Review of the Nokia X7

Announced in April 2011 the Nokia X7, at first glance, looks somewhat like a dented Nokia N8 but a closer look reveals a unique identity for this phone. Cast from a combination of glass and steel, this phone is geared towards gaming and general entertainment. The distinctive hardware is built just for this purpose. The operating system on this Nokia phone also speaks for itself with several enhancements. Let us take a look at the design in more detail and see what else the Nokia X7 has to offer.

Design (4 out of 5)

The Nokia X7 measures 119.7 x 62.8 x 11.9 millimeters and weighs about 146 grams. It comes in two colors out of the box which are Dark Steel and Silver Steel.

The front of the smartphone contains the earpiece right at the top, if held vertically. The center of the front face of the phone has a 4 inch screen with a single menu hardware key right beneath it. Well covered behind the display glass is a proximity sensor.

The back end of the Nokia X7 is fitted with the primary 8 MP camera with the dual LED flash right beside it. The right side of this smartphone has the volume up and the volume down keys with the dedicated camera button towards the bottom. There is no noticeable battery compartment lid, that is because this Nokia phone does not have an interchangeable battery.

The top side of this phone has the slot for the 3.5 millimeter audio jack, the power button and the microUSB connector slot. On either side of the Nokia X7 there are ribs which mark the places for the stereo loudspeakers. The body is encased in stainless steel panels.

User Interface (4 out of 5)

The user interface is based on an enhanced flavor of Symbian called Symbian Anna. It comes with a new set of icons that are more rounded at the corners. The icons grant access to the applications through touch input. Some applications such as the image applications, the web browsers and others from the Ovi Store support multi-touch gestures with which you can zoom content in and out.

Text can be input using the soft alphanumeric keypad or the full QWERTY keypad. These are activated depending on the orientation of the screen and smartphone as a whole. Navigating to the main menu can be done using a dedicated hardware key which gives access to all the phone operations right from personalizing the look and feel, to accessing applications and the settings tools.

The camera can be accessed promptly using the hardware camera button on the side of the phone. The Nokia X7 also comes with three highly customizable and functional home screens. The home screens contain home screen widgets which can be used to hold notifications on incoming messages, missed calls, calendar events and other useful information. The widgets can also hold feeds from RSS services over the Internet and news sites as well as social networking sites. With these you have one tap access to all these services.

Finally the home screen allows you to launch any application of your choosing using pre customized application shortcuts.

Features (4 out of 5)

The Nokia X7 comes with an AMOLED capacitive touch screen that has a resolution of 360 by 640 pixels. With a gorilla glass display, the phone has a multi-touch input touch screen with a proximity sensor for auto-turn off and an accelerometer sensor for user interface auto-rotate.

This Nokia phone comes with external stereo speakers and a 3.5 millimeter audio jack for listening to multimedia content and gaming. Behind these output choices lies a MP3/WMA/WAV/eAAC+ music player, a DivX/XviD/MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV video player and a stereo FM radio with RDS. There is a video camera on this device that supports recording of 720p HD videos.

The Nokia X7 comes with internal memory of up to 350 MB, 256 MB RAM and 1 GB ROM. There is support for up to 32 GB external memory cards through the microSD card slot.

On data connectivity, this Nokia phone is capable of connecting via GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Wi-FI and Bluetooth. You can also physically connect to your computer using the microUSB connector. The camera on the Nokia X7 supports up to 8 MP at a resolution of 3264 by 2448 pixels with Geo-tagging and face recognition capabilities.

On board this phone there is a digital compass, Flash lite 4.0, Adobe PDF reader and Quick office editor for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Performance (4 out of 5)

The Nokia X7 is quite a responsive phone for apps and games. It comes with the super fast 680 Mhz ARM 11 processor and a Broadcom GPU. Connectivity to the Internet is quite impressive on both 3G and Wi-FI.

There is plenty of standby time on this phone with up to a maximum of about 450 hours and talk time of up to 6 hours 30 minutes. Being an entertainment phone, music can be played for up to 50 hours between recharging, which is quite impressive. Ovi Maps and GPS are also enhanced and come with quite fast performance.

The phone, in general, was bound to be responsive as it has a pretty fast OS and with Symbian Anna under the hood this phone has benefited from the performance enhancements that come with this OS update.

The Verdict (4 out of 5)

The Nokia X7 is a unique and sleek looking phone with adequate hardware resources driving the features. It has a great new OS that is significantly faster than its predecessors and has a new look and feel to go with it. Even though there is nothing new with the processor and RAM, the gains made from the OS upgrades are enough to make this phone feel something of a new breed. Generally, this phone is worth getting, despite the somewhat above average price tag of US$565. Generally this phone stands out from the rest of the Nokia X-Series family of phones including the unique Nokia X5.

References

• Nokia Press, press.nokia.com/media/
• Nokia, europe.nokia.com/find-products/devices/nokia-x7-00/specifications
• Image Credtis: Nokia Press, press.nokia.com/media/