 Phone devices coming to market now and with the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft I imagine that there will be a nice selection available to choose from by the end of 2012.

Nokia though are relative newbies to Windows phone so to begin with they released 2 smartphones, both of which were greeted with similar excitement as both the Lumia 800 and the that I have here the 710 are very nice to look at which is always a good start. Originally when I was asked to review this device I was really excited as it would be the first time I’d used windows phone 7, but I am sure that you all want to know how I got on?.

 

Build Quality and design

Nokia as a mobile phone manufacturer for so many years have always been renowned for build quality, so with a change of strategy regarding which operating system they were going to use as their flagship has the emphasis on great build quality changed at all? No it certainly hasn’t as the build quality on this device although it is the more ‘budget’ of the 2 devices is really good.

Although this phone is noticeably cheaper than its sibling the Lumia 800 it doesn’t skimp on build quality at all, yes it doesn’t have the same top end of the market feel but for a mid-range smartphone it is well above average which is awesome from Nokia. It is quite a lot lighter than other devices in its category and I think this has a lot to do with its rounded edges and plastic materials, which to be honest I really liked. The phone also feels great in the palm of your hand as the back cover feels relatively slip-free which was nice.

Another thing that Nokia have always seemed to succeed with is making their phones look desirable, and that really is apparent once again with the Lumia 710 as when I first took it out of its box I was stunned at how awesome it really looks! It comes with a choice of 2 back covers, a black one and a cyan one (my personal favourite as it’s something a bit different) and both look really good when on the phone, the cyan cover really makes the device stand out from the crowd. Talking of standing out from the crowd Nokia have also rounded the edges of the device to create the look of a slightly smaller device I think, they certainly succeeded in impressing me from the off anyway. I reviewed the Nokia N8 a long time ago and really loved the design of that device and Nokia have kind of made this phone look a bit like the N8 which I personally really like.

The Lumia 800 has touch sensitive menu buttons underneath the screen and Nokia thought that they would change it up and add 1 physical button with 3 buttons built in instead, I think this set up really works too as I still prefer physical buttons as there’s less chance of them failing along the line. There is a dedicated camera button which really comes in handy as you will hopefully see later on in the review, there were unfortunately though 2 little niggly problems that I found with 2 of the other physical buttons around the edge of the device. The first of which is the fact that the volume up/down rocker feels really flimsy, which is a shame as it takes away from the quality of the product a little but I wouldn’t worry too much as it did still work perfectly. The second issue I found was that the power button is way too small! Normally I can press the power button to wake the phones I use up without looking as they are usually so simple to get used to, but with this one I found myself looking for a larger button quite often so just had to check where it was, a silly little issue I know but it really did bug me.

There is one pretty awful thing that I should mention about this device, there isn’t the option of expanding the memory which means that you are stuck with 8GB! Now I don’t know about you guys but this is a deal breaker for me because I am the type of person that can fill 8GB of storage so quickly so I always find it quite nice to have the option of inserting a Micro SD card to create more space for my files. So to not have this option was super disappointing for me but as far as I am currently aware there isn’t a single Windows 7 phone out at the moment that has the option of expanding the memory, please correct me if I am wrong though as I am intrigued to know if there is, now surely for this reason Microsoft must be considering adding this function at some point? I think it has something to do with the Operating system being incompatible which is baffling to me.

 

Software

As I mentioned a little earlier I had never used Windows Phone 7 previous to me receiving this device so I am a novice so please bear with me but I will try my best to explain how my experience with the OS was plus how everything works as much as I can.

The first thing I will say is that I really like the operating system a lot, first of all because it is so simple to get used to that I found myself really enjoying everything about it in about a day which I rarely do with something new. The operating system also looks gorgeous with its live tiles on the home screen and the dedicated applications really look lovely too as you will hopefully be able to see in a little while.

Below are some photos of the initial set up process that you will be asked to go through when you first turn the Lumia 710 on, unfortunately there still isn’t a way of taking ‘screenshots’ so I had to take photos instead.

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Windows Phone 7 is still relatively new in terms of mobile operating systems, plus there’s the fact that there aren’t really that many windows phones on the market at the moment, but I do think that due to its simple appeal that many people could be adopting this operating system in the next 12 months as it progresses, the main reason I think this is because I was an instant fan of the way that the user interface looked and felt while using it and I’m usually not one to make an instant decision on something.

Just like Android and even iOS, Windows phone 7 has its own unique way of unlocking a device as all you have to do is swipe the screen up to the top and you’ll have unlocked your phone, but if you don’t swipe fast enough or high enough the screen will simply bounce back to the bottom, nifty.

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Moving on from the lock screen to the 1 home screen, and yes I did say 1! But don’t be alarmed as it is essentially 1 continuous stream of ‘live tiles’ which animate in their own little way depending on the application type, an example of this is the people application which animates all of the time as it scrolls through the masses of content that you are able to synchronise with it such as Facebook, Twitter and even your phonebook. You can simply keep adding tiles to the home screen until it tells you that the screen is full, unfortunately I didn’t add enough to warrant this message so I’m unsure if it even has a limit.

The process of adding/removing or changing a tile is very simple too as all you have to do is hold down on one to remove it, or hold a shortcut in the list of application to the right of the home screen and an option to ‘pin to home screen’ will appear. Very simple but really what more would you want? There is however one more little bit of customisation that you can perform on the actual tiles themselves, you are able to change the colour from a list of maybe 5-6 but mine were red due to the device being a Vodafone phone and I think the colour will come different depending on where you buy it from, for example the O2 version comes as dark blue and the Orange one comes as Orange, and so on and so forth.

Below is a couple of photos of the way that I set the home screen up for my personal use but I do assure you that the way that Microsoft have designed this OS it allows every individual to customise their screen to the way that they like it.

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I mentioned in the above paragraphs the ‘application list’ you access this with either a swipe to the left or by pressing the little arrow to the right of the tiles and the list will appear, this list is where any application will appear once you have downloaded it from the marketplace, mush like on android all apps are laid out in alphabetical order for easy access.

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The last section on the software is the settings menu, which quite frankly I didn’t like at all! Is it so limited in some areas such as the mobile network settings which were an absolute flipping pain! I will explain why when I talk about signal and call quality etc later in the review. I just found that the settings were so annoying, for someone who is used to everything being laid out in a simple easy to use way with iOS I found myself cursing at this phone most days due to the fact that nothing seemed to do anything I asked it to!

There just aren’t enough sections or options to make any sense to I found myself getting so frustrated by this fact, the biggest example of this was the fact that the ‘wireless network settings’ (shown below) didn’t contain anything even close to what I would consider a logical amount of options, because this phone uses the Micro SIM format such as iPhone there are bound to be some technical issues but the issues that I found were quite severe if anything because the phone just refused to connect to the 3G network on Vodafone! I am on Vodafone pay as you go with my blackberry and get 3G signal everywhere where I live so I know that it exists but when I went to change the settings to maybe add the network settings manually there was only a ‘Add APN’ option which should in theory work straight away automatically anyway considering I was trying to use a Vodafone sim card; the problem though is even when I entered the correct network settings the phone just refused to connect to the data network at all! Even 2G didn’t work!

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Internet and E-Mail

A section that I am always looking forward to testing on a new device is the internet browser, simply because I browse the web a lot (mostly for things I know that I can’t afford!) but the principle is that I use the internet a lot for all sorts of things so I require my smartphone to be up to the task.

I was excited to start using the browser on the 710 because I know that Nokia devices, regardless of what OS they are running always seem to perform quite well in this area. Was it any good though? Well yes it really was, I was surprised at how good it was in fact having read reviews of other people being unimpressed by the browsing performance, I did have my doubts but to be honest what I say to those people is.you have really missed out on a lovely browsing experience with crisp imagery due to the 3.7″ display and quite snippy loading times due to the very impressive 1.4Ghz single-core processor that at times feels like a dual-core.

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As you can hopefully see in the above pictures, the web pages are very readable even when zoomed out which is how I mostly browse on my iPhone, so to find this on a windows phone was a refreshing surprise.

The browser has features that we would all expect such as the ability to have multiple windows at once with the press of a button on screen, it also features the ability to revert to the mobile or desktop version of a website, but this obviously depends on whether the company has a mobile version to choose from. There is also the obvious browsing history, favourites and there is also a pretty cool feature in which you can pin a web page to your start menu, which is basically the application list. Overall I would say that internet explorer on windows phone 7 is just as impressive as safari is for iOS and that’s saying something!

