Nokia Lumia 710 review

Nokia’s Lumia 710 is a budget follow-up to its first Windows Phone 7 handset, the Nokia Lumia 800. It’s £100 cheaper SIM-free than the 800, but only around £5 a month cheaper on contract. It’s very slightly larger than the 800 in all dimensions, has the same Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) operating system and 3.7in 480×800 display, but the screen is TFT rather than AMOLED, the camera is a 5 rather than 8-megapixel version and it has 8GB rather than 16GB of storage. The 1.4GHz single-core processor is identical.

The phone feels very well built, with a classy edge-to-edge glass fascia and a colourful backplate. Windows Phone 7 Mango brings numerous improvements to the original, including smartphone staples such as multi-tasking and copy and paste. It feels really responsive in everyday use, much more so than the Android interface, and it’s attractive and slick. You can add multiple Windows Live accounts, as well as Gmail and Exchange. We’re particularly fond of the email client, which is one of the only mobile clients we’ve seen with an unread message view, but the calendar isn’t brilliant – entries in the month view are too small to view so you have to zoom into the day, and there’s no week view.

Web browsing using Internet Explorer is fast. Double-tapping a page zooms in to a more readable level than the default zoom, although it’s not as good as Android’s Webkit, which not only zooms in to a more readable level but automatically re-flows the text. In our side-by-side tests, however, we didn’t notice much of a speed difference between the two browsers.

Since its launch, the Windows Phone Marketplace has expanded to over 60,000 apps. It may not have as many apps as its rivals, but the quality has improved greatly since our last visit, with some bigger names visible such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Spotify. Sadly, some of these apps aren’t highly rated, and some, such as Microsoft’s YouTube app, are simply shortcuts to a mobile version of a web site.

Microsoft software handles most of the 710’s main tasks: Xbox Live for games, Zune for music and videos and Office for business files. Nokia has included its Drive satnav app, and there’s also a link to download Nokia Maps from the Marketplace, but we don’t think Nokia Maps offers much over Windows Phone 7’s own Bing Maps.