Nokia 700 Review

Introduction:

Dubbed the company's most compact smartphone to date in terms of cubic inches overall, the Nokia 700 is indeed a neatly packed tiny handset running the new Symbian Belle.

The phone has a pretty good laundry list of specs for its price point, and should appeal nicely to those who like their phones in small sizes with a variety of colors to choose from. Is this enough to battle formidable opposing hobbits like the Sony Ericsson Xperia ray? Read on to find out...

In the box:

Design:

We mentioned the Xperia ray in the intro, since that's exactly the phone that the Nokia 700 reminded us of when we grabbed it at first. The 700 is slightly thicker, but shorter and less wide, thus indeed stuffing the least cubic inches of all smartphones, although the difference is minimal. As you can imagine, it is very easy to handle and operate with one hand, and even gets lost in your palm if you have larger hands.



You can compare the Nokia 700 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The 3.2” ClearBlack AMOLED display boasts nice, saturated colors, great contrast and viewing angles, and good pixel density at 220ppi, courtesy of the typical for Symbian 360x640 resolution. To top it off, the screen is pretty bright, ensuring above average visibility outside, which we don't see often with Super AMOLED displays, for instance.


The Nokia 700 has a metallic battery cover, which comes in different colors, always matching the variety of colors the phone chassis is offered in. The chrome-like lock button, volume rocker and camera key on the right  also add some pizzazz, but are too smallish and flush with the surface to be found comfortably, and their travel is pretty shallow, especially the lock key. Below the Gorilla Glass screen protection in the front we also have three physical buttons - call, end and menu - positioned on a plastic bar. They have a good travel and click to them, but again come smallish for larger digits. The loudspeaker grill is frontal and recessed, making the phone look like a slider.

Interface, Functionality and Software:

We talked extensively about Symbian Belle and its virtues in the Nokia 701 review, and the hardware here is identical - 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. You also get 2GB of internal memory. This silicon is enough for fluid scrolling and swiping throughout the interface, with the only short delays being when you have to call the widgets list, or are starting a comparatively heavy app. The Belle interface also has a complete landscape mode, which doesn't feel like an afterthought.


We also have a very distinct haptic feedback, which really makes you feel when interacting with the screen, and thus helps while typing on the smallish 3.2” display. Typing on such a limited screen real estate can never be a perfect experience regardless of how well-spaced the virtual keyboard is, but the Nokia 700 is pretty ergonomic to hold both in landscape and in portrait modes, which aids in hitting the right keys more often than not.


With the Nokia 700 comes the QuickOffice app, which is a combined file manager/office document viewer, and you also get the mobile Adobe Reader for PDFs. We also have World Traveler for flight schedules, unit conversion and local guides plus weather reports. For the entertainment part Shazam will take care of song recognition, while both Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja come preloaded.

Internet and Connectivity:

Scrolling and panning around in the Belle browser on the Nokia 700 is fluid enough, but pinching to zoom is choppy compared to even mid-range Android handsets, especially with heavier pages. The browser is otherwise pretty functional, with its own download manager and RSS feed reader. We don't have Adobe Flash support, but rather Flash Lite 4.0, which will prevent you from playing Flash games, or streaming videos from certain sites.


The Nokia 700 is loaded to the gills with connectivity options. Apart from the penta-band HSDPA radio, which will allow you to use up to 14.4Mbps download speeds on any GSM network worldwide that supports such, it has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM Radio and transmitter, A-GPS and NFC chip for mobile payments, collecting tags, pairing or exchanging files. The NFC chip has a dedicated app, as well as video tutorials for more info. The GPS software is, as usual, the excellent Nokia Maps and Drive with maps of close to 200 countries worldwide that can be downloaded for offline use, and voice navigation in almost 100 of them, as well as 3D landmarks, live traffic and public transport in a lot of major capitals.

Camera:

There is a fixed-focus 5MP shooter with LED flash on the Nokia 700, which means you can forget about macro shots. The interface doesn't offer many features save for face recognition and contrast/exposure/sharpness adjustments. There are also a few effects you can apply, like Sepia or Black&White, as well as the handy Vivid mode, which bumps up the contrast, making them jollier to look at.


The pictures turned to be way too out of focus for our liking, thus lacking detail and some sharpness. The overly blurry results ruined most shots, not only close-ups as we would've expected from a fixed-focus cam. Otherwise color representation is accurate, and the phone doesn't over or underexpose. Video is captured at 720p with 30fps, and, while fluid, it exhibits a lot of artifacts, got underexposed and darker than the actual scene, and just decimated detail.


Multimedia:

There are photo and video editing apps preinstalled and integrated with the Gallery, which work very well, especially the picture editor, which has an abundance of options, including adding funny animations to your photos on the fly, and is with an easy to use interface.


The music player shows album art now on a bigger part of the screen, and the progress bar is fatter, making it easier to touch on the small screen of the Nokia 700. As usual, there is a sleek CoverFlow-like interface in landscape mode.

The music player keeps its good level of functionality with the equalizer presets, and the “Play via Radio” FM transmitter is present directly in the song's options. The frontal loudspeaker packs a pretty good punch for a handset so compact, but is not as powerful as the one on the Nokia N8.

The Nokia 700 video player supports DivX/Xvid files from the start, and we were able to play clips up to 720p with no issues. What is more, it even managed to run 720p MKV files, although sometimes we had troubles with reading the sound track then.

Performance:

The earpiece on the Nokia 700 is with very decent volume, and the voices coming are clear and distinct. On the other side they could hear us very well, with loud and clear voices, and the active noise cancellation filtered out all surrounding noise, leaving only what we had to say.

The 1080mAh battery is rated for 4 hours and 30 minutes of talk time in 3G mode, which is on the short side, and about 19 days on standby.

Conclusion:

We are quite pleased with the Nokia 700's compact design - the handset is very easy to handle and a pleasure to look at in one of its many colors. People who frown at the huge smartphones of today will definitely find its size appealing.

Symbian Belle is a big step up over its predecessors, taking away the right pages from the other mobile operating systems like resizable widgets, a pull-down notification bar and connectivity switches, but lacking in 3rd party apps.

We also liked that the phone supports oddball frequencies like T-Mobile in the US, plus the call quality is very good. What we didn't like were the pictures and especially video – not that we expected much from the 5MP fixed-focus shooter, but some results were appalling in the focus and detail department..

The Nokia 700 has a close rival with the Sony Ericsson Xperia ray, which is very similar in design and compactness, but carries an 8MP autofocus camera, supports Flash and has the power of Android behind it, not to mention the high pixel density. Besides, it runs for almost the same price as the Nokia 700, so there aren't many reasons not to pick the Xperia ray, unless you are an AMOLED display aficionado or dying to play with NFC .

For alternatives with a larger screen in fairly compact devices around the same price point you can look at the Samsung Galaxy W or the Sony Ericsson Xperia neo, which are with 3.7” displays, better cameras, and have the wonders of Adobe Flash and Android Market in reach.

Software version of the reviewed unit: 111.020.0308

Nokia 700 Video Review: