The Supernova series comprises four
spotlighting the world announce. The most interesting of the four is
Nokia 7610, judging by the number of catalog page hits and search
calls. Attaching incomprehensible suffixes to the product names is
quite typical of Nokia – once again, the new 7610 handset seems to
erroneously duplicate the suffix originally reserved for an earlier
smartphone product. Nokia 7610 isn't a smartphone, yet for a
conventional cell phone it displays a very high level of functionality.
It's a slider equipped with a 3.2
in development of the 6500 Slide and 5610
the same platform, to say so.
The most
characteristical feature of the handset is the Theme Colorise used to
quickly swap interface colors in all imaginable ways. A detailed review
of this feature is available in a later section of this article. Right
now, a few more general words introducing the new product. The handset
is based off the fifth revision of the S40 software platform, which is
due to the limitations of the hardware platform. The lower-ranking 7510
model uses the sixth revision of the S40 software platform, for
instance. Supernova series' signature Xpress-on models come in a
variety of colors, letting you customize even the physical features of
the handset.
Supported Networks: | GSM 850/900/1800/1900 |
EDGE: | + |
RAM size: | 64 Mb |
Screen: | 2.2”, 320x240, 16M |
Storage expansion: | microSD slot, a 512 Mb card bundled |
Wireless connectivity: | Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, supports A2DP |
Camera: | 3.2 Mp, auto-focusing |
FM radio: | + (with RDS) |
Battery: | 860 mAh |
Size: | 98 x 48 x 15 mm |
Weight: | 99 g |
Guiding price: | 300 euros |
Nokia are targeting
Supernova at a largely female audience (still firmly counting on the
male buyer, but to a lesser extent), trying to attack Samsung on a
front where the Koreans hold especially strong positions. The Korean
manufacturer is famed to favor the slider form factor, and Samsung
female-tailored sliders enjoy an unmatched popularity on the market.
However no known Samsung product can offer an analogous functionality
in this segment. U600 is probably the closest alternative, yet
incapable of posing direct competition to Nokia 7610.
Despite its distinct
orientation towards the mass market, 7610 has no direct competitors,
which is a very intriguing combination. Talking in advance let's note
out that the solution is rather controversial; yet an active
advertising campaign planned for Supernova handsets and a scarce number
of highly functional fashion slider models from other manufacturers are
the two factor that are going to overcome any possible criticism and
further bring the product to the top of popularity. Nokia now have at
their disposal a full set of variations of the same platform: 5610
stands for music, 6500 Slide stands for business, 7610 now stands for
fashion. Marketing seen in action.
Design and Ergonomics
Nokia 7610 Supernova is
a mid-sized, lightweight slider, entirely made of plastic. Two color
versions are available – the dark and the bright ones, each coming with
two changeable panels. The dark variant comes with blue and turquoise
panels, the bright – with blue and red ones. These the Xpress-on
panels, a standard element of design customization which has been used
by Nokia in a number of earlier products. The moment is especially
actual for a youth audience. Theme Colourizer is the company's next
move catering to the youth tastes. It changes the splash screen and
Navi backlight to match a specified color. This unique feature will be
discussed a bit further in a special section of this article.
The style of
Supernova's design is intentionally kept very neutral. It is likely to
attract both female and male audiences. Unfortunately the compromises,
simplifications and concessions introduced to reach this goal make the
handset's exterior look a bit plain, at least too plain for a
top-ranking fashion-oriented solution. The only original thing around
is the mirrorlike pieces reminiscent of
solutions. However even these elements look slightly out of place.
An Xpress-on panel
feels like rubber when you touch it, to be more precise it sports an
actual thin rubber coating, which will never let the handset slip out
of the hand. It's held very tightly and won't ‘peel off' just by
accident, which from another point can be considered a downside: hot
memory card swapping becomes unavailable. Bright-colored star-shaped
stickers are supplied along. The assembly and materials show us a very
good example of what is the proper way and substance for making a
durable and good-looking phone. Unlike 6500 Slide, there are no metal
pieces, save for the back panel of the upper sliding part. All the
parts fit each other tightly, the surface coating is resistant to
physical damage.
