I’m still fiddling around with the new Nokiia 7710. The initial nostalgia I got treating it as a Star Trek Datapad died down after I saw how slow it was - my PC boots up faster than the phone unit.

Speaking of THE phone, the 7710 does not resemble a communication device one bit. In fact, the 7710 is more multimedia center than phone. The form factor alone hints this - it looks like a small plasma TV. With regards to specs, the 7710 has a huge touch-sensitive 640×320 screen, a 1MP camera at the back, a whopping 90MB of internal (!) memory and support for external MMC storage up to 1GB (!!!). All that memory — its for the movies and songs.

The phone itself is quite slow, as I’ve mentioned. It takes a total of 5 seconds to open up the “reply” menu when sending text messages. Scrolling through contacts is also a hassle because you have to tap the starting letter of your friends’ names and then scroll down all the iterations of “Ann”, “Annabel”, “Anne” to finally get to “Anwar”(ooh, do you watch American Idol??). The speed issue goes for opening videos, inputting text and basically all the other phone functions. Boo. You be the judge with the P32,xxx.00 retail price.

What it is:
It is the first attempt to create a convergence device boasting a portable media center and a phone. The multimedia features are just great - playing MP3’s and viewing Realplayer videos is really worth showing off on this widescreen wonder. The phone actually trembles because of the bass (and its not sabog). Good job on that one, Nokia.

What it’s not:
Bye bye one hand texting, hello pure stylus input. The phone has no keypad which means if you’re looking for a PDA-phone combo, this might not be the one for you. Opt for the 9300 or 9500 Communicator instead.

Check out our full review in the next issue of m|ph.