Nokia 7070 Prism Review

Introduction:

Last year Nokia released two mid-range fashion candybars – the 7500 Prism and 7900 Prism. They demonstrated  an eccentric prismatic motive and some interesting customization options by introducing changeable lines and different RGB LED lights. The clamshell 7070 Prism is a lot more simplified compared to the previous Prism models – it doesn’t even have a camera- but it offers the same exotic and attractive design at a lower price.

The package includes:

Design:

The compact clamshell form and its low weight (barely 78 grams) make it feel exceptionally comfortable in one’s pocket.



You can compare Nokia 7070 Prism with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The phone doesn’t have an additional display, just a service light, which blinks when it’s ringing or there’s a missed event. The light as well as the line circling most of the device can be either blue, or pink. Unfortunately, these features cannot be customized like with the 7500, and you’ll have to make your choice at the store. You won’t find any keys on the sides of the phone – there is only a 2.5mm headphones jack, connectors for a data cable and the charger.


The 1.8-inch display has a typical low budget resolution of 128x160 and supports 65k colors. The overall image is heavily pixelized and colorless, and as an additional drawback you’ll find it very difficult to use it in direct sunlight.

All the keys (functional, send and end keys, 5-way D-pad, keyboard) are with prismatic shape, which makes them pretty hard to press. Bearing in mind their limited motion and pale backlight in the end you really get a terrible keyboard.


We also want to note 7070 Prism’s poor build quality. The materials are nice and they don’t give a feeling of something cheap (what it is), but when it’s closed you can clearly feel the play between the two parts.

Even though the phone’s functionality is pretty standard, the 7070 managed to surprise us. The built-in themes match perfectly the overall appearance. Although nothing on this display can be really beautiful, they still provide a pleasure experience to the eye.


Luckily, the phonebook is not prismatic, since this could have been somewhat confusing. It has a capacity of 1000 contacts, for which you can add a lot of details (e-mail, position, address, birth day, picture, etc.)  Of course, as a low-end phone, we cannot expect to be able to search by last name.


The organizer functions are up to the mark and include alarms, calendar, to-do’s, notes, calculator, timer, and stopwatch. Don’t mention it to your relatives if you want to have an excuse when you forget their next birthday, otherwise they will accuse you of not being able to use your organizer. There’s also a voice recorder with a limit of one minute and comparatively low quality.


Although we don’t think anyone would actually enjoy messaging on the 7070’s subpar keyboard, we do have to note that the message menu offers some decent options. You can send basic, multimedia, fast (short, but are displayed directly on the screen) and audio messages. We were  pleasantly surprised by the presence of automatic settings for the popular e-mails, which saves you from some considerable pain.



The model is dual-band with American and European versions. We were totally stunned by the HTML browser, which single-handedly opened our web site plus the flash animations, features a pan view and develops a download speed of 7.2 Mbit/s! We’re, just kidding, of course. The phone offers a basic WAP browser, which is rather clumsy; the lack of EGDE  speed also slows it down to some extent. However, you can still open sites like Google, which is just fine for this type of device.

The phone doesn’t feature a music player, but supports MP3 files. Uploading such files to the phone will be quite difficult, considering the lack of Bluetooth, infrared port or a data cable in the package. The camera is also missing.

Performance:

It is very important for the low-end phones to sound good during a call, as they do not offer many other functions to compensate. We’re rather disappointed by the 7070 in this aspect, since we got a lot of complains that our voices sounded sharp and unclear. It was the same form our side so we suggest that you should turn the volume down, because you’ll find it painfully annoying. The loudspeaker is comparatively usable, although we couldn’t understand all of what was said through it.

For such a simple phone we were left with the impression that the battery is quite poor – 5 hours of talk time or 480 hours of stand-by. Just for the comparison, with Sony Ericsson Z320 you can talk up to 7 hours.

Conclusion:

Good appearance is a big plus for a low-range phone. In relation to this – Nokia 7070 Prism performs really good, having in mind that its design is somewhat different from the rest of the cheap phones.

Unfortunately, this is at the expense of unhandy keys, which on their side ruin all chances for comfortable writing of SMS and e-mails. Factor in poor sound quality during a call, and in the end  you get a phone that’s only good enough for the hardcore fans of the Prism. In case you are not one of them, Sony Ericsson Z320 is a good alternative at a similar price, and it even has a camera.