Nokia Lumia 710

Nokia's first Windows Phone handset, the Lumia 800 was the first fruit of what will be an ongoing collaboration with Microsoft that will see Nokia use Windows Phone for all its smartphones in the future.

The Lumia 800 is a premium smartphone selling SIM-free for around £399 (inc. VAT) as we write this; the second handset in the lineup, the Lumia 710, sells for around £300 (inc. VAT) SIM-free. It looks set to come in a range of colours and with coloured swappable backplates, although our review sample was a staid black all over.



The Lumia 710 is a little larger than the Lumia 800 (62.4mm by 119mm by 12.5mm and 126g against the Lumia 800's 61.2mm by 116.5mm by 12.1mm and 142g), has a removable backplate (which the 800 lacks), and sports a plastic build that's less eye catching. Overall the Lumia 710 looks much more ordinary than the 800.

The Lumia 710 takes a micro SIM, which you need to remove the battery to fit. And whereas the 800 model has touch-sensitive front buttons for Windows Phone Start Screen, Back and Search functions the 710 has a single physical strip button for these functions.

The Lumia 710 has the same 3.7in. screen as the Lumia 800, and its 480-by-800 pixel resolution is the same too — all current Windows Phone handsets have the same pixel count.

Internally there's little to distinguish the Lumia 710 from its 800 stablemate. The two handsets share a 1.4GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. The Lumia 810's 16GB of internal storage has been halved to 8GB, and of course this being a Windows Phone handset there's no support for external storage. The 710's camera is a 5-megapixel unit, rather than the 8 megapixels on the high-end Lumia 800.

The other key difference between the two handsets is that the screen is less vibrant here, being LCD rather than AMOLED. You can see the difference if you sit the two handsets side by side, but if the Lumia 710 is all you've got its screen is perfectly adequate.



Windows Phone remains unskinnable and has the usual Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) features such as no desktop calendar and contacts synchronisation, and support for SkyDrive and Windows Live as well as SharePoint and Office 365. Nokia adds its own turn-by-turn satnav application called Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps and an over-the-air music service called Nokia Music.

In our opinion, the features that have been cut in order to shave £100 off the SIM-free price of the Lumia 710 are not particularly crucial ones. The main bugbear is the limited internal storage — but limited storage capacity is something Windows Phone fans simply have to live with at present. It'll be interesting to see how the Lumia 710 fares in retail against its more expensive Nokia alternative.

Sandra Vogel