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Moving onto e-mail and I have to say first of all that due to this device being a windows phone there is the need to have a windows live account such as a Hotmail or a live.co.uk e-mail address, this is because having this allows you to access Xbox Live and the windows marketplace but in this section it is relevant only because of the e-mail usage.

E-mail on the Lumia 710 is ok and I only say that it is ok because I found a few issues that I basically couldn’t cope with if I owned a windows phone 7 device. The first problem that I found was that I had to continually manually refresh each e-mail account just to receive an e-mail! I even had the auto synch option turned on and it refused to receive mail that I had already got on my other 2 devices, so obviously this annoyed me greatly and even when I did get the e-mails the actual applications weren’t as good as I’d first hoped, this is because I the images didn’t always appear as they should and the text was so small with no option to enlarge it either!

The below images are of the Hotmail application and hopefully you can see what I mean about the small writing.

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Unfortunately the story doesn’t change at all with the other e-mail client installed on windows phone 7, I set up my Gmail account and I rarely used it to be truthful because I am used to getting my mail pushed to my devices regularly so for this phone seemingly not wanting to comply I got fed up and used my other phones instead for e-mail. It is a real shame I think, because the applications again are really cool! So cool that I want someone to bring an application out for iOS or android that looks like it but obviously works better!

Here are some images of the other client I mentioned.

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Social

As Windows Phone 7 is relatively new this means that some of you won’t have seen the social side of the OS yet, which is possibly one of the reasons that you are reading this review so I will oblige by giving you a brief look at social networking on Windows and the Lumia 710.

There are 2 ways of using the main 2 social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter. The first application available to the user is the most unusual in my personal opinion, the application is called simply ‘People’ and basically what this is-is an app that unifies your inboxes from e-mail right through to Facebook and Twitter into one apparently simple place. I say apparently because I got so easily confused by the app because there doesn’t seem to be any sort of logic to the way that messages are laid out as most of the time there are lots of tweets, Facebook updates and e-m ails coming in at the same time so it really did become a mess for me, hence why I stopped using it to be honest as I don’t like unified inbox apps anyway but this one is awful.

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The application has a few wrap around pains to it, the one shown above is the profile page with all contacts and your personal profile to view etc, the second pain is where all of the ‘updates’ are from whichever accounts you’ve set up so for example I set up my Twitter, Facebook and E-mail accounts, but you can also set up your Flickr account if you so wish but as I mentioned before the pictures the app really isn’t something worthy shouting about.

I told you guys that there are 2 ways of sending your tweets and Facebook updates, well the second way is by using the official applications that you can download from the Windows Marketplace for free. The applications are both beautiful if I’m honest, they aren’t the best apps I’ve used but they are the best to look at as you will hopefully be able to see below.

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Obviously you will see that the above pictures of the Twitter app and don’t worry you will get to see the Facebook application too. The app is a lot like any other on any other platform in that it works really well when receiving tweets really quickly and also it allows you to send tweets with consummate ease which is always good. There are the usual sections that you would find on iOS or android, Timeline, mentions, messages and lists as well as there being a settings menu too which allows you to look at your own profile to change your message or add more profiles as it also supports multiple twitter accounts.

Facebook works much the same as the Twitter app to be honest, it works really well and is really nice to use, both apps aren’t quite as quick to complete tasks as others I’ve used in the past but they work a lot better than the people app that’s for sure. The only downside that I found with the Facebook app in particular is the text being very small, so if you have bad eyesight I wouldn’t recommend using apps such as this one. Also as an example of why the apps aren’t quite as good as on iOS for example is that you have to manually refresh both apps to get anything new, only a slight inconvenience but enough to bug you after a while of using them.

Here are the promised Facebook pictures for you.

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Windows Marketplace and Xbox Live

Very much like the other big boys of the operating system world, Windows has its own marketplace where you are able to download applications and games from and its literally called Windows marketplace, very apt!

This area is where Windows Phone 7 is majorly behind the other 2 huge hitters as the marketplace capacity has only recently reached around 60,000 apps in it, which compared to iOS which is on 600,000 and counting and Android, which isn’t that far behind on just over 400,000 this is way behind and it really shows with the calibre of content available.

