Introduction
Good stuff coming from Nokia lately but there’s always room for more. We like to be surprised and the Nokia 700 does just that. Instead of quietly falling in line behind the obvious leader, the 1GHz Symbian Belle powered Nokia 701, the Nokia 700 puts on its best suit and goes it alone. A cute little smartphone ready for big things.
Just don’t let the size fool you. The slim Nokia 700 is no lesser smartphone than the Nokia 701 that we recently enjoyed in a preview. With a 1GHz processor and Symbian Belle, it’s got both its media and communication bases covered.
You need to hold the Nokia 700 in your hand to appreciate how small it really is. It looks like a toy compared to, say, the Galaxy S II all the while packing some of the best Nokia has to offer. The revamped Symbian Belle shows its friendlier side on a 3.2” ClearBlack AMOLED touchscreen. NFC pairing is the icing on the cake in the connectivity department featuring quad-band GSM and penta-band 3G support.
Nokia 700 at a glance:
- General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 850/900/1700/1900/2100 MHz, HSDPA 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
- Form factor: Touchscreen bar
- Dimensions: 110 x 50.7 x 9.7 mm, 50 cc; 96 g
- Display: 3.2-inch 16M-color nHD (360 x 640 pixels; ~229 ppi pixel density) AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, Nokia ClearBlack technology
- Memory: 2 GB storage memory, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 32GB)
- OS: Symbian Belle OS
- CPU: 1GHz processor
- Camera: 5 megapixel fixed focus camera with 720p@30fps video recording, geotagging
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, stereo Bluetooth v3.0, microUSB port, 3.5mm audio jack, GPS receiver with A-GPS, NFC
- Misc: Accelerometer, proximity sensor, Stereo FM radio with RDS, Flash lite 4.0
- Battery: 1080 mAh Li-Ion battery.
In terms of continuity, the Nokia 700 will be replacing the C6-01. There is one important thing to note here though. While the Nokia 701 copies the design of its predecessor, the C7, the Nokia 700 is a complete makeover. It’s not an entirely new and original design: the Nokia 700 has a dash of X3-02 in it.
We’ll go ahead and say it: the Nokia 700 is a looker of a phone. Super slim and sexy, it's got what it takes to be a crowd pleaser. There’s a lot for it to prove and this preview is but a glimpse of what the Nokia 700 has to offer. Let’s not keep it waiting.Design and construction
A mix of plastic and metal, the Nokia 700 is stylish and well built. Some design cues taken from the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type are used well. The smooth polished edges are great to touch, the super slim elongated body handles very nicely. The Nokia 700 looks class without overdoing it. Design is clean, uncluttered, ergonomics - excellent.
The Nokia 700 is touted as the company’s most environmentally-friendly handset to date. Internals are made of recycled materials and bio-based paints are used for the finish. Nokia claim 60% use of sustainable eco-friendly materials. The Nokia 700 comes with a 2mm charger in the box and is said to have many features that reduce power consumption.
Our test unit is the silver-white color combo but a selection of paintjobs will be available: Cool Grey, Coral Red, Peacock Blue and Purple.
The front of the Nokia 700 features the 3.2" nHD (360x640) ClearBlack AMOLED display. It has very high pixel density of around 229 ppi and offers great contrast and very deep blacks. Colors are very nicely rendered but we feel the screen could've been a little brighter. There’s no problem using the Nokia 700 outdoors on a bright sunny day so no harm done.
Above the display you'll find a proximity sensor to disable the screen during calls and what appears to be an ambient light sensor. There's a slim earpiece at the very top, with the Nokia logo underneath.
Below the display there are three hardware buttons: the Call keys and a centrally-placed Menu button. The press is good, except in the Call key, which is abnormally stiff but this could be just our unit being a pre-market sample.
At the very bottom of the front there's the loudspeaker grill - a strong design accent at that. It covers the entire bottom, with holes etched out into the metal plate. It's also where the primary microphone is located.
The right side of the Nokia 700 features a total of 4 buttons. The volume rocker is at the top, followed by a lock button and the shutter key. All of them are very thin but sufficiently raised. On such a small handset the lock/unlock button would've been more comfortable at the top perhaps. The Nokia 700 has a fixed-focus 5 MP camera, so the shutter key doesn't have half-press.
The left side of the Nokia 700 offers no controls whatsoever but emphasizes the design of the handset - the three sheets of plastic and metal form an asymmetrical pattern that looks good.
At the top, there are two connectivity ports that can both be used for charging: standard 2mm charger hole and a microUSB port. There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack so you could use any set of earphones with the Nokia 700.The bottom of the phone holds the lanyard eyelet only. It's where the "chin" formed by the loudspeaker is most obvious.
The back of the Nokia 700 is a mix of plastic with a metal back panel – a replica of the X3-02 Touch and Type. There's a secondary microphone for active noise cancellation at the bottom. At the top you'll find the 5 MP fixed-focus camera lens with a small LED flash.
There's a latch to open the back panel. Doing so reveals the SIM slot, the 1080mAh Li-Ion battery and the MicroSD card slot.The battery of the Nokia 700 is quoted at 465h/450h standby and 7:10h/4:30h talk time (2G and 3G). Music playback is said to go as long as 47h. Ours is a pre-market unit so we can't give you details on battery life.The Nokia 700 is a design-driven device.
Sure it doesn't serve up the latest tech but looks great and feels very solid and comfortable in your hand. We're very pleased with the ergonomics too. When you light up the beautiful ClearBlack display the whole package looks premium - and we can give Symbian Belle OS credit on this one too. But more on that after the break.
Widgets themselves have dropped the one-size-fits-all philosophy and now come in up to five sizes. Widgets are resizable too. In addition to widgets, you can also put shortcuts on the homescreen - the end of the silly shortcut widgets.
The bottom of the homescreen has three virtual buttons - Menu, Dialer and Homescreen settings. With these buttons, Nokia can go button-free at the front if they want to, just like they did with MeeGo.
This pull down menu is available on any screen so you can also quickly change a setting and look up new events.
You can choose the Arrange option and move menu items around, but you can't drop a shortcut in a folder. To do that, you have to press and hold on a shortcut, choose Move to folder and then select the desired folder. There are also Add to homescreen and delete options here.
This arrangement isn't as convenient as in other OSes and it's at odds with how the homescreen works. On the homescreen you press and hold to move an item, while a tap and hold on a menu item pulls out a menu. To move items around you have to hit the Options key and choose Arrange.
Symbian Belle feels very smooth, which is probably due to a combination of the new software and the faster hardware. The upgraded CPU (1GHz) makes sure that even heavy multitaskers won't have issues - Symbian requires fewer resources than Android.
Looking good, Symbian Belle
It's been a regular one on our list of Cons that Symbian is lagging behind Android and iOS in user experience, but Belle is a leap forward. The key elements are the new homescreen and menu, the updated native apps and overall polish of the interface.
For a quick walkthrough of the interface, you can watch this Nokia 701 video demo that we’ve published previously. The software on both phones is identical.
The widget system introduced by Symbian^3 was incomplete to say the least. Now with Belle, you get up to six homescreen panes (up from three in Anna) and you can delete unneeded ones. Each homescreen has its own individual wallpaper, rather than one for all to share.
A tap and hold on a widget or shortcut activates edit mode, but only for that widget/shortcut. You can move it, delete it or (where available) access its settings. While editing one widget, you can touch others - there's no mass edit mode (which looks like a blunder to us).
The other big addition to the homescreen is the pull down menu at the top of the screen - think Android's notification area or the similar menu available in iOS 5. This is where notifications wait in line for your attention, but you also get toggles for mobile data, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Silent mode.
Moving on, the main menu has changed as well - it's now completely flat, no level upon level of subfolders nonsense any more. You could create folders if you like, you can also sort icons alphabetically or manually.
The task manager in Symbian Belle is virtually unchanged - press and hold the Menu key and it pops up. It fits three thumbnails of the currently open apps. It's worth noting that hitting the End key will terminate an app, while pressing the Menu key just goes to the homescreen with the app active in the background.
First impressions
The updated Symbian Belle is not news any more - we mean not after our Nokia 701 preview and an in-depth software review. The Nokia 700 however, is. It's good news for loyal upgraders. It must be good news too for some of the unfaithful who might want to end an affair and come back home.
The Nokia 700 is the second phone to carry the new Symbian Belle. It's also the company's second 1GHz Symbian smartphone. Upon a casual glance, it's bound to always be second best. It seems the updated software and the new 1GHz CPU is all there is to it. That and the NFC pairing abilities. The rest of the specs are reasonable but nothing we haven't seen before.
Still there's no way for such a good-looking phone to live in anyone's shadow. We've seen plenty of beautifully designed and well-built phones from Nokia but the Nokia 700 has that rare bit of magic, which is hard to define - and resist.
Out of the two latest Symbian smartphones, the Nokia 701 is the better-equipped while the Nokia 700 is the better-looking. Two solid performers are about to give Nokia a solid boost in the midrange. Neither is mind-blowing but you'd do well to keep an eye on both. Especially on the slim and stylish Nokia 700. We'd gladly have both of them back for a full review of course but a little bias doesn't hurt once in a while. Don't blame us - it's the Nokia 700.
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