Over the recent years, but especially in the last couple of months, Nokia have been changing the way their devices are named. Tags, numbers, categories etc have been changed, but at the end they all still target one or another specific end user.
One of the latest handsets I have had the honor to test, thanks to Nokia Connects, was the Nokia X7 and I must say that’s a great phone but its characteristics tend to place it into an specific type of user and that’s what I’m going to be analyzing here, but before that, here are a few unboxing pictures of the X7, I’m not one for videos, sorry guys 
Ok let’s talk about the ‘X’ in the name, as you should know this phone follows a design line that was preceded by some very popular handsets amongst users who love music, videos, games and any entertainment related topics like the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and that’s exactly what Nokia did by releasing this phone, taking the user to a whole new experience level starting with its hardware and physical design.
For me this is the most confortable design Nokia has ever made for gamers, its shape fits perfectly into ones hands when playing games in landscape mode – which is the standard display mode in most mobile games. The diagonal corners feature a non surface perfect for handling the phone on the move where most of the game playing usually happens. Two of these corners embed speakers and incredibly the design was made to avoid the hand obscuring the beautiful audio that only lacks some software enhancement to become Dolby Mobile.
The only problem that I observed about the design was the SIM and microSD slots. The rounded back obligated Nokia to include slot trays that in my humble opinion didn’t solve the problem of how hard it’s to add or change cards.
One thing gamers care about is resolution, so Nokia answered this necessity with a very responsive AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors but I still think the size of 360 x 640 pixels, 4.0 inches (~184 ppi pixel density) could’ve been improved at least a bit but it still shows beautiful picture and video quality images, sometimes exaggerating those numbers just increase the price. The huge mistake was releasing this phone without ClearBlack display, gamers normally play on the streets with the sun making hard to watch what there are doing on the scream.
Another big fail was not including a TV out port via HDMI, gamers love to extrapolate their mobile experience onto a big screen (something Nokia is improving greatly with their Microsoft partnership about the Xbox interoperability). I loved how Nokia placed the rest of the ports, the charger and headphones never got a better position on a Nokia device and this is something Nokia learned and its getting replicated on its newer phones, it doesn’t matter OS they are running.
Talking about the OS, the Nokia X7 comes directly from the fabric using Symbian Anna and this is a big plus for the new user. Lots of things have been improved on this release and there are more expected in a very near future with the future release of Symbian Belle. Responsiveness, smoothness and almost crash-less are characteristics of this version (but I think that Nokia could do it better than 680 MHz ARM 11 processor, Broadcom BCM2727 GPU). Compatibility and built-in apps have improved but there are still problems with Nokia Store, Chat, Live View, etc. but those are minimal compared to the goodness of Adobe Reader, Quickoffice, Nokia Button, Tap to write feature, how fast the firmware updates, how easy and fast is to configure emails, the improved sync with Mail for Exchange, Intranet and Communicator support and F-Secure free (although I still recommend Track and Protect app and they can work together).
However, some things are still there after Anna upgrade and I hope they get fixed on with the Belle release, like the limitation if the built in dictionary for only 3 languages, notes API closed and not sync enabled, the hard setup of new Intranet and Communicator features, paused multitasking preview, USB issues when connecting to PC and charging (thank you Nokia for including a led to show if the phone is correctly connected.. oh wait this phone doesn’t have it!), slow image previewing, contacts navigation and mailbox configuration getting cancelled when multitasking.
I’m not going to talk much about the camera of this phone because it’s not a strong feature on this device. Color management is not good and the focus is really bad on very close pictures but the cameras general behavior is good enough for a phone that was not designed to replace the likes of the Nokia N8.
So, if you are one of those people that depend and love Nokia hardware – enjoy playing mobile games on the go (with the vast repository of Symbian games that Nokia offers on Nokia Store) this is the mobile device is for you and from what have been seeing, comes at a very attractive price too.
If you have any questions that you would like to ask me, about this device, don’t be shy and leave them here in the comments section below or ping me on twitter @warmth.
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