Finally a great phone!. Review on Nokia 7610

Some phones from Nokia seem to happen to have digital cameras built in. The cameras get mentioned among a barrage of other features. Not so the 7610, whose camera is its key selling point. You can take 1-megapixel stills with it, and capture up to ten minutes of video.

Of course, this being a Nokia phone, there's the matter of hardware design to consider too. The basic 'candybar' shape has been used, with overall size and weight at 108.6mm x 53mm x 18.7mm and 118g - pretty average. Where Nokia has gone to town is with the keyboard, making the keys of varying sizes and curved, using a dual-coloured casing to give an air of difference. Some keys are appreciably smaller than others, but we didn't find the arrangement too difficult to get used to.

Internally the 7610 runs on Nokia's Series 60 platform, based around Symbian OS7. It feels familiar enough if you've used other recent Nokia phones, and the convention of softkeys and menu key is easy enough to settle into. The Series 60/Symbian OS7 combination means this phone can share information with your PC and it comes with a USB Connectivity cable and software that allows you to synchronise contacts, diary and tasks with Outlook.

There is 8MB of onboard memory, and the phone comes with a 64MB Reduced Size Multimedia Card (these are about half the size of SD cards, and to fit them into a standard reader you need an adapter: Nokia provides one of these). Other software includes players for RealMedia, MP3 and AAC files.

The phone is tri-band, supports GPRS, has Bluetooth, can be used to access SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 e-mail, will read HTML, XHTML and WML, and has the usual voice dialling capability. It runs Java MIDP 2.0, opening up the possibility for downloading third party applications including games.