What I mean by this is there isn’t really that many apps that people will want to use at all! I had the phone for a week and a bit and I honestly only found around 10 apps that I use on my iPhone which to me is pathetic! Yes the marketplace is improving but the content at the moment isn’t very good at all.

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So that’s the marketplace, now onto something close to my heart as a gamer, that is of course the Xbox live app! I was so excited to use this app because as I mentioned I am an avid gamer so wanted to see how it worked etc. Unfortunately though I was most disappointed with it! Mainly because of the ridiculous prices of games, for example angry birds is £3.99! Yes it’s a very addictive game but no way would I pay that just for the Xbox live achievements and I don’t know anyone that would to be honest. You can however ‘try before you buy’ which I thought was pretty cool because during testing it did at least allow me to test the gaming capabilities of the 710 out. You can download a demo of most of the games in the marketplace so I decided to try angry birds and fruit ninja, what I found is that they played really smoothly and looked really good too but again I wouldn’t pay the stupid prices just for pretty good.

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Obviously though the Xbox live app isn’t all about playing games at all, it is also about having your Xbox 360 live account on the move with you. The app allows you to see who is online at any given time and it also allows you chat to them which is cool if you like that sort of thing, plus it allows you to modify your Avatar with lots of choices of clothes, props etc available to choose from. In this respect I did like the application but the gaming side of it really lets it down.

 

Calendar

I don’t know if you’ve the post on the tracyandmatt.co.uk website recently about Orange favouring Windows Phone for business? Well if you didn’t it was showing an image of this particular smartphone with ‘Nokia phones that mean business’ with the image of the Nokia Lumia 710 below it pointing to the fact that maybe Windows Phones are great for business.

Well having used the device for a while I decided that that is partly true and also partly not, the partly true bit applies to the fact that the OS possesses one of the best calendar apps I’ve ever used! It is so super simple to use and is very clear too which would be brilliant for businessmen/women for their everyday life with their masses of meetings etc.

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As you will see above, the app has a real stylish look to it as well as it being really tidy too, the app uses your synched e-mail accounts to find calendars, in this case it was using my Hotmail calendar which had surprisingly little on it! I don’t often use a calendar on the PC as I’ve got my Blackberry for that sort of stuff as it’s just easier for me, but I imagine anyone who owns a windows phone today would have just as easy time logging their everyday events as this app really is brilliant.

 

Signal and call quality

This is an area of testing that I don’t really enjoy because in my everyday life I very rarely make a phone call to anyone, how nice am I?! No I generally just use instant messaging or text to communicate with my loved ones and friends so phone calls tend to take a back step.

In the case of the Nokia Lumia 710 though I did use it to call a lot of people for some odd reason, must have been in one of those moods! What I found when using the phone for calls was that signal rarely dropped if at all which improved call quality which was superb from the very start anyway. I did, to be honest expect this phone to be great when it came to calls though as Nokia in the past have really impressed me with call quality on the likes of the N8.

There was very little back ground noise even if there was if that makes sense, what I’m trying to say is that the handset did a great job of cancelling out any external noise which impressed me.

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Camera and video recording

Moving onto a feature that I do tend to enjoy when reviewing a new smartphone, and that is the camera which is an area that the Lumia 710 didn’t disappoint. Nokia are renowned for making top-notch cameras so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this to test it out in all sorts of scenarios. One of the disappointments for me with the camera itself was, that the phone doesn’t come equipped with a Carl Zeiss lens which I found quite strange considering its brother the Lumia 800 does and Nokia haven’t exactly skimped when it comes to the specifications on this device. Nonetheless I was willing to see if it could still create great photos, which it can!

I wouldn’t say the quality of photo is as good as its predecessors but it’s definitely great for a backup if you have forgotten your everyday camera.

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It was great to have auto focus built in which helped me a lot as my hands can be very shaky at times. One other feature I tested on the camera was whether I could take a good enough photo on the move; unfortunately the results weren’t very good, there is a couple of seconds lag when the camera focusses on a subject to the shutter capturing the photo which is the reason I’m not going to show any photos to you because they really were unimpressive to say the least, the photos turned out to be very blurry and unrecognisable, so not the best camera to use if you are taking photos of a sport such as at a football match. Overall though the camera on this device is pretty good and it certainly takes crisp photos you will want to keep, most of the time anyway.

