Nokia 7900 Prism Review

Introduction:

Many of us, mobile phone fans, have repeatedly faced the dilemma of whether to pick a unit featuring numerous functions, or one with a good design. Unquestionably, as we have witnessed, this is a consequence of the fact that phone manufacturers tend to compete in only one of the above aspects, leaving aside the other. However, more and more companies have recently started, and very actively at that, to aim at filling this market niche, i.e. combining functions and attractive design. The new 7900 Prism model testifies to Nokia’s aspiration towards achieving this goal. Being a variant of the Prism concept, it resembles Nokia 7500, but is a representative of a higher class. Besides the increased number of functions, Nokia 7900 Prism will impress you with its aluminum housing, one that is even slimmer and cleaner as a design. Undoubtedly, the model has been targeted at younger users, who are looking for something stylish yet extravagant rather than the conservative trend in models such as 8600 Luna and the 8800 series.



The package includes:

• Nokia 7900 Prism;
• MicroUSB cable – CA-101;
• Leather case;
• User’s manual booklet;
• Headphones – HS82
• Nokia Standard Charger AC-6.

Design:

Nokia 7900 is a candybar phone that will feel comfortably in your hand and pleasant to touch on its aluminum corpus. Due to the solid construction one will not hear any disturbing creaking or other noise made by rickety parts while handling the device.

The entire front is made of one piece smoked glass, with an anti-reflective coating. The same type of glass is also used in another high-class designer phone: 8600 Luna. Positioning the display under this cover and the plain black of the inactive keypad both contribute to rendering the design more pleasurable by simplifying it. Regrettably, though, the glass is time and again covered by fingerprints, so one will need to often clean it.

Like in Nokia 7500 Prism, the new unit disposes of a 2 inch display with a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels reproducing up to 16.7 million colors. The image has a well-saturated and vivid coloration, and, what is more, the availability of a light sensor contributes to regulating its brightness depending on the environment. Seeing the displayed image is trouble-free at bright daylight: it will be so, however, only in case you have cleaned the one piece glass from fingerprints beforehand; failure to do this will result in an entire loss of the ability to discriminate whatsoever on the greasy screen.

All buttons are located below the display and are grouped so tight next to each other as not to have any distance between them. The numeric pad keys are triangular, which creates the overall illusion of a set of diamonds. The plastic, used in their manufacturing, is darker, rendering the digits very hard to notice when the pad is not lit. Being of plain black coloration, they match the design fairly well, while some contrast is brought about by the silverfish D-pad and the navigation buttons, which remain white regardless of the mode.

In order to achieve the good aesthetic appearance of the phone though, the Finnish company have made a compromise on their location, shape, and size. Triangles waste precious space and thus the keys have to be made smaller, which would not be the case, were they of some standard shape. One can only press them by the tip of the finger, which will lead to its premature exhaustion, especially when doing a job that takes longer than simply dialing a phone number. Good news is, however, that despite being almost at the panel’s level, they feel soft at touch and respond with a good tactile feedback.

In addition, aiming to preserve the design line of the phone, the D-pad is manufactured in the shape of a rhombus. It has a relief surface and is easy to press, also featuring a good tactile feedback. The remaining control pad buttons are: 2 soft keys, and the call/end ones.

For customers with various tastes, the phone offers a choice of 49 keypad lighting colors in a palette. This effect has been achieved through the use of RGB LEDs that enable color alteration. In addition, there are also service lights in the upper part, which will be lit with in the color, user-set for the pad. This is an interesting concept of the manufacturers, suggesting they have made great effort to pay the due attention to even smallest details with a view to improving the phone’s design.



It is not typical nowadays that a phone would lack buttons on the sides but this is precisely what we notice here. One might think of the excuse that manufacturers have attempted to simplify the design line as much as possible. On the other hand, though, this may be inconvenient when the user tries to turn on the camera or increase the volume.

In the upper part you will find a microUSB connector, which is universal and serves as a socket for charging, as well as a computer and additional accessory (for example, a handsfree) connection one. The only item to be found on the lower part, is the microphone.

When looking at the back of the phone, one will notice that the entire surface of the lid has small triangles engraved on it, adding to the diamond-like illusion. It is made of aluminum, with only a small section at the bottom made of plastic. It is also easy to make out two shades of black, used for coloration here. One is a bit darker than the other, which results in a very pleasant contrast. Similarly to Nokia 5700, the camera here is rhombus-shaped and the triangular flashlight is on its left. They are positioned in the upper back part of the unit; the loudspeaker is located on their right: for the latter, the designers have once again resorted to the triangular shape.

It is fairly easy to remove the back lid, done only by a slight sliding downward. It moves along grooves on both sides of the unit. As opposed to the many phones where this method is used, much too often leading to the lid going out while one is trying to fix it into place, the lid in 7900 partly covers the upper side, which feature allows for its smooth removing and putting. Having removed it, the user is once again convinced that the designers have indeed paid attention to even the minute details: a considerable section of the inside plastic is painted pink, reproducing once again the pattern, typical for the Prism series. This is where the battery lies, with the SIM card slot above it. One drawback we should note here is the lack of extension memory card slot.

