Nokia Lumia 710 Review - T-Mobile's Nokia WP7
by Brian Klug on January 5, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Nokia
- Mobile
- WP7
- Lumia 710
Battery Life and Charging
I still believe one of the most important factors for a smartphone is how it fares in battery life testing. We’re going to revamp the entire testing suite in early 2012, but until then, the 710 gets the 2011 treatment like all other devices to date. Those three corners are a series of page loading tests with the display set as close to 200 nits as we can get it on both WiFi, and cellular data (in this case, WCDMA 3G). In the case of Windows Phone, the lack of an analog slider for brightness does force us to use the “HIgh/Medium/Low” presets instead, which can make comparison a challenge. The third corner of our battery life test is a call time test, where we simply place a call between the device under test and another line, and play music at both ends until the battery dies.
Unfortunately, the Lumia 710’s smaller battery doesn’t do it any favors in our battery testing. On cellular data, the Lumia is indeed ahead of the Focus, and right behind the Venue Pro which we also tested on T-Mobile, but still doesn’t last very long by comparison with some of the other major devices. WiFi page loading also shows a strange little departure from the Lumia’s positive performance, though I can’t verify that the Lumia 710 likewise uses a BCM4329. Call time evens out performance between the two Lumias, but I wager again that we’re just seeing the battery size differences between the two at this point.
On a more positive note, the Lumia 710 doesn’t have any of the charging or battery reporting issues that the Lumia 800 had. The 710 charges speedily enough, and doesn’t get stuck in a pre-boot environment - unable to draw current or charge - like I saw the 800 do when deeply discharged. On that note, the 710 also includes the same diagnostics menu which can be accessed by dialing ##634#, and the interesting/realtime current draw display.
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french toast - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
We really need some exciting hardware and up to date specs..i love the look of wp7 but i REFUSE to be palmed off with 18month out of date hardware, when i can get something 5x as powerfull for the same price.Yes i have read all the countless arguements about wp7 being 'processor friendly' and being optimised for the user experience..good for them.
But it seems that they have used that rather good selling point to skimp away from the expense of decent screens, features, and processing power.
Yes it does run better than buggy android and caparitivly crap hardware..fantastic but it would run a bit more smoother, have better battery life, and would enable some apps and games that are worthy to hold that xbox moniker..at the moment all i see is crappy indie ports...i was expecting something MUCH better than this.
Still, im a massive fan of nokia, and i love my xbox 360..so my hope is that microkia get there act togther and release something worth buying..
a5cent - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
I understand not wanting to pay the same price for inferior hardware... who would?However, it's currently a fact that you can only have ONE of the following:
a) A restrictive hardware policy, enabling MS to push all their updates to all WP7 owners in a timely fashion
b) A flexible hardware policy, that allows manufacturers to arbitrarily improve their devices, enabling the WP7 platform compete with android in terms of hardware specs.
Microsoft has chosen (a). I think 90% of a smartphone's value is delivered by the software. Considering that the overwhelming majority of people don't want to bother with rooting their devices and flashing ROMs, I agree with MS that (a) is the right position to take.
As a result, the WP community will always go through long stretches were their hardware is inferior to the best Android deice. With WP8 we will get our short moment in the hardware lime-lite, only to fall behind again shortly thereafter. Going with WP means we accept this and get over it.
At some point the advances in smartphone technology will slow, and even before that many will realize the hardware is only a means-to-an-end. They will realize timely software updates are much more important... and wonder how we could ever like a system like android, that evolves so slowly and only gets one update every year or so.
PubFiction - Sunday, January 8, 2012 - link
Yep it is this and lack of choice. Sprint only has a single WP7 device and it lost my dollar because the screen was lower resolution and it was a slower device than the Evo 3D which I picked.Also when all your phones never come out on top in benchmarks no one is going to be interested.
Wolfpup - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
I wish they'd devote 2-4x the bandwidth at least so calls actually sounded decent.binqq - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link
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burntham77 - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - link
These are neat phones, but I still have not found a WP7 phone that could replace my Android phone and Zune. Someday, perhaps. Someday.jnemesh - Monday, January 16, 2012 - link
" if in two years we don't live in a world where there is mindblowing integration between my Windows PC, my Xbox 360 and my Windows Phone - then the platform deserves to fail. Microsoft will have squandered its biggest advantage. "Two years? Wow...that is overly generous! That would mean 3 1/2 years from introduction to mainstream success, swimming upstream against Apple and Google! I think its worse than that. If we dont see SOME measure of success from THIS generation of Nokia WP7 handsets, including the 710, the 800 and the "flagship" 900, they are sunk! They have been trolling around 1 to 2 percent market share, and FALLING. So if they dont get it together quickly, they will NEVER gain the momentum necessary to even remain a player! Hell, even Palm managed 5% at their height, and the only way Microsoft can report those numbers is when they lump in legacy Windows Mobile phones with them!
Personally, I feel that the phone UI is hideous, and the functionality of the phone is SERIOUSLY lacking in comparison to their Android counterparts. If I want "tiles", I can put them on my Android handset...but if I want to do anything outside of what Microsoft wants their users to do with WP7, I am out of luck! Too limited, too outdated, and too ugly to live! Better luck next time, guys...the Kin2 aint happening!
Timz - Thursday, June 21, 2012 - link
You can benchmark the camera's color reproduction simply by checking them with deltae; http://delt.ae/ , its a 100% free tool for color checker (amongst other stuff) evaluation.