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Nokia Belle 701 Review

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Nokia is really struggling with their Symbian phones, especially after the announcement of the end of days for the OS. Nokia Belle is the name given to the dying OS and the new revision brings some promise. Lets see how the Nokia 701 with Belle does in our review.

Build Quality

The Nokia 701 is exceptionally well built, If you have handled any of their E-Series metal phones, you will feel a similar sort of construction here. The back cover and top front bezel are all steel, the frame and remaining parts are solid plastic with a nice paint job that fools you into believing that the whole phone is made of metal. The 701 is also considerably heavy and feel really solid in the hand . The glass however, sits flush with the bezel and is prone to cracking if the device falls face-first. Overall the build is up to mark if not above it.

Specs

Price	Rs. 17,990
Frequency	Quad Band
Phone Style	Candybar touchscreen
Thickness	11mm
Length	117.2mm
Width	56.8mm
Weight	131g
Built-in Memory	8GB
Additional Memory	microSD – up to 32GB
High-speed Data	GPRS, 3G, HSDPA
Connectivity	Bluetooth, USB, Wi-Fi, A-GPS
Screen Size	640×360 pixels, 3.5 inches
Secondary Screen Size	N/A
Screen Colours	16 million colours
Camera	Yes
Camera Resolution	8 megapixels
Flash	Yes, dual LED

Radio	Yes, with RDS

Battery	1300mAh, 6hrs talktime, 504hrs standby

Display, Camera and Multimedia

The display on the 701 is supposedly the brightest display in the world. It has a 1000 nits brightness and excellent outdoor visibility. The screen is also very responsive to touch and has great color reproduction.

The camera was a let down especially because sits a fixed focus camera, so has a lot of limitations. The video quality is mediocre and pictures are decent. Indoor performance is poor to say the least. Don’t rely on the camera much if you are a happy snapper.

Audio quality from the speaker is impressively good, the sound has deep bass and great quality mids and highs. The included earphones can be used for daily medium use, If you like listening to good quality music on your phone consider investing in a set of good earphones.

OS, Apps and Internet

Belle is possibly the only OS from the Symbian range that can truly compete with the Likes of Android and iOS, still not truly there, the OS is much more responsive than the previous builds and offers a more-Android-esque UI. Switchable dashboard, a notification panel, app drawer and widgets that mimic Android. Still, its user friendly , but certain things such as age old connectivity options and old menus are a let down.

Apps are limited to the ones on the OVI store and there are a lot now-a-days . From Angry Birds to NFS you even have Whatsapp and Skype.

Internet browser is still slow and laggy, pinch to zoom does not work and the browser cannot render a full page within the screen. The need to pan limits what you are looking at in the phones screen. There are however tons of apps from the Ovi store like : Opera Mini, and U browser that make the internet experience a lot better.

Battery Life

The Phone has a really bright display so you would expect a high battery drain, contrary to that battery life was excellent with over 5 hours of talk time, sometimes even 7 hours. the phone lasted 5 days on standby which was needless to say – impressive.

Conclusion

The Nokia 701 is proof that the company is really trying to prove itself in what has now become a world of iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7.5. The build quality is superior and so is the display , the OS is a drastic improvement over previous gen interfaces that were usually a let down. However, that being said, the phone feels a bit overpriced, and we have seen capable companies with better softwares and hardware throw out better phones at lower prices. We fail to understand why Nokia keeps pricing their phones so high. If you are a die hard Nokia fan and still need a fix of that Symbian Love this phone should suit you, bear in mind that the optics are sub satisfactory.