Nokia 701 : Review

Nokia phones with Windows Phone 7.5 have already been announced & Symbian, once the stalwart of the smartphone world, will be going away soon, but not without a fight. The latest Symbian Belle is what you'll find in the Nokia 701 & it offers several enhancements.

First, the overall design, look & feel of the phone is excellent - it feels small and reassuringly heavy. Thanks to the rounded design, it sits perfectly on the ear. Both plastic and metal has been used, but the plastic (polycarbonate) bits feel tougher than the metal itself.

The 701's claim to fame is an ultra-bright display, which Nokia claims is the brightest in the world. While sunlight legibility is good, these claims have to be taken with a pinch of salt, because several other displays seem brighter (and sharper) in a head-to-head comparison.

Coming to the OS, Nokia's approach seems to be "If you can't beat them, join them". There is loads of inspiration from Android: a drop-down notification area and multiple customisable homescreens. All icons have the same size and shape. This lends consistency, but can also make it a little harder to distinguish one from the other.

In our opinion, some more work is needed on the icons The phone includes a basic level voice control -activated by pressing the voice button on the right side of the phone. You can perform actions like changing the profile (by saying 'General' or 'Silent' or 'Meeting') or open applications (by saying 'Radio', or 'Calculator' or 'Camera').

This voice recognition is built in -the phone does not need to communicate with servers or use any data for this feature, but because of that it is also limited in what it understands and takes a couple of seconds to recognize what you said and perform the action.

Plus, in normal Nokia fashion, a whole lot of applications are built in: a dictionary, QuickOffice, photo & video Editor, Ovi Maps, Psiloc World Traveler (weather alerts, flight info, currencies), Shazam (music discovery), Vlingo (voice assistant with speech to text) and free push email. Thanks to the 1Ghz processor and 512MB RAM combo, navigation and general interface is very fast.

Call quality is rock solid and the phone easily lasts through the day with calls, data, messaging, email, web browsing, audio, video and a bit of gaming. The 8MP camera is decent too, though it should have been an autofocus unit. In conclusion, yes, Belle is a very polished version of Symbian and the 701 is a very well built and responsive device.

The whole package is somewhat compelling, but at least for us, it doesn't quite have the desirability or momentum to overtake Android - especially at that price. For about Rs 17,500, you can go for Sony Ericsson's Xperia Neo V - an Android device with roughly the same hardware, a larger and higher resolution screen & better camera.