Oomph!!. Review on Nokia 7610

After much consideration, market hunting and following the site trails of Nokia phone models to be released in first quarter 2005 I zeroed in my choice on Nokia 7610. My last set was 8250, which was itself design apart when it was launched maybe three-four years back, so this time it should have been better. Nokia 7610 does me justice in those terms of oozing style and oomph for those who hold it forth.

With lot of fancy applications and functionality not to forget the enhanced camera zoom features, it is a killer set. Although with some downside like a missing FM receiver, I stuck to this one more on style then functional reasons.

In the following review I try to give as much info to enlighten a new buyer for the features it hosts and could have hosted so that the new ones could maybe balance their decisions on their priority and need for the points mentioned. Hope it helps and maybe Nokia itself works on the glitches and make it a perfect pie to have.

Starting with messaging, this set can hold unlimited messages in case you are using memory card. But you need to download the messages from your SIM card before they are readable or can be forwarded.

The same goes for your contacts but that can be overlooked because of the enhanced contact features that this phone has to offer. With every contact entry, you can store multiple phone numbers, address info, email, web address and a whole lot of stuff plus attach pics so that you can view them when they call, but the pic is a small thumbnail, which ruins the fun, though you can recover that part with an investment of 5 euros at their official website via FSCaller.

The phone comes with no good themes, wallpapers or games pre-installed but you can later download them from their site which should have been defaulted to the extended memory card which comes prebundled so that it makes that part from buyer side more hassle free and easy.

The realplayer is smooth in its operation and is able to play most of the file extensions available on the net these days. After setting the connection setting (GPRS, MMS) which is further eased via a utility called SettingWizard the internet surfing is also quite good. But you may have to contact your network operator to get GPRS enabled before you are up and running.

Although the phone has this expanded memory slot enhancement which allows unlimited download and application installation, based on your memory card capacity, the downside is the phone memory is only 8 MB and because of the preinstalled packages its already full.

Further more if one further stores some images or sound files in the same then user would be bogged down with repetitive message of ''Phone memory full''. Also during any Bluetooth session file transfer, the files are stored directly into phone memory and the user is not given any option to choose (initially hard to find; was only able to figure out after a month), so the free memory space in your phone memory would determine most of the times how big file can you download which is usually about less then 500 KB (or you find otherwise). I was unable to find any options to free my phone memory.

The problem of shared memory seems to be the only annoying backdrop which somehow I guess Nokia itself also realizes and has mentioned it on the first trouble shooting options but maybe failed to work before release.

Even further when I raised the same to Nokia helpcare they have following solution by

deleting unwanted messages, any images in the gallery that you do not need, contacts in the phone memory that you do not require, any applications that you have downloaded. But the phone card is already full 7/8 by the time contacts are exported and yes I don?t have a very long list. So ?

The number of applications which comes bundled with this set are also very useful especially the Contacts Editor which eases on your meticulous typing extra details for each contact entry. Another utility is the Nokia Image converter which I used extensively to transfer my friend?s images which I later linked to their contact entries. I don?t know why Nokia Application installer was always stuck on Phone memory for all its installation settings.

The phone comes with 64MB memory card which is enough to house quite a many applications, but in India we still have to wait some time for the more expanded memory slots of 512 MB or more. That is the story as in first quarter 2005. It sure turns some heads on and offers some great many features for the bucks spent, but there?s something still to be desired maybe Nokia does these in its next releases and we wait.

Although the review is a bit harsh; but being one of the costliest phone in market I do expect that a product should not have residual problems; missing functionality does not count in this case, but places where improvement could have been done; should had been done.