The camera application was simple to use and had a lot of helpful settings that improved the image quality when chosen, such as the scene modes so for instance when I chose the macro scene mode along with the macro focus mode the images as you can see above turned out really nicely, and it was the same for any settings that I chose meaning that for a change most of the settings on a smartphone camera actually did something!

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Obviously with a camera comes a gallery where all of your photos and video recording go once you’ve taken them, on this phone it was nice enough as it displayed the images really well without too much of a fuss, which at the end of the day is what a gallery should be like really.

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Video recording on the Lumia 710 is nothing more than average, which I expected really as the lens is not the best but it does an ok job of recording in 720p HD but it isn’t spectacular which brings me to my reason for not showing you a recording. The reason that I haven’t provided a short HD clip for you guys is because I think it would be difficult to show you a decent clip, simply because the recordings always turned out to be average. The image would be laggy and slightly blurred the minute that you move, which takes away from the quality dramatically so I didn’t think that you guys would want to see something like that.

 

Media

There are 2 Music Applications on the Nokia Lumia 710, the first is almost a carbon copy of the mega failed ‘Zune player’ that was released some time ago to go up against the likes of the mighty Apple iPod range and even Sony’s Walkman range of devices, the thing is though it flopped so terribly that I personally have never seen one! The second music player is Nokia’s own music app which is self-titled but I will go onto talk about this one a little later.

Anyway back to the application and I have to say that I really like it a lot, it’s hard to explain why really but I will have a go. The app is quite simple in design but at the same time it is also very stylish which personally is all I’m looking for from a music player as to be honest I just want to listen to my music so I don’t need anything fancy to do that.

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There are both good and bad points about the music player with the good outweighing the bad in my eyes, to the good first then and I would like to say emphatically that the music playback is awesome! Through a very good set of dedicated headphones the sound is crisp and the bass is impressive too which I didn’t expect if I’m being totally honest, my view is obviously based on the failing of the original Zune player but I’m happy to say that this version is excellent. During music playback the album artwork is displayed to the left of the screen, a little odd if I’m honest as on most other music players its either displayed as a full screen with the controls over the top or smack in the middle but hey this is Microsoft and they do enjoy tinkering. Following on from my previous comment about what sort of layout I’ve seen previously I was quite surprised to see that the skip and play/pause buttons were at the top of the page above the artwork, it’s slightly unnatural to reach up to the top of the page as opposed to reaching to the bottom which is so simple, an example of this layout not working is when I was walking the family dog down the road I decided to slap some music on but a track that I wasn’t in the mood for came on so I wanted to skip it and of course at this point I only had 1 hand free, well I found myself having to stop walking to use the other hand so I didn’t strangle the dog!

There is a pretty sweet little feature built into the player that I didn’t expect to see, if the Zune marketplace finds that an artist is in its database then it will display a picture of them in the background, just an aesthetic thing but I quite liked it, when it worked!

The application also consists of a videos section, which is where if you have any on the device storage your videos would be displayed, but also if you download a dedicated Video application such as Vevo, then this will integrate into the app and it will show you your video history which could also include your YouTube history which is very cool.

As for video itself I was very impressed with the quality on the Lumia 710, the playback was very smooth and relatively lag free with the only downfall in this area being my internet connection! GRR! Unfortunately regarding online video YouTube is not yet an application on Windows Phone but.playback was still very good indeed which I was very pleased with; the one thing letting video playback down though is the external speaker as it is quite poor, which is a real shame because I would have expected better from Nokia.

Finally within the Zune app is an FM radio app which requires a headset to be plugged in and a Podcast area which is pretty self-explanatory.

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The second of the music apps is similar in some ways to the Zune player but it does have 1 huge difference, it is dedicated to music only. Plus whereas the Zune player application is connected to the Zune marketplace, the Nokia Music app is connected to Nokia’s very own MP3 store where you can buy music similarly to the Zune marketplace.

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The most unique feature of the Nokia music application is the Mix Radio feature, this is something that allows you to basically listen to internet radio, it has different Genres of music to choose from and when you’ve chosen one it will play the chosen category almost on shuffle, which is a feature that reminds me of Last FM because this is exactly how Last FM works, it takes your chosen category of music and literally plays a ‘Radio’ of similar bands with that genre attached to their band name. One feature to the Mix radio that Last FM does not have is the option of downloading the music to listen to at a later date which I also thought was pretty cool.