Thanks to the
compact size and low weight, 7610 feels as natural appendage of your
hand, every aspect of shape, size and weight is very balanced. From the
point of ergonomics, the handset is close to ideal yet not ideal. The
keypad lacks any bump marks though the buttons are well-segmented, have
a sufficient move, the backlight is of a white color, it's very even
and neither too bright nor too dim. The main block of controls has
coupled buttons for dial and application actions, which is not
everyone's cup of tea. In practice though the navigation is pretty
easy.
The side edges of
the casing host a number of slots and buttons. The hardware platform of
6500 Slide and 5610 imposes a number of unfortunate limitations like a
2.5 non-standard headset jack, the storage expansion slot hidden under
the battery cover and so on. None of these is critical though,
especially in a fashion phone. On the upper edge, neighboring the
headset jack, the power button and the charger jack are located. The
right edge hosts a two-position camera button, the volume rocker and
the player button (pressing this will de-pause and pause the current
track. The left edge has a microUSB slot covered with a protective
flap.
The speaker is sunk
into the back surface, though sound distortions are minimal even if the
phone rests on a surface. The sound volume is enough to hear from a
distance, so no problems on this front. The upper part of the slider's
bottom is the habitual residence of the camera lens. It is left
unprotected, so careful handling is strongly advisable. Building the
camera into the top part of the slider would have been a more
reasonable decision, apparently.
This function was
briefly mentioned above, but this section of the article dwells on the
topic more thoroughly. The feature is simple yet very effective,
especially as seen by the female half of the audience - now it's a
matter of seconds to make your phone fit the color of your evening
dress or handbag.
Here's how it works.
The right virtual button on the main screen conjures up the primary
menu of the application. For a couple of seconds, you see a splash
screen which can be skipped by pressing OK when it appears but can't be
totally gotten rid of in the options.
After that, you find
yourself with a viewfinder window and a semi-circular palette
displaying different shades of the currently selected color, a total of
sixteen. This is done dynamically, so you don't have to press the shoot
button each time you want to update this palette.
Once you have
captured the required colors, a second push of the shoot button
confirms the choice, after which you are prompted to select one of the
three effects: Soundflora, Waves, Globetrotter. Keeping the chosen
palette intact, each of this effect mixes the colors in a unique way.
In about 99% of
cases the color recognition is done correctly, the application never
lags during data processing. This application may have varying grades
of importance to different people, but personally the male testers of
Smape.com considered it a one-shot toy. This goes contrary to our
girlfriends' opinion - they spent a lot of time toying around, trying
to find color matches for their latest wardrobe additions.
Not only the
menus and the main screen are affected by Theme Colorise, but the
backlight color of the navigation button as well. Unfortunately the
keypad remains unaffected, which in a way breaks the perfection. Still
a great fun for the fair sex.
The new product comes
with a 64 Mb of onboard memory, and a microSD card can always be used
for expansion (no hot swapping is available though, as mentioned above)
The selling package includes a 512 Mb card, however cards of a capacity
up to 2 Gb are supported.
Nokia 7610 Supernova is
equipped with a QVGA TFT screen (320x240) which is typical for this
product class, the diagonal is a bit shorter than one would want –
2.2''. The color palette is 16M. In the real life, the screen image
looks very pleasing – with good contrast, bright and vivid-colored. The
view angles are just perfect. Unfortunately, this excellence ends where
the daylight begins, the screen heavily affected by glares in direct
sunlight due to the sort of coating used applied to the front glass.
Connectivity
The new 7610 is a
quad-band phone (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) and supports Class 10 EDGE. It
has no WCDMA capabilities, which only proves the guess that this
product was designed exclusively for the mass market.
