The Nokia X7 is one of the front-runners of Symbian Anna, a major overhaul bringing portrait QWERTY input, improved browser and a refreshed design to the Symbian^3 platform. But the X7 is also a media-centric device with a premium feel and a 4-inch AMOLED screen. It's also one of the latest high-end Nokia handsets running Symbian, so it deserves some attention. But does it deserve your money? ![]()
Design:
But it's not just the new interface – the Nokia X7 is coming with a rather unique angular design with four grills on each of its corners, but only the bottom two hold speakers. A 4-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels dominates the front. It doesn't come with Nokia's ClearBlack enhancement for nearly perfect blacks and better anti-reflection for outdoor visibility, but we found the colors to be very vivid, with blacks still very deep. Add to that Gorilla Glass scratch protection, and you're looking at a delicious screen, corrupted slightly only by the average sunlight legibility.
Up front, you also have the earspeaker on top and the menu key on the bottom, while on the right side there is a volume rocker and a nifty dedicated camera shutter key that will let you quickly snap photos. On the left you're in for a surprise – a lid-protected microSD card slot and a SIM card slot allow hot swap of cards. But opening them up proves to be a challenge even for the most experienced smartphone user. The engineers have managed to come up with a unique opening mechanism – the lids actually serve as the front doors for the tiny drawers where you can put your cards. To open them, you first need to press one side of the lid and only then pull the whole drawer. After getting to grips with the mechanism, it works seamlessly, but the casual user with no manual at hand will trouble.
The metal back cover seems very durable and adds to the premium feel of the handset, but unfortunately it's not removable. On top, there is a microUSB port for charging the device, a 3.5mm headset jack and the lock key, while the bottom is just plain.
The handset feels solid with its 146 gm of weight. It's not among the slimmest out there with girth of 11.9mm at its thickest, but its oval profile contributes to a comfortable fit in the hand.
The traditional Symbian^3 interface has been given an overhaul in Anna including a brand new set of icons which freshen up the platform and real-time switching between home screens, which basically means that you can gradually scroll to the next home pane with the content moving along with your finger. In previous editions of Symbian, scrolling left or right in the home screen also brought up a transitional animation, but you couldn't only gradually scroll to peek at the next screen for example without actually completing that transition.
That's just eye candy, but it’s not only the visuals that have been improved. Code optimization in Anna brings faster performance, along with novelties like a portrait QWERTY keyboard and an improved browser. The portrait QWERTY is simple yet convenient with the only major difference with other platforms being the positioning of the numbers which appear in three rows instead of just one upper row. To our relief, typing on the full portrait QWERTY in Anna is much faster than using the numeric keypad in previous Symbian editions, so finally, the portrait QWERTY is a welcome addition, but one long overdue.
Under the hood, the Nokia X7 runs on a 680 MHz ARM 11 processor, Broadcom BCM2727 GPU with only 256MB of RAM. This is enough for the interface to run fairly smoothly, but occasionally it stutters and you can definitely notice how that lag affects the overall performance.
So while Symbian has been given a facelift, it is still a maze at its core. The inconsistency of the platform is nothing surprisingly new, but we can't overlook the fact that often even in preinstalled programs you reach a dead end with no way to go back. We can't deny Symbian's even richer functionality with the Anna update, but when it comes at the cost of the same old constant system notifications popping up from all sides, a confusing organizational structure and some lag, the end result is largely the same – a feeling of disappointment and out datedness.
Camera and Multimedia:
The Nokia X7 comes with an 8-megapixel fixed-focus camera with dual-LED flash. You can easily operate it with the physical shutter key on the right and if we have to sum up its performance in one word that would be speed. The shutter button however is located on a slope on the back making it hard to reach, but once you do reach it, the camera reacts extremely quickly. That's mostly due to the fact that it doesn't take those extra fractions of a second to focus, which in turn allows you to fire the camera right away when you feel like it. But at the same time, fixed-focus means no macro shots as the sensor automatically puts everything further away then 20 inches in focus, but the rest within that range appears blurry.
Overall, however, we find the quality of the image stills on the Nokia X7 below average - decently detailed and moderately sharpened, but colours seemed washed out and in most (if not all) cases the sensor picked up side light and ended up with pale images. When it comes to the camera interface, you're treated with plenty of options including scene modes, face detection, self-timer and colour tones. You can even set the white balance and ISO light sensitivity, as well as the contrast and sharpness of pictures. The X7 supports up to 2x digital zoom. Unfortunately, the handset comes with no front-facing camera
When it comes to audio quality, you'd be wowed with the amazing loud and clear sound of the stereo speakers located at the bottom of the Nokia X7. The music application hasn't changed much in Symbian Anna, but with album art, which you can flick through, it didn't have dire need to as it looks good visually. Along with standard file support, the handset also comes with Stereo FM radio with RDS.
Internet and Connectivity:
Browsing in Symbian was not the prettiest of experiences mostly because of the dated and cluttered browser itself. The Anna update changes that with a reworked Browser 7.3 with support for Flash, HTML5 and hardware acceleration, as well as an improved, clean user interface.
Software:
The Nokia X7 is the front-runner for Anna and bringing some impressive software with a new version of your platform always helps. The handset displayed its gaming affiliations from its very first appearance and it comes with two pretty popular titles preinstalled on the included 8GB microSD card - Asphalt 5 and Galaxy On Fire. Unfortunately, even those two titles didn't seem perfectly optimized as frame rates would often drop noticeably, especially in Asphalt 5.
Performance: The all-new Symbian Anna improves the overall performance of Nokia's platform noticeably. But even with the update, was it for the humble 680MHz CPU and only 256MB of RAM memory, or for Symbian itself, some lag was definitely noticeable. Even in the preinstalled games sometimes the screen would freeze for a fraction of a second. Web browsing has also received a boost in Anna – something you'd definitely appreciate if you're used to the standard horrendous browsing in previous Symbian editions.
The call quality is a key feature for any handset and that's why we were particularly careful when examining the audio quality on the Nokia X7. The handset comes with active noise cancellation with a dedicated microphone, which does an excellent job of bringing side noise to an absolute minimum. We were also happy with the volume on both the mic and the earpiece.
Under the back cover, there is a 1300 mAh battery providing you with an above average talk time of up to 6 hours 30 minutes and 6 hours of continuous video playback. Keep in mind that the battery is not removable.
Conclusion:
The Nokia X7 brings a much anticipated overhaul of the Symbian platform, but even with Anna, Nokia's platform UI and performance seems a year or even more behind rivals like Android and iOS. The Finns also fail to deliver contemporary hardware with a sub-par 680MHz CPU and only 256MB of RAM on the Nokia X7, which seem to be the main reasons behind its sometimes slightly laggy performance.
At the same time, the price of this package is hard to swallow – set at the whopping Rs.20999. On the positive side, the Nokia X7 is well-crafted with premium materials and unique angular design. If you feel nostalgic about the glorious past of Nokia, there's certainly something that will feed your nostalgia in the X7. But if you factor in any other sane reasons, the current dual-core offerings on the market blow the Nokia X7 out of the water easily.
