Nokia 7610

The Nokia 7610 is a nice looking phone, with unconventional curves and a white and grey styling that will appeal to many phone connoisseurs. It has a very prominent screen, capable of 176 x 208 display and very passable audio quality.

The number pad is a little compact for our liking, with buttons that appear to be more designed for style than function. They're not square, but thin and curved, which takes some getting used to. The directional keypad, used for navigating through Symbian OS 7.0s Series 60 operating system, was a little stiff, and we constantly found the cursor going in unwanted directions.

The OS itself is colourful and fun, packed with features and designed for usability. We've always found that getting stuff done in Symbian OS was fast, easy and intuitive, and the 7610 is no exception. It has a media player that supports, among other things, MP3 audio and MPEG-4 video, a calendar, contacts, games, XHTML browser and messaging and email. Symbian OS also supports Java. The accompanying PC synching software, Nokia PC Suite, is also quite decent.

The phone only has 8MB of internal memory, but also comes with a 64MB Reduced Size MMC--which can be upgraded if you need extra storage space. Given the high quality of the camera in the phone, you might very well need it.

Perhaps the 7610's biggest appeal is its camera. No more 640 x 480 shots with this phone. The camera in the 7610 is capable of 1 megapixel shots, resolutions up to 1152 x 864, making it comparable with the Sony Ericsson S700 and other advanced camera phones. They were decent quality shots, too, and there was no delay when taking photos (although there is a rather nasty delay when saving photos). They weren't equivalent in quality to shots from a real camera, of course, but good nonetheless. The phone, fortunately, will automatically resize photos that are larger than 100KB in order to squeeze them down to the maximum size supported by MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). It also has a night camera mode and even some rudimentary software for combining captured video clips for sending over MMS.

In some aspects of its design, Nokia has favoured form over function, but overall the 7610 is a fun phone, with a great camera, good software and USB and Bluetooth connectivity.