Nokia 7500 Prism Review
Nokia reserves its “7″ series for “fashion” phones: phones where style is the most important feature and which are deliberately not to everyone’s taste. Sometimes usability is compromised, and the phones are not usually at the cutting edge, feature-wise. They tend to be love-it or hate-it phones. The 7500 Prism is not as extreme as some of the previous 7 series models, but it is very definitely a fashion phone - no other phone looks like the Prism. Nokia have used conventional materials to make the Prism, and the overall shape is a classic, but the style is in the detail. Bevelled surfaces and geometric patterns are what the Prism is all about. The patterns are continued into the user interface design, making for a polished, integrated feel. The Prism is black in colour, but comes with a choice of replaceable “accent” colours (blue, green and pink) that decorate the edging of the phone.
Although heavily stylised, the Prism is a perfectly usable phone, with keys that are not so different from a conventional keypad. However they are quite small and slippery, and the navigation joystick isn’t as easy to use as a navigational pad. On the positive side, the plastic construction does make for a very lightweight phone (just 83g).
Feature-wise the Prism isn’t an outstanding phone. The LCD display is average, the camera below average, and the video camera well below par. On the other hand, the music player is excellent, being very similar to the one on the 5300 XpressMusic, with support for all the main formats, compatibility with Bluetooth headsets, an equaliser and surround sound / stereo widening. There are nice themes in the player and sound output from the loudspeaker is excellent. The phone’s memory is limited to 30 Mbytes, but a memory card can be added to increase the available memory to 2 Gbytes. In addition there’s a fully-featured FM radio, with Visual Radio support. This enables you to find out information from the station you’re listening to, such as what track is playing, and also provides interactive features such as surveys and voting for your favourite songs.
Another interesting twist is the internet support. The Opera Mini web browser is supplied, although with no 3G support, the browsing experience isn’t the fastest. A novel feature is the “Nokia Sensor” which is a mobile social networking tool that lets you connect with other Nokia Sensor users. There’s a good choice of pre-installed games too.
Connectivity is good, with USB mass storage and Bluetooth compatibility. Battery life is not so good though.
To wrap up then, we’ll say that we like the 7500 Prism, although it’s by no means the best phone practically (the Nokia 6300 is a far superior phone). However, if the design is important to you, then the Prism has few peers. Other fashion phones that you might consider are the 7373, which has a very similar spec but a completely different design, or the higher-spec 7390.
Features of the Nokia 7500 Prism include:
- 2 megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom and flash
- Video recorder
- Music player (MP3/AAC/eAAC+/WMA formats)
- FM radio with Visual Radio support
- MP3 ringtones / 64-voice polyphonic ringtones
- Animated wallpapers
- Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email, Audio messaging (record your own voice message and send to compatible devices)
- Games: Sudoku, Tower Bloxx, Snake III, Music Guess
- Internet: WAP, GPRS Class 10, HSCSD, EDGE
- Web browser: Opera Mini
- Alarm clock, Notes, Countdown timer, To-do list, Calendar
- Memory: 30 Mbytes plus microSD card slot expandable to 2 Gbytes
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0
- Offline mode
- Tri-band EGSM 900, GSM 1800/1900, and EGSM 850
- Size: 109 x 44 x 14.4 mm
- Weight: 83g
- Talktime: 2.8 hours
- Battery standby: 280 hours
- Music playback: 9 hours