Bluetooth 2.0
+ EDR is what Supernova offers in the wireless connectivity department.
It functions quite well, we weren't able to detect any problems during
the tests. The options include activation state (on/off), the list of
accessible devices, the visibility state, device name and a variety of
other standard parameters. All the associated services are also quite
standard.
The Bluetooth
stereo headset (A2DP) also brought about no problems, the maximal sound
volume is quite sufficient and can be adjusted manually. The following
profiles are available:
? Dial Up Networking Profile
? File Transfer Profile
? Generic Access Profile
? Service Discovery Application Profile
? Headset Profile
? Handsfree (Car Kit) Profile
? Generic Object Exchange Profile (OBEX)
? Object Push Profile
? File Transfer Profile
? Basic Printing Profile
? Audio Video Remote Control Profile
? Advanced Audio Distribution Profile
? Enhanced Data Rate
? Dual Profile Bluetooth (Voice & Data)
? vNote
USB 2.0 is the
means for wire communication which the new handset has to offer. The
data transfer rate isn't the highest around, though. There are four
connectivity modes available: Modem, Mass Storage, Media Player,
Printer. The required mode is selectable from the corresponding menu
and can be set as default, or optionally left for prompting each time
you plug the phone cable into your PC.
The radio unit has the same nice-looking
interface. The headset provides a very decent quality of sound, to say
the least. The theme is independent from the theme used by the mp3
player, so the both applications can be configured to sport different
skins simultaneously. Up to 50 radio stations can be saved to memory in
a specified storage folder. Auto-search and RDS capabilities are also
in.
Software Platform
As it was noted
earlier, the top-class Supernova is based off the firth revision of
S40, so there aren't any platform-wise peculiarities that have not been
discussed in the previous articles dealing with S40 E5 phones. Please
refer to 6500 Slide and 5610 reviews on our site to find out more about
S40 functionality.
The only thing worth
mentioning in this article section is the Theme Colorise feature, which
is a rich pack of themes – actually more of them than any Samsung
product could ever offer.
Camera
For a fashion phone,
the camera looks not bad – a 3.2 Mp auto-focusing unit with an
integrated flash. In this aspect, the model is fully analogous with
6500 Slide and 5610; the Slide handset possesses Carl Zeiss optics
though, which gives it a little boost putting it above the two other
models in the sense of image acquisition quality… The flash is
effective at distances not exceeding a meter and a half. The camera is
deprived of a lens guard. The shoot button is a bit too tight . A 20x
digital zoom is available. The volume controls serve as zoom controls
while in the shooting mode.
The camera interface is fully analogous with
Nokia 6500 Slide / 5610, here we see the very same options and
possibilities. The interface utilizes a landscape orientation, though a
portrait mode is also available as an option. In the viewfinder mode,
the screen displays a number indicators telling of the current
settings: the resolution, the storage folder, the zoom ration, the
timer info, the remaining number of shots, the flash on/off state and
so on. Everything's simple and clear.
Pressing Left, we pass on to the settings menu, consisting of the following items:
Only a few options are available, the number
of effects is minimal, but that's still great for a music phone. The
extra settings include:
Image resolution:
A really reassuring point here: besides just
choosing between the onboard memory and the memory card as the storage
location, the user can specify an exact folder to save files to.
A photo can be instantly sent over attached to
a text message, via Bluetooth or sent for printing. The photo can also
be set as a wallpaper, logo, call image for a specific person or a user
group. There's also the scaling option, functions like Rotate and the
contrast settings (a ten-notch scale).
The acquired image can be instantly transferred to the graphics editor (which has only the very basic set of functions)
As a result, the phone's extras in the aspect of video editing are rather modest, being nothing beyond the basic required level.
