Nokia 700 Review

We’ve got tiny smartphones and then we have the Nokia 700 - the tiniest of them all. This one comes with Belle on board. Nokia is slowly gaining mileage with their WP7 phones – more with the Lumia 710, than the Lumia 800, but they’ve still not abandoned ship with the Symbian ones. Does the Nokia 700 justify that decision? Let’s find out. 

From all sides

Features and Performance

Design and Build Quality

Just three words can describe the Nokia 700 – slim, tiny and compact. It’s one of the tiniest smartphones we’ve ever held in our hands. Don’t let the spec sheet showing a 3.2-inch screen fool you out here, because it’s more screen area lengthwise than breadthwise. So, the 700 will feel much tinier than say, a similar 3.2-inch screen that the SE Live with Walkman sports. It’s quite similar to the Xperia Ray, in terms of looks, but yet the Xperia felt slightly bigger in our hands.  

It's not a slider

The top consists of the 3.5mm headphone jack, a microSD card slot and Nokia’s proprietary charging port. The right consists of the lock button, a volume rocker and a dedicated camera button. The front consists of the 3.2-inch ClearBlack nHD display with an ambient light sensor and a proximity sensor on top and three physical buttons at the bottom. The back has the 5 mp shooter and an LED flash. The microSD card is located beneath the battery, so there’s no hot swapping feature. 

Connectivity ports on top

This one is delicate, there’s a lot of plastic involved, and disappointingly it doesn’t have the same aluminium build that we saw on the Nokia 701. The design is good, but Nokia could have definitely done better with the build quality of the phone. 

Interface 

The 700 is powered by a 1GHz CPU with Nokia’s Belle operating system. We first came across their improved OS with the Nokia 701 and we quite liked it. It’s zippy, quick and lag-free. Also, there’s quite a bit of customization available for the home screen and the overall layout of the phone. Oh, and it’s borrowed some stuff from Android as well, with the most prominent one being the drop down notification bar. 

The interface

Though navigation is well covered, typing deserves a special mention for the 700. The small screen size makes it almost impossible for you to type smoothly on the phone. So much so that we wouldn’t be surprised if you’d have a special game with your friends as to who makes the most mistakes, while typing. The ‘longer’ screen makes sure that it’s more difficult to type in portrait mode. Social integration has been done well, but say you’re one of those Twitter addicts, then again typing becomes a major issue. 

Social networking integration

Media

The media interface sports a similar look to the one we saw on the Nokia 701, and there’s a bunch of preset equalizers as well. The phone supports MP4, H.263 and H.264 video formats and MP3, WAV, еAAC+ and WMA audio formats. We didn’t get a pair of headphones with our review unit, but the 700 drivers proved to be pretty good on our test headphones. The loudspeaker is good enough for personal listening.