Nokia Lumia 710 Review - T-Mobile's Nokia WP7

Cellular

Like all MSM8255 devices, the Lumia 710 uses Qualcomm’s onboard combination GSM/EDGE/WCDMA HSPA+ baseband for cellular connectivity. That means HSDPA category 10 on the downlink and HSUPA category 6 on the uplink. Of course, the fact that these HSDPA/HSUPA categories are nothing special at all right now for WCDMA means nothing to T-Mobile, who gladly replaces the “3G” indicator with “4G”.

The other noteworthy thing is that the Lumia 710 is also subdivided into two different revisions which carry different WCDMA bands - we were sampled the RM-809 which includes T-Mobile AWS (1700/2100) support. What’s interesting about the RM-809 is that the device also has support for PCS 1900 and Cellular 850, which which means it would work on AT&T, though our device wasn’t unlocked and thus we weren’t able to try. The FCC approval is in place, however. The other Lumia 710 is geared for international support with bands 1, 2, and 8.

I had no issues at all with the Lumia 710 on cellular - connectivity is excellent. Unfortunately I couldn’t get Field Test on the 710 working to read out dBm and check for deathgrip (for some reason it loads indefinitely), however I didn’t see anything odd in my time with the device. In addition I ran speedtests and saw throughput on par with what I expect out of T-Mobile’s HSPA+, though none of the speedtest applications on WP7 allow me to export data and make a nice histogram or two.

WiFi

WLAN connectivity on the Lumia 710 is the standard fare for almost all smartphones these days - 802.11b/g/n (2.4 GHz) single stream. On 20 MHz WLAN channels, that means a physical rate of 72 Mbps, which is precisely what I saw the Lumia 710 authenticate as. I wasn’t able to completely verify, but it seems like a safe bet that BCM4329 is lurking inside. In addition, range signal performance are spot on with where they should be, I saw no issues in my testing.

In our throughput test I saw speeds that almost matched the Lumia 800 (which isn’t surprising at all).

Speakerphone

I spoke a lot about how the Lumia 800’s speakerphone was way too quiet. If the Lumia 800 is one side of the spectrum, the 710 is on the complete other side, as its speakerphone is eardrum-shatteringly loud. In our sound datalogger test, the Lumia 710 placed literally at the top of the ranks for volume, so if you absolutely need speakerphone volume the 710 is an excellent pick. Earpiece volume is also subjectively top notch.

In the call quality department I did the usual thing and recorded samples from the 710 on line in, placed a few calls, and tested noise rejection. The 710, like all WCDMA devices, sounds great to me, though GSM call quality is a bit reduced.

The Lumia 710 does do noise rejection, which has worked its way down from the $200 “superphone” category all the way to the $50 category over the last year or so. The device does common mode noise rejection and some fancy DSP to isolate and cancel noise, and though I’m not sure what IP is in place here (possibly Qualcomm’s Fluence since I don’t see a discrete solution on the board) it does a good job in our test.

GPS

The Lumia 710 unsurprisingly uses the GPS/GLONASS (GNSS) system onboard MSM8255 and accompanied by QTR8615 which we’ve seen numerous times before. Though WP7 doesn’t have API access to NMEA data so we can see SNR from individual satellites, the Lumia 710 does seem to get a GPS lock speedily enough even in some tough environments. In both the maps application and Nokia Drive I had no issues getting a GPS lock in under 5 seconds and keeping the lock for the duration of navigation.