Nokia Lumia 710 review

Pictures

One of the most important things when it comes to media is storage, and this is another area where money has been saved on the Nokia Lumia 710, providing 8GB of capacity compared with the Nokia Lumia 800's more generous 16GB. Yet again this mimics the HTC Radar specification, just as the Nokia Lumia 800 mimics the HTC Titan.

As long as this doesn't limit you too much, the Pictures app is a breeze to use, with a customisable in-app background based on the images on your phone.

We did, however, find that it's not possible to delete images in bulk from the Nokia Lumia 710 without using the Zune PC software. This isn't a limitation of the Nokia Lumia 710 specifically, but one of the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system.

Music

When it comes to listening to music on the Nokia Lumia 710, you're presented with two options out of the box, with the default Zune Player from Microsoft and the Nokia Music app.

The main advantages of Nokia Music over the Zune Music+Video app is that it includes Mix Radio, providing a selection of different genre-based Music Mixes to listen to over the air, or download to listen to later, which are updated weekly. Plus if you permit the app to use your location, it provides live local gig information.

That being said, the My Music section of Nokia Music is heavily reliant on the Zune Music+Video back end.

The only way to tell if you're using Nokia Music when scrolling through your music is that Nokia Music has 'My Music' rather than 'Music' written at the top of the screen, and provides selection via Genre, which isn't offered by Zune Music+Video.

Nokia Music, as its name implies, is limited to music media, whereas the Zune Music+Video app provides access to Music, Video, Podcasts stored on device, a standard FM Radio (with headphones) and direct access to the Music Marketplace.

If you're prepared to fork out £8.99 per month or £89.90 per year you can get your hands on a Zune Pass, which enables you to download and listen to as much music as you like from the Marketplace on your Phone, PC and Xbox 360. Although this is a nice idea, it seems a little expensive in the current market.

A frustration with the Zune service is that although there is a method of playing audiobooks on Microsoft Zune Media Players, this hasn't transitioned into the Windows Phone operating system. This means that a number of clever people have had to devise a work-around where you can upload audiobooks to the Zune software as local podcasts, enabling bookmarked audio, so you can pick up your audiobook where you put it down.

Doing a speaker comparison between the Nokia Lumia 710 and Nokia Lumia 800 - using Shelter by The XX - we found that although the sound from the Nokia Lumia 710 is fractionally more open, the Nokia Lumia 800 sounded slightly better.

We put the difference down to the construction of the phones, since through headphones they sounded the same. Nokia has already accepted that the sound quality could be improved in the Nokia Lumia 800 and promised an update later in the year. Hopefully this will be applied to the Nokia Lumia 710 too.

Games

Gaming is another area where the Nokia Lumia 710 excels, since it works as an extension of the Xbox 360 gaming experience. Many Xbox 360 Arcade games have been expanded to have variants playable on Windows Phone handsets.

Some over the counter games such as Kinectimals enable the user to take a snapshot of the television when playing the game on the games console, and transfer progress to the phone. They also use the Xbox 360 Kinect to take a photo of the Nokia Lumia 710 screen to transfer progress back to the console.

Not only are you able to download games to play, but you can also download an app to modify your Xbox 360 avatar if that takes your fancy. Or download an app to control your console, an app to act as a ruler, a spirit level, a torch and more.

The gaming experience on the Nokia Lumia 710 is very impressive, with the only disappointment being that games are somewhat more expensive than in other mobile app stores, including the Nokia Store.