 

Nokia Apps

Nokia with their newfound partnership with the mighty Microsoft have managed to showcase their own applications to showcase what their devices can do, that other Windows Phones can’t. What they’ve done is provided their users with a range of applications to further enhance their Windows Phone experience, starting with the smaller of the applications which is called App highlights. This is an application designed to show Nokia’s consumers the best apps and games to download on their devices, so I suppose you could it a clever marketing strategy from Nokia and Microsoft really because it is basically a showcase of the best apps currently available, I personally didn’t find it useful but I’m sure that some will do.

The most important of the Nokia apps is called Nokia Drive which is a satellite navigation application that really is awesome! It makes paying for the Tom-tom or Co-pilot apps on iOS or Android look daft and you get it pre-installed for free on all Nokia Windows Phones!

The app provides turn-by-turn voice guidance (when the voices have been installed) and it didn’t fail to take me to where I wanted to go, which I’m afraid to say that my own Tom-tom start has done a couple of times!

Below are a few images for you to see the application, unfortunately I totally forgot to turn the GPS on when I took the photos so I apologise in advance but you can still get the gist of the app.

As well as Nokia Drive there is also a downloadable application, again made by Nokia called Nokia Maps and this application is almost identical to the pre-installed Bing Maps but Nokia Maps for me comes out on top because it does seem to work much better.

Some more images for you below of both the Nokia Maps app and Bing Maps.

 

Microsoft Office

One thing that really sets Windows Phone apart from the crowd is the Microsoft Office mobile integration; I personally found the user experience to be brilliant although it is a little basic but for what it is I think it’s the best mobile office app around.

In the office app you get, Word, Excel, Publisher, and OneNote. The app I used most was Word as I wrote most of the Otone Aporto speaker review on the Lumia 710 using this application and I found it to be quite good as it worked really quickly and didn’t lag behind how fast I was typing which was good considering I’ve become quite adept at typing quite rapidly on touch screen devices now.

There are a few of places that you can save your work to, the phones internal storage (not recommended as it will fill up very quickly) or another one, which I preferred using was SkyDrive which comes with 25GB of free storage to any user, this is thought was brilliant as it meant that I could save the work on the phone and it would immediately be available on the computer for me to carry on working away. There are 2 other ways of saving work, Office 365 and SharePoint, neither of which I’ve used before.

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Battery Life and Performance

Smartphones aren’t the best at keeping battery juice for longer than a day these days, with the biggest culprits being android devices. So with a new operating system and a new vision from Nokia how have they done with the Lumia 710’s battery life? The answer is in 1 word.Amazing! I managed to get a massive 2 and a half days of battery life out of medium to heavy use! That is literally unheard of in a smartphone and I can only put it down to the operating system and the really great build quality from Nokia as I was stunned by the sheer length of time this phone lasted for me, I mean I wasn’t just sending a couple of texts every hour or making 1 phone call every 6, I was watching YouTube content, browsing the web, browsing twitter and Facebook etc so I wasn’t exactly watching how much I used the device. Extremely impressed by what Nokia have achieved with this device’ battery life I really am.

As for the performance of the device I can’t provide a benchmark screenshot for you as this is windows phone and such an app doesn’t exist, but what I can tell you is that I didn’t notice at any time during my time with the phone any lag, glitches or anything to suggest that the 1.4Ghz processor was struggling at all, so here is another thumbs up for Nokia!

 

Conclusion

Wow! At the end of another review and this really has been an eventful one with so much more to talk about than usual, with this being my very first windows phone 7 device I thought that I should try at least to get all of the features of the OS as well as the device in the review, mainly to give you guys a more rounded opinion from myself on all aspects of the phone.

Overall I have really enjoyed my time with the Lumia 710 but I have to be honest and say that until the Marketplace gets stocked with more apps that I would use, and the OS becomes more useable in every area then I could never own one. I say this with slight sadness because I really did have high hopes, not just for this phone but for the operating system as a whole, the device has really impressed me but it is let down by the OS installed on it a little bit.

 

Review by: Chris

Posted in: Phones

About the Author:

More than 20 years in the IT industry. Blogging with a passion and thirst for new technology since 2005.
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