Nokia 7280 - review

I actually bought Nokia's one-of-a-kind phone, the lipstick Nokia 7280 in January. There seems to be a gimmick of not keeping them in store, rather you have to order it. Part of the "exclusiveness" image, I guess.



Anyway, I have now been using as my daily phone for some months, So I can attempt to give it a fair review.

Packaging

The phone simply has gorgeous looks. It fits well in both your pocket and dangling in the included leather strap, although I have noticed some wear and tear on the strap. So, not perfect in details. It's definetely an attention-grabber. If you haven't checked out the images, do it now.

Included in the package is Nokia's Windows PC Suite + software for Mac OS X. I have only tested the Windows software. The installation sucks, since it by some strange reason uses Flash for the initial part. Fortunately, you don't really need the software since the phone supports Bluetooth for normal usage, as contacts and files.

You also get som extra hardware; a pair of white headphones (required for the built-in FM radio), a leather wrapper for protecting the phone, and two (!) odd metal cylinders with a pin to eject the SIM card holder. You might as well use a paper clip ;)

The battery is not removable except at a service center. This is annoying since there is no good way of doing a hard reset -- which I, as somewhat paranoid person, want to do sometimes. I also assume this will create an extra cost when/if you need to change the battery.

Usage

This phone has no numeric keypad. Instead it has three soft buttons, one scroll wheel, a dial button and a hang up button. It has no "directional" buttons.

Otherwise, it's a quite standard Nokia series 40 phone, that is, the menus are very similar to models like the 6610, 3310 and friends. The soft buttons works as expected and the scroll wheel is used to navigate menus and lists. No real surprises here.

In normal dial-up usage, where you select from your list of contacts this works well. Press the soft button for Contacts, scroll to the name (yes, a fast-mode based on first letter is available) and press dial-up. Same for the common task of re-dialing.

Entering new numbers and text messaging takes more work, but is fully doable. However, my SMS rate has been at least halfed using the 7280.

The display has a wide-screen aspect, so using the XHTML browser for surfing is troublesome. Pages won't never fit, even though the rendering is good. Lots of scrolling is necessary.

The phone camera is fair, but not great. The construction in itself is good since the lens is protected by the sliding hull, but indoor images tend to be quite dark and grainy. There is a definite interface design mistake in not starting the camera as soon as the sliding hull is opened. Instead you have to make at least two button clicks to start it. Adding and sending images using MMS is straightforward.

Answering calls can be done either by sliding open the hull or pressing the dial-up/answer button. The ring tone volume is a bit on the low side due to the single-output speaker construction. If this is blocked, like in your pocket, the sound is heavily muted.

Voice activation

In my opinion this doesn't work. I succeded to get a hit-rate of about one out of three, which is way to low. Using the menus are much easier and faster. On the positive side is that quite a lot of functions can be voice-controlled, not just dial-up.


Tech and build

It's debatable if the 7280's software is 100% bug free (my unit has software version 3.22, new units should have 3.24). After continuous usage, the MP3 playback seems to crash, and it has happened that the screen starts to blink oddly.

The physical build is somewhat squeeky, but still holds after 5 months of daily scrathing and tearing. Since the screen is mirrored even tiny scratches tend to be visible. But it actually took some hard and sharp keys to make this happen.

The screen is very good indoors, but really sucks in sunshine. The mirroring seems to block almost all of the backlight. Be prepared to shadow the phone to use it in sunshine.

Conclusion

The 7280 is a competent indoor phone dressed in a lovely skin.
The phone actually works well as a phone. Text and number input is slow, but most other operations work fast. And it is great for party show-off ;)

Random facts

• Tri-band, GPRS
  
• No Java (whetever anyone tries to tell you!)
• SMS, MMS
• Plays MP3 files as ring tones and messaging tones
• FM radio
  
• Bluetooth (headset audio, serial port, OBEX push, OBEX file transfer)
  
• 50 meg internal memory
• The user cannot replace the battery
• Shortish battery life. About four days in normal usage.
• Speaker phone (surprisingly good for music too)
• Shows animated GIFs (also as backgorunds)

/E