Nokia Lumia 710

A much awaited price cut has given Nokia Lumia 710 a prospect to be one of the best sellers. A 1.4ghz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255 chipset, 512 mb ram, 3.7” screen with WVGA resolution, the list goes on. Lumia 710 has many offerings to surprise you with a price tag of around 15.5k. On the Software side, Windows Phone Mango may win many hearts with its simplistic interface, which may not be as versatile as, say, Android, but is ridiculously fluid, and stays that at all times.

Pros:
1. 1.4ghz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255 chipset coupled with 512 mb ram provide a buttery smooth experience. It is very close to what you will get even on the costliest windows phone.
2. 3.7” LCD ClearBlack display with WVGA resolution provides crisp bright colors. The overall contrast is good.
3. Video Recording offers good resolution and colors, bit rate is quite high.
4. 8gb on board storage (At this price, it is excellent).
5. Free life-time voice guided navigation.

Cons:
1. Disappointing battery life. Turning off multi-tasking may improve the battery life, but it isn’t the most pleasing option. With moderate usage, it may not even last a full day.
2. Disastrous audio quality. The frequency response is way off (something you simply can’t associate with modern day phones), intermodulation distortion is too high.
3. The other cons include the limitations of Windows Phone OS. No expandable storage, no Bluetooth file transfer, no DivX/XviD support out of the box, over-dependence on Zune.

Competition:
Yes, some shortcomings are a little too much to be ignored (What was wrong with the audio quality). But battery life may not be comparatively very good in some competing android devices either. What you definitely get with Nokia Lumia 710 is a total commitment by Nokia-Microsoft to make this ecosystem as strong as possible. And what used to come at an appalling 20k, is now available at three-fourths the price. Considering that, Lumia 710 may be a very tempting package at this point of time.

Samsung Omnia W I8350 is a close competitor, with similar hardware. It even brings a SuperAMOLED screen and metallic back, all at a very slight increase in price. But you will be giving up on SatNav and Nokia Drive.
HTC radar is all about good finish, but it comes with “only” 1 ghz processor and a higher price. If price is not an issue, you can go all the way up to Nokia Lumia 800 which flaunts a very hot polycarbonate uni-body, better battery and camera.
However, there is ample competition outside Windows Phone. Sony Ericcson Xperia Ray and Xperia Neo V are very tempting android alternatives with 1 ghz processors, 512 mb ram and planned upgrades to ICS. A better camera or a bigger screen should tilt your preferences to the former or later.
Nokia offers some Symbian phones too. Nokia 701 and 700 come with very similar hardware. More importantly, Nokia Belle has been in news for good things.
However all phones mentioned do have a higher price than Nokia 710 which could well be the defining factor when many young people finalize on a model to buy.

I bought this phone and it is amazing. The design of this phone is simply superb. Its the best looking phone in the market right now. The OS is super smooth. The GUI is very simple, different and fluidic. Its a completely new experience. I never found any hanging problems or delay in response. The calendar is very good because i depend on the reminders more often. Plus the Microsoft Office option is very good. You can edit and save. This was really helpful. Plus you also get some quality apps. The screen quality is also very good. The camera is good. This phone is a good productivity phone.

I compared this with Android phones. Though they have lots of apps and features like front video camera, expandable memory, the delay in response or lag problems really irritated me. Yes this phone doesn't have front camera and have storage limited to 8GB, but that doesn't matter to me.

If your criteria list has front camera and expandable memory as a must have then this phone is not for you. Instead if you want a smooth operating GUI and a good Nokia then this phone is for you. In long use the working of the GUI matters a lot. You might discover many features useful for you once when you browse through the phone.

I guess this was the best move by NOKIA, to go on with Windows Mango and not Android. Android might be free, but its no way smooth in mid-segment models and hence lags a lot in many phones. However looking at this new NOKIA, the WIN 7.5 uses the best of nokia's hardware excellence. To people who think its overly priced when compared to OMNIA W I8350 (Rs.18299 on flipkart), have you used Samsung phones? I have one and it looks like I am holding a cheap phone in my hand since Samsung uses lot of plastic, even in high end phones. Not that i am against Samsung, but Nokia truly deserves an applause for at-least coming back into the Game. If you compare with OMNIA, most of the features are same, except for front facing camera, AMOLED screen and slightly higher battery life in OMNIA, wheras NOKIA has great built, design and looks with Corning Gorilla Glass. This phone is for no non-sense people, who would want to be serious with their work, even if the crowd thinks its paying little extra (Rs.1800 extra to OMNIA.) Windows Mango rocks!!!

I'm sure you are aware that for this price tag, the specs seem like a bargain. But I am sorry to say I have been shortchanged in that department because despite several weeks with this phone, I still crave the Nokia music express phone I had before this, which at 5000 had more heart and soul than this phone.
1. Battery Life: One thing you expect from any phone, is that it lasts at least a full day given moderate usage. Well guess what, it dies out in 5 hours!!
2. End call: I'm sure you have heard about the end call bug that Nokia is desperately trying to fix. I have to reboot my phone because it hangs every time I make a call and this is fairly irritating.
3.No business cards. It's crazy!! How can we function if we cannot even attach the number as a message?
4. CAmera: one word- Abysmal. The quality is worse than my basic Nokia phone. REally it says 5MP, but the pictures are grainy be it night or day.
5.I need to go through 2-3 screen to enter someone's contact info. It could be integrated into one page, but Nokia has really messed up here. Simple UI is the need of the hour.

It's not all bad:
The UI is great and the phone is quick and with (when it doesn't hang that is). Great touch sensitivity (too sensitive at times.) Was able to easily transfer all my contacts from my old phone using contact transfer app- Great stuff.

If all the bugs are fixed it may be a desirable phone for the price tag.

I got this phone shipped a few days back, and this was the third time i made a purchase from flipkart. The delivery process as usual great and without any hassles.

For the phone, it was above my expectations. I had been using an HTC Wildfire S before this, and my experience with an Android was not that great. It always had issues with its internal memory and was not at all smooth. For the Lumia, its much smoother than any other operating system available. I also have an iTouch and despite the availability of a billion apps, the operating system doesn't excite me much.

The phone surely has a few drawbacks, such as a limited memory; but to be honest the Android has a similar problem too. You cannot move most of the applications to your beloved memory card and at the end of it, your phone starts craving for extra memory. The buttons at the bottom, spoil the brilliant user interface and may also seem quite irritating at times.

People have been comparing this phone to the Samsung Omnia W, mainly because of the Super Amoled screen it boasts of. But, the phone is an eyesore to look at, and with that even the amazing screen doesn't help. Also, all the Samsung phones are known to have a very small life span, so if you think about keeping it as a backup phone later in life; forget it.

Overall, the phone is a brilliant machine. The price is a bit of a buzz kill, but despite that I would recommend you to go for it. You will simply fall in love with as soon you geet your hands on it :)