Review of the Nokia Astound: Design and User Interface
Introduction
The Nokia Astound was announced in March 2011 and made available to the public in April 2011. The Nokia C7 Astound was made available primarily to US T-Mobile customers. This is a smartphone of the Symbian^3 family of high-end smartphones. The Nokia Astound is a curvy looking mobile phone. With a sturdy build and substantial weight to it, this Nokia phone appears to radiate with excitement and comes packed with features geared for the not so average Internet and multimedia user. So let us get right on in and see what the Nokia Astound has to offer in terms of design.
Design (4 out of 5)
The Nokia Astound comes with dimensions measuring 117.3 x 56.8 x 10.5 mm and weighing 130g. The body of this Nokia phone is built with stainless steel with Gorilla glass covering the AMOLED capacitive touchscreen. This display measures 3.5 inches which covers almost the entire surface area of the phone. The color available with the Nokia Astound is frosty metal.
There is quite a bit going on above the display in terms of a secondary camera, a light sensor and a proximity sensor for auto turn-off. Below the screen you’ll find the call place button, the menu key and the call end buttons respectively.
The back of the Nokia Astound has the camera lens, the camera flash, the external speakers, the battery compartment and the second microphone. There is nothing much on the left side of the Nokia Astound. The right side of this Nokia Symbian^3 based smartphone has a dedicated camera button on the bottom, a screen-lock key and the multimedia keys with the volume up and down keys. The other part of the Nokia Astound has the power button and connectors for the TV-out, microUSB and the 3.5 mm audio jack. There is also the slot for the extended memory card and the charging port on the device.
User Interface (5 out of 5)
The Nokia Astound comes with the Symbian^3 based OS. It generally has three home screens just like its counterpart, the Nokia E7. Each home screen has got configurable widgets which you can set up based on themes or categories of your choice. Navigation on the Nokia Astound is done by using the capabilities of the touchscreen such as the multi-touch input method and the accelerometer sensor for auto-rotating the user interface.
Further navigation is achieved by accessing the menu system using the dedicated menu key located below the display. Sliding fingers around your screen gives you the ability to drag components and to scroll though documents and objects. Text can be input in horizontal orientation mode using full QWERTY softkeys as well as an alphanumeric keypad in vertical orientation mode. Like other previous versions of the Symbian OS, you can customize several items including entire themes, wallpaper, ringtones, and other sounds and beeps.
When not using the Nokia Astound, its proximity sensor automatically puts the phone into standby mode.
Features (4 out of 5)
The Nokia Astound display comes with a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels. There is an external speaker on the Nokia Astound as well as two microphones. An alternative option for listening to music is provided by the 3.5 mm audio jack.
With the Nokia Astound you can listen to music using the MP3, WMA, WAV and eAAC+ audio player. Video is also supported and can read DivX, XviD, MP4, H.264, H.263 and WMV video formats.
Included in the Nokia Astound is an FM radio with RDS support.
Internal memory on the Nokia Astound is capped at 350 MB with RAM of up to 256 MB. This Nokia phone provides support for external memory up to 32 GB. This is easily enough memory to store images taken with the built-in 8 MP camera. The 8 MP camera on the Nokia Astound has an image resolution of up to 3264 x 2448 pixels. Only fixed focus is available on this Nokia phone which support Geo-tagging as well as face detection.
Video images can be captured at 25 fps at 720p HD. A secondary camera is available for video calling.
There is a GPS receiver on the Nokia Astound with preinstalled Ovi Maps 3.0 for free turn-by-turn voice guided navigation. Also available is a Quickoffice document viewer for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF file formats. Adobe Flash is supported with the Flash Lite 4.0 player. The Internet can be surfed with ease on this Nokia phone with the built-in web browser. All standard messaging services are supported on the Nokia Astound. Apps and games can be downloaded from the Nokia Ovi Store.
Performance (4 out of 5)
The camera on the Nokia Astound produces some great quality photos and you have the ability to manipulate those photos. The only problem here is that there is no auto-focus on this mobile phone. With the 680 MHz ARM 11 processor powering the Symbian^3 OS and a Broadcom BCM2727 hardware accelerated GPU, the performance of video playback is great. This is further enhanced with the vivid colors and contrast of the AMOLED display.
Call quality is awesome with significance background noise canceling being achieved. This is the case for users on each end of the call. Cell phone reception is quite good even when used in places with tall buildings and lots of cover.
The Nokia Astound boots up relatively fast and performs just as well when it comes to launching and running applications. The GPS reception is quite good in open areas and also gets a fix on location much faster when A-GPS is used.
Sound quality from the external speakers is okay but it is always better to use the headphones.
Verdict (4 out of 5)
The Nokia Astound is a relatively good phone with decent performance. The phone looks great, is easy on the eyes and is comfortable to carry. This Nokia phone comes with the Symbian^3 OS interface with the gesture controls and it is an improvement over previous Symbian OS versions. There is still room for improvement though. All-in-all this T-Mobile Nokia C Series phone is definitely worth getting hold of. It has the benefits of free navigation in over 100 countries at no extra cost other than possible data charges. For a cost of US $80 and with similar features to the Nokia N8, I would not hesitate to recommend this phone to you.
References
- Author’s own experience.
- Forum Nokia, forum.nokia.com
- Image Credit: press.nokia.com