Messaging:

The messaging menu is exactly what you can expect from Nokia. T9 helps you enter text faster and there are a few templates by default in the phone. You can create text, multimedia, flash and audio messages. This is the place where Yahoo!Go is, providing the opportunity to know the latest news as well as get information on the weather forecast. Another option on offer in the above program is Map, enabling the user to search for various locations, the route from A to B, as well as points of interest, including shopping sites, rest areas, fast food, and many more landmarks of a particular settlement.



Connectivity:

Nokia 7900 Prism is quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G UMTS and thanks to that it is usable worldwide.

The internet browser supports HTML/ XHTML and WAP 2.0. We tried to load www.phonearena.com but the browser couldn’t visualize the page correctly and there were some mixed rows of text. For local connectivity you can use both the Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and the miniUSB 2.0 ports.

Camera:

Nokia 7900 Prism is not meant to be a multimedia phone, but it is not deprived of such settings. It is equipped with 2 mega pixel camera with 8x digital zoom. Activation time is about 2 – 3 seconds, which is fast indeed; for a comparison, Nokia 7500 Prism featured a delay of 5 seconds. The camera interface is in a portrait orientation and the display shows information for the number of pictures you can take before the memory is exhausted, the resolution and the quality of the pictures, as well as the regime – picture or video shooting.

You can choose from among a total of 7 different shooting resolutions varying from 160x120 to 1600x1200, as well as from 3 image quality options: basic, normal and high. You can also make pictures with specific effects like false colors, grayscale, sepia, negative and solarise. When you are taking pictures in the dark place or in the night you can use the night mode or the integrated LED flash.

Photo quality is satisfactory at daylight; however, one cannot fail to notice that colors are too bright, which may sometimes render the shots entirely unrealistic and quite different from the ones in reality. Details are good for a phone, whose main asset is not the camera; there is some “noise”, though, to be clearly seen in the photos’ corners.


Those, taken inside, feature quite a lot of “noise”, with details blurred and unclear. In case there is no light whatsoever apart that of the flash to rely on, quality shall be determined as disheartening.


At some of the photos we noticed a queer defect, manifesting itself in the form of an orange spot in the middle of the picture.

Video-shooting fans will remain quite disappointed by the fact that theunit supports a maximum video clip resolution of 176 x 144 pixels,which is too low for anything but MMS.

Multimedia:

The Prism supports MP3/AAC/eAAC+/WMA formats for reproducing of audio.The music files, can be arranged by artist, album and genre, as well as to add and manage playlists.

While playing music the display shows name of the song , album and album cover art if there is one. You have 2 themes at your disposal here to change the interface of the player. Also, if you want you can play with the settings of the equalizer and the stereo widening.



The phone does not pretend to have the options of the full functional music player, but nevertheless you can listen to stereo by the headphones in the set or by wireless, by the use of the Bluetooth A2DP profile.

According to the specifications, Nokia 7900 Prism supports the following formats and codecs: 3GPP (H.263), H.264/AVC, MPEG-4. During our tests where we used standard encoded H.263 and H.264, we established that those with QVGA resolution were reproduced with sound only and no picture at all, whereas playing the ones with QCIF was just normal.

Software:

As most of the phones of the Series 40, Nokia 7900 Prism comes with several preloaded applications: Download, Installer, Opera Mini, Search, World Clock and Sensor. Nokia has taken care that you are not left without an entertainment in your free time, as for this purpose four games have been loaded: Golf Tour, Music Guess, Snake III, and Sudoku. The phone supports Java MIDP 2.0, so that you can install all kinds of additional applications at your need and discretion.

Performance:

For the time that we used the phone we noticed that it performs with amazing speed; there was no slowing down or interruption in the menus, even when we were opening heavier applications.

With incoming calls the ringtone is very loud and you are not likely to have any problems hearing it, even in noisier places. You can only feel the vibration if you’re carrying Nokia7900 Prism close to your body, for example in the pocket of your close-fitting jeans.
The sound that you’ll hear through the phone is medium loud, it is clear and distinct, but the voices sound unrealistic and muted. All the time you’ll hear background noises, which is rather off-putting and annoying.

On the other hand, the person at the other end shall not have any problem with the sound volume, which is really high. Although the sound is clear, the voices are unrealistic and some sounds are reproduced louder than normal, which sometimes results in unintelligibility.
According to official data from the manufacturers, the phone can last for 3 hours of talk time, which is very short, compared to the current standard.

Conclusion:

Although a phone is primarily intended for talking, we are all keen on the latest trends in the area and we demand that our phone incorporates all possible extras and that it looks good, too. Well, 7900 does not exactly fit into this picture, but the manufacturers are worth a praise for the precision with which the phone is made, for having paid attention to the smallest detail in order to achieve the desired result, namely an eye-catching designer phone.

Obviously, as far as functions are concerned, there is a lot to wish for as to their improvement, but, unfortunately, this is the reality and the characteristics of this phone are what they are. Maybe we’ll have to wait for a little longer to get the phone that we wrote about in the introduction of this review, but anyway, we can say that with the launch of Nokia 7900 Prism we have gone another step up the ladder.