Things are even simpler when it comes to the
video, there are no editing options but there's a function that allows
you to strip the sound away from a clip completely. The video record
length is only limited by the remaining amount of free memory, three
quality presets offer you a choice between High, Normal and Low, the
supported resolutions are 640x480, 352x288, 176x144 and 128x96. The
video quality among the best found with the today's camera phones, and
within the music phone segment 5610 is the absolutely unquestionable
leader, the only disappointment being the relatively low framerate of
just 15 fps. On the whole, the video acquisition quality is on a level
with Nokia 6233 and similar models.
Performance
Java implementation is
done on a good level, no differences are observable if we compare it to
the other members of the S40 5th Edition family. The processing rates
are quite nice:
Model | Nokia 7610 Supernova | |
Jbenchmark 1.1.1 Score | 1723 | 1244 |
Text | 412 | 345 |
2D Shapes | 413 | 333 |
3D Shapes | 294 | 207 |
Fill Rate | 182 | 103 |
Animation | 422 | 256 |
Jbenchmark 2.0.1 Score | 256 | 92 |
Image Manipulations | 249 | 74 |
Text | 293 | 102 |
Sprites | 392 | 100 |
3D Transform | 330 | 102 |
User Interface | 115 | 83 |
Jbenchmark 3D HQ | 128 | 72 |
Jbenchmark 3D LQ | 251 | 84 |
Triangles ps | 32681 | 9296 |
KTexels ps | 1296 | 955 |
Battery life
The model is powered by
a BL-4S 860 mAh battery. The capacity is plainly unimpressive, though
in practice the battery life tests lead quite reassuring results:
Model | Nokia 7610 Supernova | Samsung U600 |
Regular duty | 2 days | 1.5 days |
Multimedia cycle, video (3GP) | 3:52 | 3:20 |
Multimedia cycle, audio (MP3) | 13:21 | 11:59 |
Market outlook
Nokia 7610 Supernova
produces a very ambiguous impression; on the one hand are the excellent
stuffing, the interesting and audience-befitting feature of Theme
Colorise and so on, but the other hand holds a deficiency in the image
power, as long as the position of the series' flagship is concerned;
even the changeable panels don't help the cause enough.
Despite all the
surrounding controversy, 7610 is bound for success; the price floats a
bit above the reasonable assessment, yet we wouldn't say that the
product is too overpriced. The large-scale promotional campaign and the
famed brand loyalty of Nokia's fans will also improve the situation,
given that a fashion slider is a rare occurrence in Nokia's portfolio.
At the same time, the other companies offer a number of analogous
solutions at lower prices (e.g. Samsung U600), though those aren't
marketed as members of a dedicated fashion slider line.
The very
Supernova line itself is an interesting phenomenon. The mass-wise
targeting tends to simplify the models, turning them cheaper than an
average solution from the class. This comes at the price of a less
pronounced image. How bad is that? Of course, part of the audience is
lost but an even bigger part is added. Supernova is a serious blow
delivered to Samsung, which is reputedly strong in this segment.
7610 should be
viewed just as described above, it shares little with the top-ranking
products of similar concept, for it is a purely mass product. Nokia
cleverly used the design peculiarities to differentiate three products
based off the same platform: the musical 5610, the businesslike 6500
slide, the fashion-powered 7610 Supernova. Each of the variations
enjoys considerable demand, and the new product doesn't like an
exception either.
Over a few
weeks, Supernova became one of the most talked about phones of the
recent time. Nokia is promising to launch the two color versions of the
handset into full production by the beginning of the third quarter.
Editor's Opinion
Nokia 7610 Supernova is
a solution targeted at the mass market, displaying a good balance
between the stuffing and the design. The image impact is rather modest,
regardless of the series' flagship title. The price, on the other hand,
is quite inoffensive and the functionality keeps on a high level.
That's a compromise bound for popularity.
+ Changeable panels
+ Theme Colorise
+ Attractive price
+ Decent camera
- Controversial design
- Screen gets too glared over in sunlight
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment