Nokia Astound is an excellent choice for mobile enthusiasts with it affordable price tag, premium sleek design, great call quality and 8-megapixel camera that takes excellent video and photos. It is an affordable and well designed smartphone for T-Mobile; however there are plenty of budget friendly cellphones available in the market that are very easy to use and provide advanced performance. The Astound was announced at CTIA 2011 as a rebranded version of Nokia C7, launched in the year 2010. It is considered as one of the sleek looking smartphones that provides 8-megapixel camera, wallet friendly price tag of $79.99 and Wi-Fi calling.

The Nokia Astound is made with top notch quality materials including stainless steel battery compartment and glass screen, giving it a premium feel. It measures 4.62 inches long, 0.41 inch thick, 2.24 inches wide and weighs 4.58 ounces. The Astound is pretty impressive to boot, with its chrome accents and frigid metal color. It features a capacitive AMOLED touchscreen that measures 3.5 inches and boasts 640 x 360-pixel resolution. Admittedly, it is not the supreme and most recent in display technology. On the other hand the screen is quite bright and sharp enough, making it best suitable to view multimedia and read text. Some of the exclusive features found in this model are the built in accelerometer and pinch to zoom support.

The Nokia Astound’s touchscreen is quite responsive, but the general apathy of the smartphone affects the pinch to zoom gesture and launching of applications. It also provides both portrait and landscape keyboard. You will find the End and Talk keys at the bottom of the screen, while the dedicated camera key, volume rocker button, lock switch and mute button on the right hand side of the device. The dual LED flash and camera are at the back, while the power button and 3.5mm headphone jack are located on the top of Astound. It ships a Symbian 3.1, so as with N8 model, you get three different home screen panels, so that you can customize with several widgets for RSS feeds, messages, favorite contacts, social networks and music player.

The prime improvement in Nokia Astound is the Symbian, which provides single tap interaction model across user interface. This one top user interface is quite intuitive, while the operating system doesn’t compare to the ease of polished look, use and flow of OS, mainly Android, Windows Phone and iOS. The Astound provides quad band world roaming, multimedia and text messaging with threaded chat view, speakerphone, active noise cancellation, speed dial, vibrate mode, conference calling and voice dialing. Some of the wireless features of the phone include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 and 3G-support. It is compatible with numerous email protocols such as Exchange, IMAP/POP3 accounts and Lotus Notes and provides folder and HTML support.

The Nokia Astound comes with some of the preloaded applications, which include Quickoffice suite, Ovi Maps that provides free turn by turn navigation and offline maps, PDF reader, dedicated YouTube application, ZIP manager and voice recorder. Overall, the Nokia Astound is an excellent phone for those who are looking for a full featured and well designed smartphone.

The very first thing that any one who’s dreaming of the Nokia Oro should know is that the phone is 18-carat gold plated, creased with leather and constellated with a sapphire crystal home key.

Now, if reading all that you felt that it’s an ornament we are talking about, then no, we are not, the Nokia Oro is not a piece of jewel from Nokia, it actually is a phone. The Nokia Oro runs on Anna, which is the all new variant of Symbian, and comes fitted with an 8 megapixel display and a 3.5 in display.

Its not that this is the first gold plated gadget we’re seeing, but the Oro definitely is unique in a fashion that it has been manufactured by Nokia itself, and has not been crafted as a piece of consumer electronics, but as a status symbol. The Nokia Oro clearly is a luxury item.

This is the reason Nokia will be making only a handful of them, and even will not be selling the phone all across the globe, but instead will dispense the phone only in selected areas. The areas where the phone will be available at this moments includes Europe, China, Russia and the Middle East, all the places where according to us people don’t get mugged while carrying gold phones on streets.

The Nokia Oro is expected to have a price tag of around $1,128, when the phone enters the market later this year. So if you want this Gold plated Nokia, then you better start saving your pennies.

Nokia is all set to introduce their all new smartphone the Nokia X7 in Indian market and intends to do it next month. The all new Nokia X7 will be having a brand new variant of the Symbian OS known as Anna.

A Nokia spokesperson told us that, “Nokia is planning to introduce a brand new X7 in Indian market by this quarter,” though the accurate date of launching still has not been disclosed.

Nokia has placed the Nokia X7 as their amusement smartphone, and hence has incorporated a 4 in AMOLED screen with native resolution of 640 x 360 pixel and 16 million colors, as well as delivers superiority sound output.

The Nokia X7 comes with a pristine feel and look, and has a lot meliorated interface offering fluid sign movement, which according to Nokia is rather responsive.

The all new Symbian OS, Anna will also be having a brand new browser also. This new browser is probable to be 3 times quicker than the current browser in the phone. The Nokia X7 will also come loaded with an 8GB preinstalled memory card, which further can be uprated to 32GB. The X7 will be having internal memory of 320MB, which will be functioning as the RAM/ROM for the system.

The Nokia X7 will be having Corning’s Gorilla Glass display, which will give protection to it against minor breakage and scratches that can happen because of accidental falls. IN order to provide additional strengths to the smartphone, Nokia has also designed a stainless steel casing, which will also augment the longevity of the phone as well.

The all new Nokia X7 measures 119.7 x 62.8 x 11.9 mm, and weighs 146 Gms, but the phone is respectably thing around its edges.

The system offers next generating 802.11 b/g/n WiFi together with USB connectivity and Bluetooth 3.0 plus Pentaband 2G/3G network connectivity. The phone is powered by a 1200mAh battery which will give the phone 450 hrs of standby time and talk time of 4.5 hrs on 3G networks and on the 2G networks it will be even longer.

The Nokia X7 will be priced at Rs 25,000.

Nokia E90 Communicator belongs to the E series and the E series of Nokia phones has earned a good reputation for making powerful smartphones for the business users. For instance, the Nokia E65 and Nokia E61i have been great products and the E90 is the granddaddy of them. It is a descendant of Nokia 9300 and has a good collection of features with solid performance. There is GPS, Wi-FI along with a latest version of Symbian OS. I was disappointed to see that there is no 3G on the phone but this omission is a bit hard to swallow considering the high $1,100 price tag for the unlocked version. This is a sharp device but if you are looking for a more affordable cell phone, I would recommend you to take a look at the AT&T Tilt.

Nokia E90 Communicator is a really huge phone. It is 5.2 inches tall, 0.7 inch deep, 2.2 inches wide and weights about 7.4 ounces. It won’t be easy to slip this phone in to your pants pocket comfortably. On the bright side, the construction quality of the handset is good and it will easily take rough treatments. The phone has a corporate and no-nonsense look and is perfect for the targeted audience.

On the exterior, the Nokia E90 Communicator has a two inch diagonal display with a resolution of 320×240 pixels. It isn’t a touch screen but the images and text look sharp and vibrant. Underneath the screen, there is a standard navigation array of 2 soft buttons, End and Talk buttons, shortcut for the Main Menu, four way toggle along with select key in the center and alphanumeric dialpad. The big dialpad is due to the bigger size of the phone and it gives you plenty of room with large buttons. Typing on this phone was really comfortable.

Apart from the roomy controls, there is one more positive side to the bulkiness of the Nokia E90 Communicator. There is a full QWERTY keyboard hidden underneath right next to a 3.6 inch wide display. The screen has a 16 million color output along with a resolution of 800×352 pixels and this gives you an impressive view. The big screen also gives good browsing experience in Web sites and I had a great time reading e-mails and documents. The screen is flanked by one more set of Talk/End buttons and there are also two soft buttons located here.

Keyboard of the Nokia E90 Communicator doesn’t give the users a lot of problems in terms of accuracy and ease. Individual buttons are quite roomy and hence typing is comfortable even if there isn’t much space between the buttons. The keys have a tactile feel and my only complaint is that it is a bit stiff to press. Apart from that, there is discrete number row and below the screen, you will see shortcuts for various applications, which includes Calendar, Web, Messaging and Contacts.

On the right side of the Nokia E90 Communicator, there is camera activation button and voice recorder key. On the bottom, there is miniUSB port, 2.5 mm headphones jack, and power connector. The rear side has 3.2 megapixel camera along with flash and microSD expansion slot.

This phones comes bundled along with power adapter, USB cord, software disc, wired headset, and a reference manual. This phone is meant for business users only and it is powered by Symbian OS 9.2 Series 60 3rd Edition. It comes packed with a lot of application for business users. There is full support for editing and viewing Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents courtesy of Quickoffice suite. There is also Nokia Team Suite for creating teams and defining members, conference call PINs, conference call numbers and the Web pages.

Other goodies on the Nokia E90 Communicator include Adobe Reader, Zip Manager, calendar, calculator, notes, clock, voice recorder and currency converter. This phone is based on Symbian Platform and hence you get access to a huge library of third party apps. There is Download Catalog on this phone for getting more titles. There is 128 MB of onboard memory and the microSD card slot can hold up to 2 GB of cards.

For e-mail enthusiasts, Nokia E90 Communicator has support for Microsoft Exchange Server, SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 accounts along with full attachment viewer. Through this, you can get real time message delivered through a lot of push e-mail solutions including BlackBerry Connect, Intellisync Wireless E-mail, GoodLink, Seven Always-On Mail, and Visto. There is additional help offered by Nokia for the business users like mobile VPN client for securely tapping in the corporate server.

Phone features of the Nokia E90 Communicator include quad band world roaming, conference calling, speakerphone, speed dial, VoIP support and voice commands. There is also multimedia and text messaging and like the Nokia E61i, the E90 has text-to-speech radar through which reads all the messages aloud. Address book here is limited by just the available memory and the SIM card can carry another 250 contacts. A single entry has room for a lot of numbers, work and home addresses, e-mail address, URL, etc. For caller ID, you can attach a ringtone or photo to a particular contact.

There are plenty of wireless options on the Nokia E90 Communicator but there is no support for the 3G US bands. It is compatible only with WCDMA/HSDPA 2100 bands in Europe but it didn’t accept the US HSDPA/UMTS bands so you just have EDGE speeds. This is disappointing considering that the phone is power packed with features. You still get 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi and hence you won’t have to rely on just EDGE/GPRS for Web surfing. There is also Bluetooth 2.0 for stereo and mono wireless headsets along with hands-free kits, dial-up networking, file transfer, amongst other things. E90 comes with GPS radio built-in through which you can get driving directions, real time tracking, etc. You will need Nokia Maps application for this though.

Nokia E90 Communicator is a business centric device and hence some might be disappointed by the presence of camera since a lot of companies don’t allow camera phones in their premises for security reasons. E90 has a 3.2 megapixel camera along with autofocus, flash and it can also record videos. You have some choices regarding image qualities and scenes and you can also play around with color tones, contrast and ISO for getting the best shot. The settings are a bit limited in the video mode but you still get two scene modes (night/auto) and 5 choices for the video quality.

Picture quality of the Nokia E90 Communicator is subpar and the photos had a grayish tone to them in spite of the flash. Video clips were dark looking. For music enthusiasts, there is music player and the tracks are sorted by composer, genre, album and artist. Playlists can be created on the device itself and you can set the songs in repeat/random mode. There is also a built-in equalizer for tweaking the sound settings. If you are bored with onboard music, there is FM radio and you will have to use the bundled wired headset for it. Supported formats for the player include MP4, MPEG-4, 3GP, RA, RV, AAC, MIDI, and AMR.

This phone is the successor to Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone and the manufacturer sent me the Nokia 7210 supernova review model in my labs. It is a thin, light and small handset and is light on the pockets too. However, the phone is light on pockets too but still gives you great value for money. It is a good phone with a decent performance provided you keep your expectations under control.

My Nokia 7210 supernova review model was 106mm tall, 10.6mm thick, 45mm wide and the weight was about 70 grams. It is a really nice looking phone. Nokia sent me a blue version and there were turquoise highlights on number pad area and turquoise edging. This phone is offered in grey and pink options too. All the three versions have black, grey, and white which fills most of the color scheme.

The usability is changed here. Number pad of the phone is flat and it is not responsive like its predecessors. You will have to press a bit harder in order to make good contact and you will need some time to get used to it. Fast texting was a bit challenging and people having stubby fingers will definitely suffer.

My Nokia 7210 supernova review model had a screen of two inches with a resolution of 240×320 pixels. It looks sharp but isn’t big enough for things like Web browsing. This phone cannot be heavily recommended for multimedia enthusiasts either. It is a GSM tri band handset and you won’t be whizzing around with the data world at zippy speeds. There is Web browsing but the speed.

The camera of my Nokia 7210 supernova review model too is pretty basic. It has a two megapixel sensor which is pretty standard in cell phones. The camera doesn’t come with self portrait mirror either and there is no flash, autofocus or a discrete button for starting the camera. However, you can assign one of the directions on the D-pad to start the camera. For shooting, you will have to press select button on the D-pad’s centre.

Nokia 7210 camera comes with some special effects like solarise, sepia, greyscale, and false colors. The latter fiddles with palette and turns the blues in to orange and reds in to blues. There are some white balance settings also. The images can be shot in sequence but the resolution will have to be dropped to 640×480 pixels.

The most striking feature of the Nokia 6500 Classic Black is that it is really simple. There aren’t a lot of buttons besides the keypad and there is just one port – microUSB socket which lurks on the top of the device. It has a sedative look without any flashy exterior. Some might think that it is too boring but for me, it was a welcome relief from the tons of phones out there; desperate to impress.

Nokia 6500 Classic Black has a display with a resolution of 320×240 pixels. There is a silver thin perimeter surrounding it. Each of the alphanumeric button has raised silver stripe on the base and this makes close-set keys easier for distinguishing. The usual configuration of nav-key has a sunken button for centre selection instead of the usual raised one.

It took me some time to figure out how to remove the Nokia 6500 Classic Black battery. You cannot use your nails here for scooping the cover out using your nails; you will have to turn the phone upside down and then tap hard on the surface for removing the battery. You won’t be removing the battery a lot especially since there is no memory card slot but people who swap SIM frequently should take a note of this.

Nokia 6500 Classic Black has an aluminum body and this really feels solid in the hand. The body does attract a lot of fingerprints but again, this is not unexpected in mobile phones these days. Nokia says that this phone is a fusion of function and form. There are plenty of entertaining and useful features inside the phone to keep you happy. There are nifty apps inside like Opera Mini browser, world clock and Sudoku, which is now ubiquitous in cell phones. This device is focused around music and there is a sleek media player application inside.

NokiaN73 is the successor to the Nokia N70 which has been in the market for a long time. At first sight, you might think that this phone has a standard square design but look from the sides and you will realize that it has a trapezoid shape. I liked the color variants and the body design. The front side is quite thin and the lateral sides along with rear cover have a different color. My review model had a silver plate on the front and on the sides and back, it was violent brown. This phone is offered in combination of red and white too which emanates sport and young spirit.

For me, the NokiaN73 is better than Nokia N80 in terms of value for money. You might think differently but I have tested both the phones in my labs and can confidently say that the N73 is better bang for the buck. Nokia says that this phone is more of a multimedia computer. The functions are really extensive with simple video calling camera, photo camera, Web browser, MP3 player, primitive game console, etc.

On the right, the NokiaN73 has 3 buttons – volume rocker on the top, and on the bottom, there is camera button situated close to the gallery key. The stereo speakers are located on the top with a power button in the center. Nokia phones usually don’t have the best quality construction but the NokiaN73 seems to be an exception. I liked the construction and the parts stick together very well. The camera’s sliding cover is a bit loose though.

The original NokiaN73 package doesn’t have a memory card inside and this is really annoying for a high end phone like this. The manufacturer could have bundled at least a 512 MB card inside the phone. You can extract the memory card when the device is running but you need to close all the active applications while doing it. The cover is not really easy to open and I would recommend you to grow you fingernails for this. Keypad backlighting illuminates the memory card slot so you won’t have any trouble pulling it out.

The ‘Classic’ tag at the phone’s end should give you a clear idea that this is a no-nonsense traditional handset from the manufacturer. It is meant for people who are looking for a handset that is user friendly and has a good battery life.

The cost of the Nokia3110 Classic is £90 and it is available SIM free. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Nokia threw in some surprising extras in a basic phone like this. We all know that Nokia is one of the best when it comes to making cellphones, and this one too won’t disappoint you on that front. The menu layout of the Nokia3310 Classic is so simple that anyone can get a hang of it in no time. The company has taken advantage of the chunky size of the phone for putting larger buttons and this makes it easy to type long pieces of text.

While testing the Nokia3110 in London, I was impressed to see that I gave good signal quality even in areas where the reception was a bit weak. The call quality wasn’t stellar but it lived up to my expectations. The speakerphone too is really good and it sounds the best at healthy battery life. The rated talk time is around four hours which is not bad for an entry level phone like this.

For wireless connectivity, the Nokia3110 Classic has a good set of options. You get both infrared and Bluetooth and there is also a miniUSB port located at the bottom. But for using this, you will have to buy the USB cord separately and download PC Suite software (available for free) from the manufacturer’s Website.

The music features on the Nokia3110 are pretty decent – there is FM radio onboard which gives good reception and the music playing applications too are quite neat. Popular formats like AAC, WMA and MP3 are supported but for storing the tracks, you will have to purchase a microSD card separately.

My one big gripe about the Nokia3110 is its bulky frame. Handsets are getting thinner and smaller these days but Nokia doesn’t seem to care. On the bright side, the large buttons feel great for texting and it also makes the phone look a bit old fashioned. On the back, there is a low end 1.3 megapixel camera which takes awful photos, they looked washed out.

It seems like Nokia is releasing the XpressMusic phones in pairs. Last time, they got the 5610 and 5310 XpressMusic devices at the same time. Now they are back with 5320 and this Nokia 5220 Xpress Music that I’ve got in my labs for review. The cost of the phone is $307 without any contract obligations. At first look itself you will understand that this is a music centric phone with the three dedicated music playback buttons upfront. They are indicated by playback icons on the circumference on the device. These buttons flash in and light up to the music. Some might say that these lights distract a lot but for me, they add to the aesthetic appeal of the phone. They can also be disabled in the settings if not needed.

On the front, there is a small Tic Tac- shaped keyboard underneath the two inch screen and it is flush with the surface. Typing was still comfortable and I could compose long messages withoug any problems. My only gripe here is that the front is very glossy and hence attracts a lot of finger prints. There is a lot of real estate wasted too. Nokia 5220 Xpress Music is not really rectangular but still looks very pretty.

In the hands, the Nokia 5220 Xpress Music feels plasticky; the ergonomics here are not as good as the previous 5310 XpressMusic phone. The 5310 had multimedia buttons on the front which were better to reach. The 5220’s buttons are flush on the surface and hence on easy to tell by feel.

There aren’t a lot of advanced features on this phone but it is forgivable for a price like this. The supported file formats are WMA, AAC+, AAC, MP4 and MP3. These files are assorted by Genres, Albums and Artists along with the standard goodies like repeat, shuffle, album art support, customizable presets, and stereo widening options.

It is easy to get music on to the phone. You can either connect the mobile phone to the PC through the USB cable or put in the music from the memory card. The onboard memory is really small at just 30 MB and the manufacturer bundles a 512 MB card with the phone. Get a bigger card if you have a large collection of music. Nokia 5220 Xpress Music also has FM radio along with RDS. Use it if you are bored with the music on the memory card.

There are plenty of ways to get music on the Nokia N79. Connect the phone to a computer through a cable and you will get several ways to copy the music. They include media transfer, mass storage, image transfer, and PC Suite. Most of these modes just require you to drag and drop the files. Music can be loaded through microSD card as well. The handset also has support for Nokia Music Store for browsing and purchasing the music wirelessly but it is not launched in the U.S. yet. When asked, Nokia said they are planning to do it soon but couldn’t give us a date. I hope this is done soon because it would add a lot of value to the phone.

Supported video formats on the Nokia N79 include 3GP, MP4, H.264, and H.263. On the back, there is a five megapixel camera which supports video recording too. It features Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens, just like the N96, and has a dual LED flash with 20x digital zoom. You can only zoom up to 8x but it is still impressive. Video is recorded at 640×480 pixels VGA resolution at 30 fps. There are four settings of quality to choose from and the Nokia N79 records and stores videos in 3GP and MP4 format. Video stabilization feature contributes a lot in keeping the video still.

Nokia has always been impressive with the camera options in its N series and the N79 is no different. There are eight shooting modes to choose from starting from sports to landscape to closeup. You can also choose from five quality settings and adjust the contrast, brightness, color tone, white balance, exposure value, and ISO light sensitivity. The flash comes with option for red eye reduction. Finally, there is sequence mode for the multiple shots and self timer.

The Nokia N79’s picture quality is really impressive. My stills came out sharp with vibrant and bright colors. There wasn’t any haziness that I first saw on the N78. Quality of the recorded videos was good particularly for a camera phone.